The Devil of Echo Lake

January 7, 2013
In this supernatural thriller set in the late 1990s, debut novelist Wynne re-imagines the Faustian myth in which a musician sells his soul to the Devil in return for mass adulation. Washed-up rocker Billy Moon, seeking to connect beyond his core audience of goth chicks, travels to a remote studio to make what his record label and manager hope will be the album that restores Moon's once-iconic stature. Doing so, however, means reuniting with imperious record producer Trevor Rail, with whom he shares a dark and damning secret. Even before Moon's arrival, inexplicable events begin to occur in and around the haunted church that anchors the studio's facilities, threatening the entire project and everybody involved. Wynne, a former rocker himself, no doubt tossed in anecdotes from his own industry experiences, and he gives disillusioned but likeable young recording engineer Jake one of the book's best lines: "You may find that records are kind of like hot dogs. You enjoy them a lot more before you know how they're made." Confining most scenes to the residential studio and its surrounding woods, Wynne combines the cinematic imagery of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll with a good old-fashioned ghost story that thrills more often than it chills.