The Book Plank

Lost Souls by Seth Patrick, Reviver Trilogy #2 After the life-altering events of Reviver, Jonah Miller, the world’s most powerful forensic revivalist, is caught between standing up for what he knows is right, and protecting the job he loves. But the tide is turning. Those who campaign against revival have redoubled their efforts. Better funded, their polemic is working. Public opinion, usually supportive of the revivers, is becoming uneasy. Then a bizarrely mutilated body is found. The cause of death baffles police, but Jonah suspects that there are other forces at work, forces just as destructive as those he has already faced. When research efforts begin again to explore the source of revival, old faces reappear and Jonah’s world starts to unravel. As the research closes in on dangerous truths, Jonah and his friends find there’s nowhere left to go; no-one left to trust. And in the darkness, something is coming. Has it already been two years since I first read Seth Patrick's d...

Guest Post: When is a zombie not a zombie? by Seth Patrick You must have noticed it. In zombie movies, the word ‘zombie’ is often treated like a swear word. In Sean of the Dead, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost joke about not using the Z-word; in World War Z, the military use the term ‘Zack’ instead.  In The Walking Dead too, the Z-word is avoided, calling them ‘Walkers’. The intention, according to series producer Robert Kirkman, was that the world of The Walking Dead is like our own except that nobody ever came up with the concept of zombies – at  least not in the George Romero sense. It’s a hard thing to pull off without it just seeming like the characters have really not been paying attention all their lives. This whole idea even has its own entry in TVTropes:  http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NotUsingTheZWord In the French TV series The Returned (my novelisation has just been released, plug plug), people living in a remote Alpine town are...

Reviver by Seth Patrick, Reviver #1 Able to wake the recently dead, and let them bear witness to their own demise. Twelve years after the first reviver came to light, they have become accepted by an uneasy public. The testimony of the dead is permitted in courtrooms across the world. Forensic revival is a routine part of police investigation. In the United States, that responsibility falls to the Forensic Revival Service. Despite his troubled past, Jonah Miller is one of their best. But while reviving the victim of a brutal murder, he encounters a terrifying presence. Something is watching. Waiting. His superiors tell him it was only in his mind, a product of stress. Jonah is not so certain. Then Daniel Harker, the first journalist to bring revival to public attention, is murdered, and Jonah finds himself getting dragged into the hunt for answers. Working with Harker's daughter Annabel, he becomes determined to find those responsible and bring them to justice. Soon t...