Stephen King Channels H. P. Lovecraft for "Revival"

Revival - Stephen King

The first time Charlie Jacobs’ shadow fell across him, Jamie Morton was just a boy of six playing “army” in the dirt. That would not be the last time, though: the shadow of Charlie Jacobs would drift back and forth across his life for the remainder of his days. In 1962, though, Jacobs was a minister with the ink barely dry on his divinity degree, just arrived at the Mortons’ church. With Charlie's pretty wife and toddler son, the Jacobs family injected a little life into what had been a moribund congregation. 

They brought life that is, until they brought death. After that death came that memorable Sunday that Charlie preached the Terrible Sermon, and then he was gone. Charlie Jacobs dropped out of sight for four decades, during which our narrator grew to be a man, and became a minor rock god, and finally wound up a junkie. The second time that the shadow of Charlie Jacobs fell on him, Jamie Morton found himself at life’s low ebb. Jacobs fixed him up though, fixed him permanently with a special form of electricity that set him on the road to recovery.

Now flirting with the double-nickel, Jamie had never thought he’d see his old minister –and later savior – again, but when he learned that Jacobs was back in the religion biz, healing the lame and curing the sick in a classic tent show, he couldn’t resist. When the shadow fell upon him one last time, Jamie Morton discovered that the now-old man had a last project on his schedule: Revival.

There are horror authors, and there are those who write horror fiction. The first often seem to be literary one-trick ponies, endlessly rewriting the same tired plot like some second-rate romance novelist. The second avoid the Harlequin-slash-Fabio trap by continually inventing new plots, each equally as horrifying as the one before it. Stephen King is undeniably the second kind, the sort of author who is somehow capable of choosing an ordinary object, event or place – a classic car, a high-school prom, a large dog, a small town in Maine – and slowly converting it to an object imbued with evil. Some readers find such versatility annoying, as it apparently clashes with a desire to meet a comfy old friend between the covers of each book.  Not me.

Revival is not your “classic” Stephen King from the days of Carrie or Firestarter, it isn’t the same Stephen King who created ensemble horror for The Stand and Under the Dome. This is the Stephen King who plays guitar in the Rock-Bottom Remainders, a King marinated in

Jamie's first electric guitar
[source: wikimedia commons]

an eldritch horror of old, an acolyte of the horror-master himself: H. P. Lovecraft. Readers who appreciated the horror of creepy tales like The Colour Out of Space and who still shiver when they hear the name “Cthulu,” decades after first meeting that nameless ones, will get Revival when they read it. Those expecting to find a familiar character or a situation just slightly different from that in the last King novel (or movie or television show) probably won’t.

King, much as did Lovecraft, uses his narrator to carefully build a window through which the reader inadvertently glimpses a horrific world he was never meant to see. What appears at first to be another coming-of-age novel, what somehow reads like the life story of one more almost-famous session musician, what could be seen as a run-of-the-mill tale of redemption in the end serves to construct the mystery of Charlie Jacobs. Jacobs, the one who wishes to open that horrific window, is in reality the novel’s main character of the novel – not Jamie: he’s only the narrator. Readers who find themselves puzzled such a plot device – and there are quite a few of them at “the river” – should spend a few minutes (or hours) pondering the novel’s title. The word “revival” has more than just the one definition. King’s novel will lead a reader through each of those meanings in succession, culminating with the last meaning: the most horrifying.