A radio documentarian obsessed with silence, Kael Mercer is contacted by an old roommate, Noriko Tanaka, who has inherited a sea-bleached Victorian on Derby Street in Salem, Massachusetts. Sun floods the rooms, the cedar closets smell clean, and the bay windows bite bright squares into the floors—perfect, at first glance. But the municipal survey Noriko pulls from a drawer doesn't match the way the house sounds. A single handclap in the parlor returns in a pattern no rectangle can make. Kael shares the spectrogram with Pilar Oviedo, an acoustical engineer in Boston, and together they notice "ghost delays"—echoes that imply voids where no voids should be.
What are these "lost rooms," and why do their boundaries only appear in sound? Is it bad measurement, bad drawings, or something the timbers themselves are withholding? Who was Augustin Pelletier, the watchmaker-landlord listed on a 1911 insurance map who vanished with a ledger full of children's names? Armed with a laser measure, chalk, twine, a wind-up metronome, and a balky reel-to-reel, Kael and Pilar begin to map the house by ear. Trap doors bloom behind a Delft cabinet. A windowless children's room, its ceiling painted with flaking planets, has no doorframe, yet leaves fingerprints in the plaster. Hallways change length between breaths. Their voices come back carrying extra syllables—borrowed, or returned. To solve the riddle of the sound-plan is to risk being cataloged by it, one delay at a time. How many names does a house keep? How many echoes does it need to replace the ones it lost?
Read for the ensemble, not the answers.
At its best, Echoes of the Lost reaches for Brian Evenson's clinical unease; at its worst, it drifts toward Gemma Files territory without her bite. The investigation by mic and metronome promises a cold labyrinth, but the momentum stalls and the revelations feel filed rather than felt.
Echoes of the Lost keeps needling at memory, inventory, and absence. The characters try to catalogue a house by ear, and in return the house tries to catalogue them, asking what gets kept when walls forget. The recurring talk of "lost rooms" doubles as grief: compartments of the self sealed over, airless, yet humming with leftover syllables. I liked the idea that voices can borrow and return pieces of language, even if the novel remains wary of saying what debt is being paid.
Through the worldbuilding lens, the Derby Street Victorian is a small mythology of acoustics. Sunlit rooms behave, then clap once and the house replies with wrong angles and ghost delays that imply hidden volume. The tools are lo-fi - twine, chalk, a metronome, that reel-to-reel - and those choices make the rules feel tactile. I wanted clearer limits for how the echoes see and why certain voids answer, because the boundaries blur conveniently when the plot needs a turn. Still, Salem's history murmurs at the edges without overplaying witches, and Augustin Pelletier's ledger sits like a quiet reef under the water.
It echoes.
I can handle slow burns, but the prose here calcifies around jargon until the narrative feels embalmed.
Whole pages orbit the spectrogram, mic placement, and clap tests. Meanwhile the scenes that should matter most (Noriko's unease, Kael's fixation, Pilar's curiosity) idle in neutral.
Chapters arrive in looped beats, each promising the blueprint will finally click, then swerving back to another calibration. The result is a trance that numbs rather than builds.
The line by line writing is neat and clinical, but the sensory range narrows to tones, taps, and tape hiss. When everything is sound, nothing stands out.
By the last reels, the form still refuses to commit to discovery or collapse, and the tension just dissipates. I left admiring the concept and frustrated with the composition.
The house that only maps in echoes is a killer idea, and the Salem setting hums. The investigation stops and starts so often that the chill keeps leaking away.
