mikerickson reviewed Revenants by Daniel Mills
Review of 'Revenants' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
Never before have the woods seemed so dark to him as they do now: so boundless, so forbidding. In October, the sun begins its retreat, confining its daily arc to an ever-shrinking slice of sky, leaving the world stark and shadowed. These are latter days. Already the trumpets blow, bringing rumors of war in the east. The seals are broken, the best set loose upon the world: her howl will shake the vault of heaven.
He breathes on his hands and rubs them together.
Wind stirs the rotting leaves. He waits.
This book had some of the best prose I've read in a long while. Every sentence felt so carefully crafted to reinforce this overall sense of... I don't wanna say 'dread' but definitely that feeling of melancholy when fall begins to slip into winter. There are honestly over a dozen mentions and metaphors relating to dried up and dead …
Never before have the woods seemed so dark to him as they do now: so boundless, so forbidding. In October, the sun begins its retreat, confining its daily arc to an ever-shrinking slice of sky, leaving the world stark and shadowed. These are latter days. Already the trumpets blow, bringing rumors of war in the east. The seals are broken, the best set loose upon the world: her howl will shake the vault of heaven.
He breathes on his hands and rubs them together.
Wind stirs the rotting leaves. He waits.
This book had some of the best prose I've read in a long while. Every sentence felt so carefully crafted to reinforce this overall sense of... I don't wanna say 'dread' but definitely that feeling of melancholy when fall begins to slip into winter. There are honestly over a dozen mentions and metaphors relating to dried up and dead leaves in this book, but they all work.
At face value, there's not a whole lot of dramatic action that happens in this story, but the prose and in-between bits were so well-written that I didn't even mind. Basically a small, isolated town of Puritan colonists in 1680's Massachusetts has had two young women go missing in the span of a few weeks, and we follow another one shortly before she also vanishes. The men of the town form search parties and split up as they enter the thick woods that hem in their village. But in doing so, the older men are forced to confront the repercussions of something they carried out fourteen years earlier that the younger generation never fully understood.
Honestly one of the main things I'll remember about this book is the time period and setting. I find that most historical fiction tends to crowd around specific eras and places, but pre-Revolution America tends to get overshadowed, save for the famous examples of The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible. And the nature of Puritanism absolutely informed the decisions of the characters in this story; many of the events, and definitely the climax, just would not have happened in a more tolerant culture. Ideas of "impure thoughts" and "unforgivable sins" also goes a long way towards explaining why certain characters change so much from beginning to end.
This book is categorized as Horror on GoodReads, and I half agree with that, but don't come into this expecting a bunch of buckle-hatted pilgrims getting slashed up in the woods. The supernatural elements of this book are subtle, just like everything else. It's more of a character study with some vaguely weird shit happening in the background, though I do wish the spooky factor was dialed up a notch. If you do decide to pick this one up, definitely wait until October/November-ish for the full effect.