Revival - Stephen King
Jamie Morton was barely six years old the first time Charlie Jacobs’ shadow fell across him. It would not be the last time – in fact, Charlie Jacobs’ shadow would remain with him until the end of his days. But back in 1962, Charlie was the newly-hired minister at the Morton family’s church, and with his wife and son beside him he'd brought new life to the moribund congregation.
| Life that is, until there was death. And with that death there came the Terrible Sermon, after which Charlie Jacobs disappeared from Jamie’s life for decades. In those decades Jamie first became a man, and then a second-tier rock god, and finally a junkie. The second time Charlie Jacobs’ shadow fell across him, Jamie stood at life’s low ebb – but Charlie fixed him right up, fixed him with his special brand of electricity and set him on the road to recovery. Now in his mid-fifties, Jamie had never expected to ever see his old… what, friend? again, but he found that the Rev was back in the religion biz, healing the halt and the lame in a big ol’ traveling tent show. When that shadow fell across him one more time, Jamie discovered that Jacobs had one last project in mind: Revival. |
There are horror writers and there are writers of horror. The first are the literary equivalent of a one-trick pony, endlessly recasting the same tired, old plot. The second avoid that romance-novel trap, constantly inventing new situations that are each as horrifying as the last. Stephen King is the second sort, an author who somehow seems capable of picking an ordinary object or place – a Plymouth Fury, a winter-bound hotel, a Saint Bernard, a Caribbean island – and turning it into an object of singular menace. Some readers find this versatility annoying, as it clashes with their desire to find a comfy old friend between the covers of their book. Not this reader...Revival ain’t your “classic” Stephen King from the days of Christine, Carrie or Cujo, it isn’t the same Stephen King who wrote a form of ensemble horror in The Stand or Under the Dome. This is a version of Stephen King steeped in the eldritch horrors of olde, an acolyte at the right hand of the master himself: H. P. Lovecraft. Those who appreciate the creeping horror of tales like The Colour Out of Space and still tremble at the mention of Cthulu decades after first feeling that nameless dread, will read Revival and they will get it. Those who expect to find the same characters and same situations only slightly changed from the last King novel (or from some television show) will probably not.
King, like Lovecraft before him, uses a prosaic-seeming narrative to slowly construct a window through which an ordinary man might look upon a world of horror. What seems to be a coming-of-age novel, what appears to be a second-hand biography of a second-rate musician, what might ultimately be a story of redemption – all those aspects serve to build the mystery that is Charlie Jacobs. Jacobs, the man who would open that window, is the main character of this novel, not the narrator.
 
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Readers puzzled by this aspect of the plot – and there are several reviews by such readers floating at “the river” – need only ponder the novel’s title, for the word “Revival” has more than one meaning. King’s novel leads his readers to understand each of those meanings, culminating as we discover the last meaning: the most horrifying. |
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