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Fire Escape Partners
3465 25th Street, Suite 17
San Francisco, CA 94110 | (noun)
[REV-ah-nahnt] 
1. one that returns after a long absence: "Bingo Fridays at Jill's Whack-n-Fry had been floundering since its founder left town, but upon her return, the revenant mastermind was able to bring back its original excitement."
2. one who returns after death, especially as a ghost
Origin:
Approximately 1827; from French, from present participle of 'revenir': to return, to come back; from Latin, 'revenire': to return, to come back ('re-': back + 'venire': to come). In action:
"There's the relentless mother of 'Anywhere but Here', relentlessly optimistic about the future, relentlessly tweaking her daughter's hem and pushing her to stand up straight. Or there's the revenant dad of The Lost Father -- a charming, Egyptian-born academic preceded through much of the novel by his will-o'-the-wisp reputation for brilliance and unaccountable disappearances -- whose final shape in his daughter's life is as a Central Valley restaurant manager, pitching the good life through chardonnay and baby lettuces, juggling an elderly wife and a hungry mistress, anxious at last to regard his child as an achievement.
Most recently there's the visionary biotech entrepreneur of 'A Regular Guy', a man so isolated by his own brilliance, and the skittish magnetism of wealth and power, that he's unable to stave off the loss of his company, a self-made connoisseur who pours thousands of dollars into the individually hand-shaped floorboards of a house his girlfriend doesn't like, and ultimately adopts fatherhood with the awkward single-mindedness with which others take up religion. (If the latter story rings a bell, it is because Apple Computer's Steven Jobs is Simpson's older brother, although the two did not meet until they were in their 20s.)"
Ariel Swartley. "Writing in the City: Mona Simpson's dilemma," LA weekly (December 10-16, 1999).
"As one of the great conservative minds of the 20th century, Kirk is best known as a founding intellectual of a modern political movement. When he wasn't writing books about Edmund Burke or columns for 'National Review', however, he was scribbling away for publications such as 'Fantasy and Science Fiction', 'London Mystery Magazine', and 'New Terrors'. In 1958, T. S. Eliot wrote to him: 'How amazingly versatile and prolific you are! Now you have written what I should have least expected of you -- ghost stories!'
If Eliot had been a bit more familiar with Kirk, he wouldn't have been surprised at all. Kirk often talked about his brushes with revenants, and was convinced that his big house in Mecosta, Mich., was haunted. Visitors to his home -- myself included, as a college student on a trip sponsored by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute -- were regaled with ghost stories told by candlelight.
Kirk's most-influential book was 'The Conservative Mind', but his most popular one was a novel, 'The Old House of Fear'. It made the bestseller lists in the early 1960s and sold more copies than all of Kirk's other books combined. It employed the conventions of Gothic fiction to tell a great story set on a remote and mysterious Scottish island -- and also to satirize Marxism and liberalism."
John J. Miller. "The Ghosts of Kirk," National Review (January 23, 2003).
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