A night-black descent into dread from #HorrorBookTok breakout Morgan Graves—the acclaimed author of the cult hit Salt in the Walls. Praised as a writer of "razorwire empathy and abyssal terror" (Night Vault), Graves delivers a story that blurs the boundary between sound and silence until it snaps. Maeve Kincaid, an audio archivist adrift after her brother's drowning, retreats to Ebon, a weather-scabbed mining town tucked in Colorado's Uncompahgre, to catalog the contents of a shuttered AM station: KNAR, where time stopped in 1979. When Maeve powers up the antique Scully reel-to-reel and threads a box of unlabeled tapes, her headphones bloom with voices that shouldn't be there—the town speaking back in the present tense, answering questions she hasn't asked.
As the recordings begin to predict accidents, repeat names no one remembers, and stitch impossible rooms into the station's floor plan, the locals grow wary, and Maeve's cousin, Sheriff Jonah Pike, finds himself walking hallways that weren't there yesterday. Doors shuffle. Clocks refuse the hour. The mountain hum deepens like a held breath. And somewhere beneath KNAR, an echo learns how to make a mouth. Ebon Echoes is a bone-cold tale that lingers at the hinge between grief and the inhuman, where every sound has a shadow and every memory returns with teeth.
Solid entry for mood-first horror readers.
Best suited to folks who like archivist horror and slow, sonic hauntings rather than action-heavy scares.
I wanted a novel that faced grief with teeth, and instead I got a loop of static dressed up as revelation.
The sound-versus-silence motif is hammered again and again until it stops meaning anything. If I read one more sentence that essentially says "every sound casts a shadow," I might start wearing earplugs just to protect my patience.
Tapes that talk back, whispers predicting accidents, rooms stitching themselves into the station's floor plan - it is all atmosphere with the volume turned up, yet somehow monotone. The book keeps telling me the mountain is holding its breath, but nothing breathes.
Doors shuffle, clocks refuse the hour, and we wander hallways that weren't there yesterday. The repetition dulls what should have cut, and grief becomes a prop, not a pulse.
By the time the echo tries to make a mouth, my interest had left the building. One star for an idea that could have sung, and a long, thin silence where a story should be.
El pueblo de Ebon vive en el cruce de óxido y montaña, un zumbido mineral, puertas que se reacomodan, relojes que niegan la hora. La emisora KNAR congelada en 1979 y la Scully en marcha convierten la arquitectura en amenaza, y ese detalle sonoro hace que cada habitación parezca una trampa. No todo encaja con lógica, pero la atmósfera es tan densa que acepté las reglas como si fueran del clima.
Maeve's grief is clear, but her choices feel arbitrary beyond the mandate to keep listening, so her arc reads passive rather than compulsive. Jonah, as cousin and sheriff, mostly ferries warnings between rooms, and their conversations flatten what could have been a thorny family dynamic.
Graves writes with chilled precision, letting small sounds tilt the room. The prose often lands like a needle on vinyl, clean, suggestive, a little scratch in the silence.
Structure-wise, the book leans on logs, transcripts, and mapped corridors. The archival transcripts hum; when they swell into second-person imperatives, the effect is properly uncanny, but the midsection lingers too long in hallway cartography and the momentum slackens.
Ebon Echoes turns radio hiss into menace and moves with a patient, nerve-fraying rhythm.
