The Scare Salon

At the beginning of the story, it’s 1994, and we’re introduced to perfect married couple Steven and Cassie Gold in the middle of one of their frequent sex sessions. Seriously, these two stepped right off the cover of a Harlequin romance: he’s all chiseled, hot, well-off, and completely devoted to his wife, and she’s a beautiful artist with a troubled past that only makes her more mysterious and intriguing. She’s implied, in fact, to have been something of a repressed young woman who has blossomed under the ministrations of her hunky husband over the past eleven years of wedded bliss. The couple is planning on trying for a baby in the very near future as well.

They live in a house that was left to Cassie by her despised father, who also happened to croak right in his easy chair in the house’s well-appointed living room. The dude wasn’t found for five days, so he was nice and ripe when Cassie and her family discovered him. Cassie has been wanting to sell the place because it understandably creeps her out, but they just haven’t gotten around to it yet.

Fortuitously, just as Cassie is thinking she really wants to get the hell out of this place, a friend of theirs named Jim calls and asks them to house-sit for a few months while he’s overseas on business. This seems to be just what the doctor ordered.

Despite the couple’s seemingly idyllic life, though, it’s clear that Cassie has some issues. She takes pills for anxiety but tells Steven they’re vitamins, for example, and near the beginning of the story, she actually has a bad dream about finding her decomposed dad, which results in her sleepwalking. Steven finds her standing downstairs, lightly slicing at her leg with a kitchen knife. It’s implied that there are things in her past that are still fucking with her mind, but Steven seems understanding at least.

After the Golds have got themselves set up at Jim’s place, watering his plants and feeding his cat and all that (and spoiler alert; the cat doesn’t make it, so be warned), Steven and Cassie are invited to a fancy dinner by Steven’s boss at the Ottawa Herald, whose name is Richard. Steven has just gotten a raise, and just as in everything, the guy is like the quintessential golden boy.

They have a great time at the dinner, though they all get pretty drunk. The Golds help Richard into a cab and then get one for themselves. But before they drive off, Cassie realizes she forgot her watch in the restaurant, so Steven goes back inside to get it. There’s a bunch of traffic, and the cab can’t stay at the curb, so the driver has to go around the block while they’re waiting. There’s also a torrential downpour, and visibility is near zero.

Long story short (too late), Steven gets run over by the cab as he comes out into the road in the rain, looking for the very car that mows him down. Cassie is completely beside herself as she howls to the cruel universe, crouching next to his prone body.

Steven is rushed to the hospital, where he actually dies for about a minute but is then revived. Afterward, he makes a fairly quick recovery, coming home in short order and appearing to be as good as new.

But just as in many stories where somebody dies for a brief time and then comes back, Steven ain’t quite the same. As a matter of fact, his mental health starts to steadily deteriorate as he begins to see ghosts; or rather, the fucked-up-looking corpses of people he’s wronged in the past. And as studly and desired by all as Steven is, he did some really sketchy shit over the years, including an intensely questionable incident involving his own eventual wife.

So the bulk of the story, then, is about how we can never be free of our past sins. The story largely revolves around Steven’s breakdown as he becomes increasingly haunted by horrific visions, but Cassie’s past is delved into as well. In Cassie’s case, she was more the victim of trauma than the perpetrator, but it was a nice parallel having the two characters going on a similar journey, but sorta from opposite sides, if that makes any sense.

The concept of the story gave me Flatliners vibes for sure (and I’m talking about the 1990 original, not the 2017 remake), though Revived definitely focuses more on the horror aspect and doesn’t delve into questions of God and the afterlife as Flatliners did. I found the ending to be a touch confusing, I admit, because it read a bit like maybe the whole thing had been a dream that Steven was having, but I’m not entirely sure if that’s the case.

As I mentioned, at times Revived reads very much like a romance novel, with steamy sex scenes and long passages about what a smokeshow Steven is and how all women’s panties immediately become sodden whenever he walks into their eyeline. This amused me as someone who’s not really a romance girlie; don’t get me wrong, I like smut as much as the next bitch, but romance novels aren’t really my thing, especially in the midst of a horror story.

Additionally, I felt as though both Steven and Cassie needed more substance as characters, which is why I feel like this might have been even better as a longer work. There were a lot of things introduced into the story—the thing about Cassie’s father’s death in the house, the couple staying at Jim’s place, Cassie’s past traumas—that I felt like should have been explored more and tied in more with the overarching story. Even Steven’s turbulent history is only brought up in brief flashbacks when he sees a new corpsy manifestation appearing before his eyes. So yeah, I feel like this definitely needed to be novel-length.

Oh, and this is not a big deal and probably something an editor should have caught, but a lot of things were italicized when they shouldn’t have been. Like, yes, movie and book titles and the names of newspapers are italicized, but band names, sports teams, games, Italian coffee drink names, and song titles aren’t. Not a huge thing, but it did sort of make my grammar gland twitch.

All in all, if you like dark psychological horror with a slightly smutty romance angle to it, then Revived should be right in your wheelhouse. It’s a fast-paced tale that gets pretty spooky at times and reveals new layers of increasingly horrific past events as it goes on.

Thanks again to Barbara Avon for sending me a copy! Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.