Walsh, O. Jamie - The Revenants

For those who have read Edita Bikker’s The Night Of Turns (also from Broodcomb), this collection makes an ideal companion, especially for those who wondered what “the settlements” were that Bikker left.
This reads like a newcomer’s guide. Meeting inhabitants, seeing and perhaps guessing how the society work. There are a variety of characters, several we drift back to repeatedly, others are chance encounters.
Bikker is referenced once in an unsent letter. There is an offhand comment about Potter’s Museum (Of Curiosities), which brought a smile, recalling a visit there decades earlier.
Each entry is brief, never more than two pages, and I would calculate there are 100+ in this generous collection.
This is a book to be read in small doses, not to wolf down, but to allow impression to steep into you.
At the fringe is a group of individuals who had ventured outside the settlements on a search-rescue expedition. When they returned, they were profoundly altered. Unable or unwilling to communicate, they live apart, and they live – perhaps – out of time. Locals call them the revenants.
Late events rise to a crescendo, although readers who long for meaning to be folded into mystery may be stymied. We are permitted so much, yet we remain observers, outsiders.
Several of the main actors have a hunger, a thirst for experiencing, or simply “seeing.” Experiences are often transactions. Something gained, another thing lost. The bartered exchange is frequently bitter, yet the longer one lives, the more one grasps that there is no going back, only looking back.