ECHO CITY – great review
The very splendid James Lovegrove, on ECHO CITY:
Tim Lebbon made his name as a writer of cheerfully gory horror fiction, and that’s evident in Echo City’s prologue, which opens with a monstrous creature shambling across a toxic wasteland and dying. From its corpse emerges another smaller creature, which continues the journey until it too dies, and from its corpse emerges yet another, still smaller creature, and so on. It’s a ghastly, death-inflected parody of the cycle of life, and sets the scene superbly for the existential torments that are to come.
Echo City is packed with gruesome detail and outlandish characters but the star of the show is the city itself, marooned in an unending, lethal desert. Lebbon seems to know every sinister nook and dusty cranny of the place, and enriches his creation with an intricate backstory of internecine religious cults, social stratification and genetic engineering. His seething urban stew bubbles over with the arrival of an outsider who has, impossibly, survived the rigours of the imprisoning wilderness, sparking conflict and the fulfilment of apocalyptic prophecies.
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