A slightly different version of this review appeared on at David Gemmell Awards. Since this novel didn't make the final ballot, and my review at the DGA has been up for about two months, I'm going to post a modified version of it here.
Spectra, mmpb, ebook, $7.99
Tim Lebbon’s Echo City is a dark, dense novel full of wonders and terrors and many things made up of both. The novel starts out, not really slow, but at a more restrained pace. Lebbon has a number of characters in different locations he needs to bring together, and once they start to join up, the pace is relentless and the suspense nerve-wracking.
One of the main characters is the city itself.
Echo City is ancient city. No one is sure of its age, but the city is thousands of years old. Over time the city has been built up atop the previous cities, and the lower levels are called echoes, giving the city its name. Whole buildings still exist in the echoes, along with ghosts and other more unpleasant denizens.
Echo City is quite large, with walls separating the different districts of the city known as Cantons. I seem to remember Lebbon mentioning the city was either thirty square miles or thirty miles across. I don’t recall which and can’t find the reference. Anyway, the city is large enough that portions of it have been parceled off as parks and others as farmland to feed the population.
This is important because Echo City sits in the middle of a vast, toxic desert. No one has ever crossed the desert, although many have died trying, their bones littering the landscape. That changes when the book opens.
