A clear pattern has emerged in Stephen King’s writing over the past 20 years. Whenever his story or novel is a period piece – think The Green Mile, ‘1922’ from Full Dark, No Stars – the quality of his writing improves. Because he can’t rely on lazy pop-culture or literary metaphors, he is forced to exercise his considerable talent for language, and the results are often impressive.
His latest novel, Revival, is set (at first, anyway) in the 1960s. The main protagonist is Jamie Morton, a six-year-old who lives in Harlow, Maine. He is the first person in his small country town to meet the new preacher, Pastor Charles Jacobs, and their paths will continue to cross for the next forty years.
Jacobs and his wife are initially popular among the townsfolk. They are young and attractive and Jacobs – unlike his predecessor – doesn’t put the faithful to sleep with his sermons. He also has an interest in electricity, which he puts to a variety of entertaining uses. Even, it seems, curing Jamie’s brother Con, who is left mute following a skiing accident.
But a few years after arriving in Harlow, tragedy strikes and Jacobs’ wife and child are killed in a road accident. A short time later, the devout religious man delivers what becomes known as ‘The Terrible Sermon’. In a grief-stricken tirade he denounces his faith, which doesn’t go down well with his flock, and he leaves Harlow in disgrace.
Many years later, Jamie – now a mid-level rock musician and a heroin junkie – comes across Jacobs at a sideshow. Jacobs has become a carny and is using what he calls his ‘special electricity’ as part of a spectacular magic show. But he is not just using the electricity for showmanship. He has continued to research and develop its healing powers, and he uses it to cure Jamie of his heroin addiction. He offers Jamie a temporary job assisting him in his sideshow act, and then one day pulls another disappearing act.
Another twenty years pass and Jamie and Jacobs are reunited once more. Only this time, Jacobs is using his special electricity to cure the sick in religious revival meetings. Ostensibly he is a pastor again, but Jamie sees he has not reclaimed his faith at all – he is merely using it as a means to an end. Jacobs is getting closer and closer to his goal, which is to bring someone back from the dead. He believes the afterlife as it is spelled out in the Bible is a lie, and he plans to discover the truth… no matter the cost.
Revival is a pleasing return to form for Stephen King, filled with memorable characters and textured descriptions of Maine and Colorado. It’s certainly his best novel since Under the Dome and is a sight better than anything else he wrote since Dreamcatcher. (It is so vastly superior to Doctor Sleep[y] that I wouldn't be surprised if it restarted rumours about King using ghost writers.) As I type this, the average Goodreads rating for Revival is 3.81, which I think is spot on. It’s much better than a three-star book but falls just short of a genuine four-star read.
While it sometimes feels like a novella stretched out to novel length, Revival only lags briefly around its middle section and, like Under The Dome, that 'lagging' provides a build up that enhances the book’s harrowing (and I mean harrowing) finale. King’s most notable achievement in Revival, however, is the character of Jacobs, who is a believable secular zealot; a born-again nihilist with a fanatical devotion to his cause that is both fearsome and destructive.
There are a couple of glaring flaws in Revival. One is its nods to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the works of H. P. Lovecraft. These so-called homages, like those in Cell, are actually more like plagiarism. The second flaw is Jamie’s love affair with a woman less than half his age, which is both unnecessary and hard to believe (it feels more like King indulging a personal fantasy).
But such missteps are far outweighed by interesting turns of phrase and that ‘soothing’ tone King generates in his best fiction. Revival is also thematically robust, with many things to say about organised religion, humanity’s often crazed obsession with knowing the unknowable, and – a hobbyhorse King has been riding for most of his career – the ramifications of throwing open Pandora’s Box.
