Lost Echoes »

Joe R. Lansdale has written more than a dozen novels in the suspense, horror, and Western genres. He has also edited several anthologies. He has received the British Fantasy Award, the American Mystery Award, and six Bram Stoker Awards from the Horror Writers of America. He lives in East Texas with his wife, son, daughter, and German Shepherd.

Since a mysterious childhood illness, Harry Wilkes has experienced horrific visions. Gruesome scenes emerge to replay themselves before his eyes. Triggered by simple sounds, these visions occur anywhere a tragic event has happened. Now in college, Harry feels haunted and turns to alcohol to dull his visionary senses. One night, he sees a fellow drunk easily best three muggers. In this man, Harry finds not only a friend that will help him kick the booze, but also a sensei who will teach him to master his unusual gift. Soon Harry’s childhood crush, Kayla, comes and asks for help solving her father’s murder. Unsure of how it will affect him, Harry finds the strength to confront the dark secrets of the past, only to unveil the horrors of the present.

Publishers Weekly

In this superior East Texas crime thriller from Stoker-winner Lansdale (Sunset and Sawdust), Harry Wilkes discovers after a severe childhood ear infection that he has a peculiar "hindsight." Harry can not only see dead people but see and hear violent events as they occurred in the recent or distant past. "It's like I hear and see ghosts in sounds," he tells his father. By the time he's a college student, Harry's psychic abilities have driven him to booze. After meeting alcoholic Tad Peters, a retired martial arts expert, Harry becomes Tad's surrogate son and student. The two forge a pact to sober up together. Their resolve is tested when Harry agrees to help Kayla Jones, an old childhood crush now a cop, solve her father's murder, which her boss, the local police chief, has dismissed as a suicide. Lansdale's down-home prose erupts with explosive twists and razor sharp insights into how "echoes from the original sounds" can never be silenced until action is taken to defeat the fear that created them. (Feb.)