Echoes
by Roger Arthur Smith
Roger Arthur Smith’s spectacular debut, Echoes, asks, what happens when your fundamental nature is challenged, not by the many evils without, but by an unexpected awakening within?
It’s 1960 in Hawthorne, Nevada, a desert town so secluded that the U.S. Navy stores munitions nearby. While the Cold war lumbers on, the town’s gossip mills and marriage-eligible bachelors and bachelorettes play a game of cat and mouse, a pastime, that if nothing else, manages to while away the hours. Attorney Will Dubykky keeps a watchful eye over Hawthorne, and it comes as no surprise that his interest is piqued by the sudden appearance of a strange boy. Why is this boy disfigured? Why does he have difficulty speaking? Why can’t some people seem to see him? As one of the initiated, Dubykky has an inkling; the boy is evil, an echo sent to rectify the wrongs of an indulgent murderer. The echo’s mission? Tempt, trap and eliminate the human monster that spawned it. If all goes according to evil’s intent, the echo will die fulfilling its destiny. This fatal sequence has persisted as long as evil itself, but before the dark circle can be closed, riddles must be solved. In a town this small, who is capable of committing a string of heinous crimes undetected? And, when the time comes will this echo, more naïve and innocent than any echo Dubykky has ever encountered, fulfill its gruesome destiny? Echoes, is a wildly entertaining, gloriously absorbing exploration of humanity, evil, and the stark environs in which both exist.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A former Nevadan, Roger Arthur Smith lives in Portland, Oregon. This is his first novel.
Book Details
Title: Echoes
Author: Roger Arthur Smith
Publication Date: February 2018
ISBN: 978-1-936097-09-8
$17.95
Dist. by Publishers Group West
www.pgw.com, 800-788-2123
Available at your favorite local bookstore, on Indiebound.com, or from Baobab Press affiliate Sundance Books and Music
Reading Dates
April 5th, 7:00pm
Mother Foucault’s Bookshop
523 SE Morrison Street
Portland, OR 97214
February 28th, 6:30pm
Sundance Books and Music
121 California Avenue
Reno, NV 89509
Advance Praise
The starkly bare landscape of western Nevada, in Roger Arthur Smith’s telling, harbors some remarkable secrets—the oldest man alive, a child who will never age, and the sweetest, most charming crow in all of American literature. Smith fluently weaves such elements into an engrossing narrative in which readers will be happy to be swept up. —John Daniel, author of Gifted and Rogue River Journal
Part 1950s noir novel and part spellbinding fantasy, Echoes sets the banality of evil against the milieu of a desolate, small-town life, a battle that is both intricate and fundamental, both for humanity and for echoes, the offspring of evil come to rectify the past. Smith takes the reader into a world that is both familiar yet mysterious, and one in which evil is all too real. Roger Arthur Smith’s prose combines the tension of the old noir writers with the imagination of modern fantasy writers. The result is a story that is both delightfully eerie and terrifyingly familiar, and the further you delve into it, the harder it is to escape. —William Todd Seabrook, editor of the Cupboard Pamphlet and the author of This Semi-Perfect Universe and The Genius of J. Robert Oppenheimer
With his genre-bending debut, Echoes, Roger Arthur Smith examines the chiaroscuro of human nature in a compelling tale that melds the supernatural with old-fashioned noir. The result is an unsettling but captivating story that challenges our assumptions about innocence and evil and, ultimately, how the echoes of our actions reverberate throughout our lives. —Debra Ginsberg, author of The Grift and The Neighbors are Watching
