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The Returned by Seth Patrick

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


A thought-provoking, character-driven horror novel, based on the TV series ‘The Returned’, novelised by Seth Patrick.

Camille, fifteen years old, finds herself alone on the mountainside, with no memory of how she got there. She cannot remember dying in a bus crash four years before, her only concern to return home. But her home is now a broken one; her parents, Claire and Jerome, are separated and her sister, Lena, now nineteen, is wracked with guilt and painful memories, spending much of her spare time at the local Lake Pub.

Elsewhere, Julie, haunted by an attack that almost killed her several years before, meets a young boy, Victor, apparently abandoned and with nowhere to go. She takes pity on him, but soon finds that his presence may fill a hole in her life.

Others are slowly beginning to return home, their presence four years later not as readily welcomed as Camille and Victor find themselves. Simon finds his wife, Adele, now engaged to another man. Serge, brother to the landlord of the Lake Pub, hides dark compulsions that threaten to ignite the tension that is descending across a town that has been haunted by its losses for the past four years.

With a large cast of characters, ‘The Returned’ carefully unspools its growing tension, secrets and lies slowly rising to the surface. The complex web of each of the characters' stories unravels with each revelation, while the personal battles build to a war for the town itself. Sides are taken, leading to its inevitable climax. But another danger lurks and threatens to engulf the town in another tragedy.

The novelisation is based on the first season of the critically acclaimed 2012-15 French TV series ‘Les Revenants’, which was broadcast internationally at ‘The Returned’. The TV series was itself based on the concept of a 2004, also French, film ‘Les Revenants’/‘They Came Back’ – released in the UK under the title ‘The Returned’ – which follows a similar premise of the dead returning to their former lives. The TV series ran for two seasons, but the reported second novel was never published. A single season US remake also premiered in 2015.

Absorbing and well-written, ‘The Returned’ is a far deeper and emotional exploration than you’d usually expect from a zombie horror, like the film and TV series before it, excellently portraying grief and loneliness and the lengths to which people will go to protect those they love.



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