Revenant (fiction)

In fantasy fiction, the term revenant usually means a sentient creature whose desire to complete a goal (usually to avenge its death) allows it to return from the grave as a creature vaguely resembling an intelligent zombie. Another possibility is that a powerful wizard returns a dead hero from the past to make him go on a quest that no living human would dare to undertake. Such a revenant may be just as intelligent as it was in life but its will is usually bound by the wizard who summons and controls it.

In Peter Straub's "Ghost Story" the female ghost is a revenant and declared so by the protagonist. The revenant manifests itself throughout time and space at will and as different personalities to fulfill its mission of vengeance. In "Ghost Story" the revenant manifests as Angie Maul, a young girl, Anna Mostyn an attractive young lady to wreak havoc on the nephew of one of the original victims, Ann-Veronica Moore who attacks the original victims and in life was known as Eva Galli.

The character of Eric in James O'Barr's The Crow is a revenant.

In Laurell K. Hamilton's "" series, revenants are animalistic vampires who were violently killed by a group of vampires (rather than being turned in the traditional 3-day period).

Revenants exist primarily in role-playing games and horror fiction.

In the online game "Ultima Online", the revenant is a creature that can be summoned by a necromancer character to attack a specified target. It is also a creature that spawns occasionally in the dungeon Khaldun.

In some earlier versions of the role-playing game "Dungeons and Dragons", the revenant is a powerful undead creature strongly resembling a zombie, a far less powerful undead creature at first glance. Notably, more recent versions of the game have adapted the revenant to reflect the aforementioned role of one who returns from the grave to fulfill a set task.

In the online game "City of Heroes", references are made in one particular story arch to 'The Revenant Hero Project'. This program spawned the entirety of the enemies called Paragon Protectors, who exist within the villain group of Crey Industries. This project consisted of the harvesting of DNA from deceased heroes and the recording of their memories and personalities from life. A new body would be grown using the supplied genetic material and implanted with the memories of the past person, albeit with some minor adjustments to make that person subservient to Crey. This is the culmination of years of Crey research into cloning and memory implantation and it was their way of keeping the hero population in check by creating heroes of their own. Their decision to name the program 'Revenant Hero' is most fitting as they are in their own way bringing the dead back to life for the fulfillment of a task.

The dictionary definition of revenant, from Merriam-Webster's Internet site (m-w.com) is "one that returns after death or a long absence", hence the long association of the term with the undead in fantasy and horror fiction. The way the word is most often used there is the implication that the person who has returned has done so to take revenge of some kind.

While never referred to as such, in the later Friday the 13th films, Jason Voorhees fits the description of a revenant.

Caleb, the protagonist from the video game series Blood can also be considered a Revenant.