The Revenant

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.