Stephanie Jones: Book Review - Revival by Stephen King

The ghosts of Pet Sematary, one of the most ghoulish and terrifying novels ever produced, haunt the pages of Stephen King’s new novel Revival. If it’s not a sequel to his 1983 work it’s certainly an homage, and a revisiting of his roots in the horror genre. The supernatural is never more earthbound or ghastly than in the hands of King.

Thematically, there’s a great deal to the story of drug addict and itinerant rhythm guitarist Jamie Morton and small-town-minister-turned-healer Charles Jacobs. King’s ideas are big, taking in the intersection of religion and science, crises of faith, and the human desire for rescue and redemption at any cost. In October 1962, Jamie is a young boy playing happily alone in the dirt when the shadow of Jacobs – which he will later acknowledge he never escapes – first falls over him.

The youngest of five children of a peaceful Methodist couple, Jamie is aware of his parents’ modest piety and the role his father, a deacon, plays in bringing Jacobs, his beautiful young wife Patricia, and their toddler son to town. All is calm and bright until one of Jamie’s brothers is injured in an accident and, while the family doctor shrugs his shoulders, Jacobs applies a treatment that is something between a medical experiment and a miracle.

Though the boy is cured, the incident acts as a tipping point in both the storyline and Jamie’s juvenile world view, and the locomotive of King’s narrative kicks into a higher speed. Before the first four chapters have elapsed, death and destruction have established themselves as dominant themes beneath the oblique canopy of religion.

Is Jacobs a scientist and ground-breaking thinker about the manifold off-label applications of electricity, or a conjurer of dark forces? What he doesn’t seem to be is a charlatan. In just three years he is fired from his post after renouncing his faith in a Terrible Sermon to a scandalized congregation (sample line: “Religion is the theological equivalent of a quick-buck insurance scam”).

But as King himself might put it, Jamie might think he’s done with Jacobs, but Jacobs is not yet done with him. The younger man, having discovered a latent talent for music, turns it into a career before succumbing to a prolonged lost weekend (one very like that of Danny Torrance in King’s recent Doctor Sleep): “between the advent of the Reagan administration in 1980 and the Tulsa State Fair in 1992 I was living a very bad life.” Lo, here is Jacobs at the fair, presenting under a different name but still applying his mysterious cures.

This time, Jamie is given to a full understanding of what his brother experienced, and awakened to a curiosity about the long-term prognosis of other recipients of Jacobs’ ministrations. King makes timely and thought-provoking points about the limits of medicine and what can seem to be the educated gambling of its practitioners. If we allow for acceptable risks, Jamie muses, “the question is always acceptable to whom?” The doctor, after all, is not the one left paying the piper.

As an addition to King’s recent oeuvre, Revival – a title with a double meaning if ever there was one – is a rousing reminder that King is at the peak of his powers, gliding smoothly between psychological crime thriller (Mr Mercedes), time-bending epic (11/22/63), amusement-park ghost story (Joyland), and the old-school horror of last year’s The Shining sequel.

Perhaps Doctor Sleep reawakened King’s astonishing gift for rendering evil, or maybe he has simply been ruminating on the place of religion in the human condition. What is certain: no other writer will remind you of your helpless mortality more readily than King, or usher you into the spirit world more persuasively.