Iconic Writing Post – Revival #12 by Tim Seeley

Every now and again, I am so emotionally moved and physically paralysed by a piece of writing that I am unable to turn the page. Though the issue was great, I have not had the opportunity to review the whole book. However these pages were so poignant and provided a piquant glance into the world of revivers. If there was needed an explanation for the nature of those returned, then these panels provide them.

Losing the one you love is a classic theme and there is a wealth of literature dedicated to finding love by overcoming the past. There are tragedies the world over and fictional stories about moving on and finding your emotions again in other people or pursuits. The elderly gentleman on the page is a reviver and he is talking about waking from a dream where he loses grip of a dark angel and subsequently the fight for life. The risks we take and the pain we endure upon failing is the price we pay for trying to find the greatest joy. For this man it is for a blonde, blue-eyed girl called Mimi but the risk was too much, and he lost her. That pain would never leave him and halt him from ever finding true happiness for the rest of his life.

Tim Seeley builds on this classic lovelorn scaffolding to demonstrate the true emptiness of his reviver story. People may disagree but feeling pain is better than feeling nothing at all. The gentlemen knows he is alive because he hurts every single day, but the day he became numb to Mimi, was the day he died. It is a very intelligent passage when combined with the dream analogy, as not only do we relate to losing someone we love, but then Seeley takes it further into his fictional characters. To create a book with baseline zombie tendencies but to alter it subtly to convey complex inter-personal relationships is brilliant. It adds more depth and texture to the undead trope and the doors have flown open for Seeley and his revivers. This passage is delicately written to convey his emotion, even when we know he has none. The lack of pain is what made him know he was alive, now he feels nothing, now he cannot tell if he is alive, now he has become a reviver.