* Attention contains minor spoilers *I don’t feel I can give a justified rating here, as these are not really short-stories in a classic sense, they are merely longer vignettes, focusing on stories of love and loss, set around the events in Jason Mott’s The Returned, a novel in which the deceased suddenly, inexplicably return.“The First” is the tale of Edmund Blithe, the first person to return one year after having died from a tragic accident, shortly after having proposed to his girlfriend.This one feels the most uneven of the three prequel vignettes, it splinters up into little elements showing various aspects of how his return affects the world, and his fiancée.I really does little more than adding backdrop to book excerpt following it.“The Sparrow”, the tale of a little girl who was killed with her mother in uprisings in Sierra Leone only to return a decade later in the midst of America. This one works in my opinion best out of the three on its own. Here the author manages to make the most of the short amount of space, weaving together the stories of the couple that find the girl and take her in, the story of the girl and her mother, and a tale spun by the girl and her father.“The Choice”, the bitter sweet tale of a man who learns that the girl he grew up with and fell in love with, the girl who vanished at seventeen without a trace, has returned now some twenty years later, forcing him to re-evaluate his since new found love, and the little family they started. Out of the three “The Choice” felt the most disturbing to me as it leaves us with so many unanswered questions about what happened to the girl twenty years ago, and we never get to learn how she deals with returning from the dead as if never a day had passed, still deeply in love with a man who had to come to terms with his grief and move on. The second prequel to a social thought experiment about how the world would react if suddenly some deceased loved persons reappear just totally fine and don't know they were dead at all. This is a very emotional and hooking story.Will the public get frightened? Will charities boom due to fear of an apocalypse? Will these returned be seen as humans or as non-human anomalies despite the fact they are totally normal? Will you hand over a returned child to the authorities or care for it yourself?
What do You think about De Mus (2013)?
This one was absolutely wonderful. One left. Hope the book itself is as touching as this story was.
—amymariej
Another emotional short story from Jason Mott. He is amazing! Had me in tears of joy by the end!
—jen
This was definitely the most compelling of the three short stories/prequels. Incredibly moving.
—mcletus27
sequel to the prequelprequel to the prequelstill curious, no longer confused
—john
The second of the three prequels to The Returned.
—Meagann
