The Revenant

About the Book

Phoebe Reeves' first novel The Revenant has been nominated for the prestigious 1999 Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel, alongside bestselling works by Stephen King and Dean Koontz--a remarkable achievement for an independent press book.

The Revenant is a magical realist story of creation and death, about a woman's search for identity and transformation.   In The Revenant, a mysterious tale of murder, conspiracy, and confrontation with the unknown, a young woman confronts the ancestors, both living and dead, as she searches for her own redemption in her mother's murder and her part in that murder which has become the whole definition of her life.

Nenut Kite, an amateur artist born of a Nubian father and a Caucasian American mother, has been raised from the age of ten in a juvenile's jail.  Since being released at 18, she's tried to carry on a normal life.  But her father has never forgiven her for her mother's death and obsessively demands that she preserves a physical appearance identical to her mother's.  And so, Nenut has never lived comfortably among the living.  Now at 25, consumed by the image and sensation of holding her mother's burning skull in her hands as she tried to put out the flames, Nenut sculpts glass and stone monuments, invocations to the Dead, in hopes that They will convince her mother's ghost to talk to her.

Someone or something answers her call, and her life becomes caught up in a raging whirlwind, when during her first public exhibition, her sanity is brought into question by her encounters with Kongo and Egyptian ancestors, and the enigmatic organization known only as The End.  The End, with the promise of insight into her mother's demise and her relationship to her mother, hires Nenut to become a mute, a burial mourner and creator of art and ritual situations needed by the families of people who've died.

And so her journey begins via funerals, across places, across cultures, across times, as Nenut races to piece together the puzzle of her identity before a disease that is literally turning her to stone kills her.

About the Author

Phoebe Reeves is a magic realist writer whose short story "The Crossing" was published on-line in SF Goth's Errata magazine, the October 1999 issue.  Her novella-ization of the Outer Limits teleplay "The Quality of Mercy" for Outer Limits 3, published by Prima, was nominated for the 1997 Horror Writers Association Best Long Fiction award.  Her cyber short stories, "Eyes Like Stars" and "Too Beautiful For You" were published in Midnight Zoo magazine and Midnight Zoo's 1994 anthology respectively.  She also adapted and directed "Eyes Like Stars" as a radio play on Shoestring Radio Theater in San Francisco.  This production aired nationally.  Additionally, she's written and delivered weekly film reviews on Movie Magazine, a nationally syndicated radio show broadcast out of San Francisco.  Her multicultural critical reading, thinking, and writing textbook What's The Big Idea? Writing Through Reading and Thinking was published by Prentice Hall in July of 1998.  In July of 1999, Prentice Hall also published her second writing text, a cyber-culture anthology of Internet and book published readings from around the world called Turning The Century: A Bits and Bytes Reader for Developing Writers.   Phoebe is an education curriculum and training consultant for YouthBuild USA.  Prior to that, she was the director of YouthBuild San Antonio at the George Gervin Youth Center in San Antonio, Texas.  She taught creative and nonfiction writing at the University of San Francisco and City College of San Francisco as well as at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, and Leeward and Kauai Community Colleges in Hawaii.  She received her MA in English Literature from the University of Massachusetts at Boston and her BA in English from Tufts University.  Born of her passion for dreams and nightmares, The Revenant is her first novel.