Miranda Mellis’ The Re:Visionist begins with portentous silence. The type of silence one imagines as the “calm before a storm,” and at first the two seem to equate. Though on a second read one realizes it is similar, but The Re:Visionist’s silence is conveyed with no calm. In Mellis’ text the noiselessness never dissipates though the storms happen, continually sending their shock waves into the rest of the prose. As we enter this novella the category-defying narrator is in a, “lighthouse seven miles from the city.” Perhaps the only conventional thing about this person is that he/she sometimes narrates and in this instance relates the following, “From the tower I couldn’t hear, but I could see kids jumping and the dogs chasing, their jaws snapping open and shut in the barking maneuver” (5). The emptiness of watching without hearing such an aurally-charged action as dogs barking demonstrates the thorough alienation the narrator experiences throughout The Re:Visionist. In this novella characters are presented as external to even their own sensory experiences. The concomitant impotence intertwined with this on-looking is ever-present. Characters appear as observers, watching as things happen until there are fewer and fewer things that do.