There are only four characters to speak of-only Evelyn and her clone, Martine, get much development-and, outside of a few descriptions of internal scenes at Evelyn and Martine’s houses and the lab, there’s very little detail. Gailey’s writing in The Echo Wife is really quite spare on external descriptions, focusing inwards on Evelyn instead. Cherryh’s Cyteen (1988) for its use of cloning to create an intensely internal, even claustrophobic psychological drama there’s also some mild body-horror in The Echo Wife, oblique but disturbing discussion of childhood abuse, and a Bluebeard-esque murder reveal. I don’t know if it was an influence or not, but I kept thinking of C.J. The last line, in particular, feels distinctly Jacksonion: you can read it as either really disturbing, or as a strange but happy ending. It’s a shocking but subtle twist, changing the way the whole novel works, and making it very effectively creepy-I was reminded a lot of Shirley Jackson in how Gailey uses spare prose and implication to build horror. Suddenly, all the wholesomely Agatha-Christie-like clues I’d been gleaning are transfigured instead into ominous hints about Evelyn’s actions, past, and mental state.
#THE DARKEN ECHOES OF THE END HOW TO#
It may vary for each reader, but for me the shift happened when Evelyn lets slip that her current, very science-fictional problem-figuring out how to help her own clone deal with the murder of their mutual (ex-)husband-is a recapitulation of Evelyn’s traumatic family history.
Where the novel really comes into its own, however, is the moment that its genre shadings darken into a kind of psychological horror. In pivoting away from revealing critical information, Gailey prompts the reader to suspect multiple and solvable mysteries in Evelyn’s current predicament, and in her past. There’s little ambiguity about the central murder, but Evelyn’s narration has a way of highlighting certain details as clues, and a habit of occasional and tantalizing obfuscation. I might have been primed for it by the private investigator of Gailey’s Magic for Liars (2019), but there are elements of The Echo Wife that quickly put me in a mind of a murder mystery.
Still living out of boxes after her recent divorce, Evelyn is contacted by her ex-husband’s distraught new fiance, and quickly finds herself entangled in a game of subterfuge, murder, and-you guessed it-clones. A brilliant scientist, she has pioneered a method of cloning that can create adult near-replicas in a matter of weeks (though the tone is wildly different, the cloning technology of The Echo Wife recalls The Sixth Day ). Evelyn Caldwell, our protagonist and narrator, receiving a prestigious award for her work in cloning and going about her solitary and mono-focused life. Moving stealthily between sci-fi thriller, mystery, and horror, it begins with a very consciously performative femininity-an uncomfortable and expensive gown-and ends with a possibly liberating, definitely disturbing vision of gender-swapped patriarchy. Sarah Gailey’s newest novel, The Echo Wife, draws from both approaches, with a quiet emphasis on gender roles. Other works, like Orphan Black (2013-2017), while not turning a blind eye to the weirdness of the technology, have used cloning to examine possibilities of identity.
Cloning has been used for horrific effect back to at least Brave New World (1932), focusing on its “unnaturalness” and the uncanniness of the doppelgänger, and was foreshadowed in earlier writing like Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr.
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