Author: Richard Matheson
I was in a used bookstore with a couple of my friends. Mike handed me Stir of Echoes and said "Buy it. I guarantee you'll like it."
"Guarantee?" I asked?
"Yes. If you don't like it, I'll buy it back from you."
At under $4.00, how could I refuse?
Stir of Echoes is probably best described as a paranormal suspense novel. Here is the first sentence of the teaser from the back cover: "Tom Wallace lived an ordinary life, until a chance event awakened psychic abilities he never knew he possessed."
Imagine you suddenly started picking up random thoughts from people around you. Imagine you started seeing things happen before they happened. But imagine you had no control over these occurrences. How would you react? It would probably be quite disconcerting. It is, to Tom.
This novel was written in the late 1950's, and is set in a neighborhood of young couples renting cookie-cutter houses of that time. In that setting, the pressure to be "normal" was quite high, and Matheson helps us feel that pressure. He also shows the couples struggling to maintain the appearance of normal and happy lives, when many of them were far from happy. Then, when our protagonist, Tom, the husband in the happiest of the couples, suddenly becomes something other than normal, life gets stressful indeed.
I was pulled into this story very easily. The suspense built over the course of the pages. While some of the attitudes are a bit outdated (the amount of stress which can be handled by a pregnant woman, for example,) it's easy to slip into the mores of the time as we experience the story in Tom's mind. And, as the final six or seven chapters arrive, it's pretty hard to put the story down.
I'm glad Mike guaranteed I would like this. He was right.
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