Stephen King’s Revival Reveals a Life in Supernatural Peril

In the dedication to Revival, Stephen King includes a long list of “the people who built my house”: horror writers like Mary Shelley, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert Bloch. But it’s really a love letter to two of those writers in particular: H.P. Lovecraft and Arthur Machen. (If you haven’t read Machen, check out his novella The Great God Pan. Even 124 years later, it’s still disturbing, while delivering the valuable message that sleeping with an unknowable horror from beyond just might have a downside.)
While Revival ticks off many of the boxes on your Stephen King checklist (small-town Maine, classic rock, deranged religious figure…), the tone of the book would fit right into a work by Lovecraft or Machen. It’s your classic “average man discovers a horrifying world beyond our own” story, but with King’s talent for fleshing out characters giving the terror even more punch. After all, wouldn’t Lovecraft’s Dagon be a little more emotionally gripping if we actually knew something about it’s protagonist? (For example, his name?)
Revival follows guitarist Jamie Morton’s life through his increasingly disturbing encounters with the minister of his childhood, Reverend Charles Jacobs. The book opens with Jacobs befriending 6-year-old Jamie, a member of his new ministry, and the two forging a close bond. Jacobs has a growing obsession with electricity and electrical devices, which culminates in his healing Jamie’s mute brother with a device of his own creation. But when a horrific tragedy befalls Jacobs, he falls from grace and leaves town.
Years later, Jamie runs into Jacobs at a county fair. While Jamie’s now a touring rhythm guitarist with a heroin addiction, Jacobs has become “Daniel Jacobs,” a sideshow pitchman who uses his electrical wizardry to create special photos of fairgoers, showing them not as they are, but how they picture themselves. Jacobs uses his knowledge of “special electricity” to cure Jamie of his drug habit, but leaves him with some unsettling side effects. He’s also left with a growing fear of what Jacob’s healing might be doing to his patients, and exactly how far he might go to get the knowledge he seeks.
It’s hard to give a sense of Revival’s tone in a summary, because so much of the terror happens at the very end of the book. Here King is all about the slow buildup to horror, with large swathes of the book detailing Jamie’s life away from Jacobs: his first love, his music career, his reconnection with his family… And while these sections are never boring, the horror takes a backseat to a well-written coming-of-age novel, colored with dark foreshadowing. The narrative moves quickly and has no filler, and in the end, everything we learn about Jamie feeds into the horror of the climax, even if the reader doesn’t realize it on the way.
So much of Lovecraft and Machen’s horror came from seeing how a man’s life can be destroyed by a brush with something unimaginable from beyond our world. Revival takes that idea further by lovingly fleshing out that life in painstaking detail. By the end of the book, we know Jamie Morton as well as any other character King has written, which only makes the possible destruction of everything he’s built all the more terrifying.