Brendan Duffy's House of Echoes

House of Echoes, by Brendan Duffy, is a four-hundred page suspense and thriller fiction piece that was released for purchase in April this year.

When two spinster sisters die and their larger-than-life house is up for sale in Swannhaven, New York – a small town upstate – the Tierney family jumps on the purchase in hopes they can change their lives for the better: mother Caroline previously worked for a bank which went under, son Charlie was being bullied at his school in Manhattan and father Ben has written two novels but has yet to find any sort of inspiration for the third. Each member of the family is hoping for fresh start, but some of the locals make it difficult on them to make friends.

The novel begins by building the story around the Tierney family, explaining all the various reasons of why they made the move in the first place and discussing why they purchased the 65-bedroom home. Ben hopes that allowing Caroline to spend her days repairing the old home and turning it into a sort of Inn to bring more life back into the small town, she can eventually become happy again as she suffers a sort of depression from the bank failure. There is also a hope that Charlie will make new friends at school.

However, the friends that Charlie makes are perhaps not what his parents had intended. The young boy enjoys wandering through the woods – his enthusiasm springing from a book character he adores – to find a clearing in the woods where a lake sits. Charlie sits on a moss-covered stump and waits until he feels as though he is being watched; he has high hopes that one day he will finally meet the owner of the pair of eyes that is watching always. However, readers wonder if it is more of a ‘what’ that owns the eyes rather than a ‘who’ as the family’s beagle Hudson has a tendency to bark and growl at something lurking in the forest.

This novel is slow paced and detail packed, which is perhaps the best way to tell stories that are sure to give readers a sense of the heebie jeebies. With letters from one sister to another that are several decades old that offer words of warning about what is hiding in the forest and small sections of the story itself where readers are indirectly warned about the evils of the woods, there is no doubt that readers will be putting this novel down once they pick it up.

A copy of Brendan Duffy's House of Echoes is simply a click away. Also available through Audible.