Revival (Volume Two): Live Like you Mean It: The small-town horror continues

Revivial (Volume Two): Live Like You Mean It by Tim Seeley (writer), Mike Norton (artist), Mark Englert (colors), and Crank! (letters)

Wasau, a small town in Wisconsin, is our locale for strange happenings in Revival: The dead are coming back to life. And not in some zombie-like fashion, either. In fact, if you did not know they were dead to begin with, and they had died fairly recently, you would not even know that they were dead watching them move around. There are also ghost-like figures in the woods, but those do not seem to have gathered much attention in town yet. It seems spottings have been minimal, though of course Tim Seeley has introduced us to them in volume one.

Dana, a police officer, is still working the revival cases with the representative from the C.D.C., Ramin. Dana’s son, Coop, is attempting to communicate with the figures in the woods, and Dana’s sister, Martha, is trying to deal with the fact that she, too, is a reviver. Dana’s father, the chief-of-police, is just hoping to keep the town from going crazy under his watch as he watches over the town border. He is there to see the arrival in a large tour bus of Clyde Birch, a famous conservative talk-show host, who is there to stir up trouble.

There is a lot of action in this volume: Dana first is called to a murder scene, before walking in on an odd altercation between a man and a woman who seem to be hatching some plan, a scam of some sorts: The woman is watching over her father, who seems to be catatonic, but she has really been plotting his death to run off with her step-brother with the insurance money from the death of her father. The only problem, she soon finds out, is that her father has only been pretending to be catatonic. And he is stronger than he first appears, as Dana will shortly find out.

Dana’s ex-husband seems to be clueless about what is going on in his shed: The brothers who have rented his shed from him are getting him to question a little bit about what they are doing in there when he hears what he thinks are screams coming from there, but the tenants tell him it is just the high-pitched sounds of a circular saw. We, however, no better: They cutting something that is causing a lot of blood, though Seeley delays our discovery of their actual horrific activities.

There are so many sub-plots in this story, it is amazing that Tim Seeley can juggle them all within the confines of the typical issue-length format, but he does an excellent job of doing so, and it is not difficult to keep up. Some of those sub-plots include the reporter who first broke the news of the revival in volume one. She goes to snoop on fitness expert Lester Majak, a local celebrity. Dana seeks out and confronts a local professor who seems sketchy and who had a relationship with her sister, Martha. At the town border, in addition to the talk-show host showing up, a bus crashes in the snow into a truck, and that truck spills out body parts for everyone to see, raising even more questions about what activities are going on in the town. And these are just a few of the sub-plots. Along with the sub-plots come multiple secondary characters. And these characters all are connected in multiple and interesting ways. It is quite an amazing, well-written horror series, and I highly recommend it.