Talking Scared 78 – Thomas Olde Heuvelt and the Mountains of (My) Madness
This week is my personal Everest.
Thomas Olde Heuvelt, bestselling Euro-horror whizzkid author of HEX, joins me to to talk about his newest novel – Echo. It’s a story of mountaineering, and madness, and monsters of the soul.
If you follow me on any form of social media you may have seen that this book utterly distressed me. I can’t even say why myself; it just tweaked a nerve.
Echo is a wonderfully easter-egg-laden novel, full of references to other horror masterworks. As you’ll hear in this conversation, that is no surprise. Thomas knows what he’s doing. He knows how to twist the knife (or the climbing axe) for maximum effect.
We talk about mountains, of rock and of the mind. We talk about the role that those grand peaks play in horror through the ages, and how his own relationship with the mountains is one of both fascination and terror – whereas, for me, it’s just the latter. We also discuss writing horror in translation, about the role of erotic love in horror fiction, and the creepy mountain stories that led to the creation of this nightmarish book.
Enjoy!
Other books mentioned on the show include:
- Into Thin Air (1997), by John Krakauer (a phenomenal non fiction account of disaster on Everest)
- Touching the Void (1988), by Joe Simpson
- The Raw Shark Texts (2007), by Stephen Hall
- Maxwell’s Demon (2021), by Stephen Hall
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