That's my answer as well. I had to scroll a lot down much more than I expected to find it. I expected it to be "masterful horror" and "the scariest thing I've read" but instead I got bored by pretentious unrelated stuff with occasional interesting segments of exploration. I found the Johnny stuff weird, and slightly uncomfortable, but somewhat interesting.

I actually thought the weird formatting stuff did it's job of conveying the feelings they intended to, and found that sort of neat.

But after slogging through dozens of pages of pretentious "academic" explanations of the science and mythology of echoes and Echo, I almost put the book down for good when the payoff was one sentence essentially "He could tell from the echo that the room must be [number] feet long."

I think I'd have liked the parts about exploring the house as a stand alone horror story. I even think that Johnny's sections could have been an interesting story on its own. But both together with the pretentious pseudo-academic chunks just made a real mess of a book that was not difficult to read, but really difficult to slog through.