The drive-in totals would include: Ice Axe Fu, Bandage Fu, Gratuitous Alpine Choughs, Gratuitous Classic Horror Excerpts, Academy Award Nominations for Ramses

108. Echo – Thomas Olde Heuvelt

I really loved Hex, Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s first book that came out worldwide via English translation, and I was pleasantly surprised by Echo. It’s creepy like Hex and reads rather propulsively once you get into it. I do appreciate that his books are really effectively creepy without being slow. I’m not sure I entirely care for the format of going back and forth and bringing in classic horror literature to mark sections, it’s both epistolary and not, but I got used to it.

Anyway, as Joe Bob would say, “it’s the sensitive story” of a mountaineer who gets an ice axe to the face trying to climb off a damned mountain and the man who loves him and tries to cope with his own unfortunate past and living with a boyfriend possessed who has birds that shoot out of his mouth while finding out what the hell really happened up there on the Maudit. It is kind of sensitive. I mean, Nick’s really sensitive about his bandages and also about what happens whenever he takes them off… And Sam the boyfriend is not the best person to investigate anything, but does make some interesting choices in the process of choosing whether to save his love, himself, or everyone else affected by Nick’s bringing the mountain off the mountain, so to speak.

Also, Nick and Sam have a cat together named Ramses who was very much a cat and therefore an enjoyable bystander. Speaking of nonverbal characters, there are also some very cool mountain death birds that populate the village by the mountain and the mountain itself and at one point come out of Nick’s mouth, Alpine choughs. They do not look as creepy in real life as they seem in Echo. Everything with them in Echo managed to be creepy in some way.

 

They have Ramses, I have Wisting, who is loud enough to cause an avalanche.