Revival

Electrifying Horror

The prolific Stephen King churns out books at an alarming rate, and every book has an intriguing idea at its core and a style of writing that keeps the reader hooked. Even those who are not fans of the master of horror, suspense and fantasy, can’t but marvel at how he pulls off a bestseller each time, without compromising on the quality that one has come to expect from him.

His latest, Revival—his 58^th-- is a sprawling novel spanning half a century, with a strange pastor-scientist character, inspired by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (later in the book, there are characters called Mary and Victor, as homage). King also dedicates it to HP Lovecraft and Arthur Machen, whose The Great God Pan “has haunted me all my life.”  In an interview, King called it a “nasty, dark piece of work...It’s too scary. I don’t even want to think about that book any more.”  The book does have a disturbing effect on the reader.

The narrator is Jamie Morton, who first encounters Pastor Charles Jacobs when he is six years old, playing in his backyard.  A shadow falls over the mud fort he has made, and never leaves him.  The new minister is charming and is soon popular with the whole town. His wife and infant son also become a part of the community. Jacobs is a man of God, but his passion is electricity and he is always tinkering with wires and batteries, creating his own gizmos. He wins over the Morton family by curing one of the kids Conrad, of his muteness, using a handmade electric tool.

Then, Jacobs’s family is brutally killed in an accident and he loses his faith.  After preaching a sermon in which he says that religion is “built on the blood, bones, and screams of those who have the effrontery not to bow to their idea of God,” he quietly leaves town.

Meanwhile, Jamie becomes a musician and is spiralling out of control with a drug problem when he encounters Jacobs again. Jacobs is now a fairground huckster, wowing the hicks with his electrical tricks.  But he picks up Jamie, takes him home, looks after him and using electricity again, cures him of his addiction. The ‘cure’ has some scary side-effects, but Jamie is still grateful for being pulled out of the gutter and placed back on the road to recovery. Jacobs also arranges for a job for Jamie at a recording studio with a maverick music producer Hugh (also one of his ‘cures’), and he is at peace. But every time Jacobs makes a re-entry, he is in a new avatar, as a miracle healer or conman, and, as Jamie can see, a man so obsessed with electricity that he is losing his grip on reality. Even as he does cure some people, Jacobs also leaves a trail of tragedy behind him.

But Jacobs does not think he is doing anything wrong. He has a clear agenda and Jamie is a part of his grand plan, for which he uses threats and emotional blackmail to summon him whenever he needs a hand.

King masterfully draws the reader in, with placid passages when Jamie is almost happy, to the darkness that engulfs him every time he meets Jacobs. Even though he knows nothing good can come of it, and he promises to break ties with Jacobs, Jamie cannot stay away from the destructive power of the man.

Jamie’s and Jacobs’s lives get increasingly intertwined, till the truly terrifying climax, which has a hint of Hindu mythology.  It’s a nightmare-inducing but fascinating read.

Revival

By Stephen King

Publisher: Scribner

Pages: 405