Revival

Revival  by Stephen King   405 pages

I used to read Stephen King religiously, investing money and shelf space with each book as they were published. After a while, however, I was so disillusioned with the endings that I stopped wasting my precious time (I swear the man must get paid by the word!) and basically abandoned the horror genre altogether. The other day, however, a patron was overly enthusiastic about Revival, so I thought to give King another chance.

In his signature fashion, King slowly and methodically builds the narrative of this five decade story that follows Jamie Morton and his periodic encounters with Reverend Charles Jacobs, the man referred to as Jamie’s ‘fifth element’. The Reverend suffers a personal calamity, and subsequently banished from town after delivering The Terrible Sermon in which he blasphemes God and mocks religious belief.  The Reverend has a secret obsession with science that grows as the novel unfolds; although questionable experiments benefit people in tragic circumstances, the Reverend’s real agenda is entirely his own.  Although deliberately withdrawn from religious practice, over the ensuing decades, the Reverend takes up the mantle as a revivalist, carrying out research on people as he perfects his science, experiments done under the guise of healing through God. The few times Jamie and Reverend encounter each other through life have profound consequences on both men, creating a bond that “becomes a pact beyond even the Devil’s devising, and Jamie discovers that “revival” has many meanings.”

I’ve always appreciated King’s attention to detail, great characterization, and master storytelling, and this story does not disappoint in that regard. While the novel was a good read, and thankfully much shorter than the books for which I abandoned him a few decades ago, and the ending doesn’t resort to nonsensical aliens, I’m not willingly to commit to another of his works in the immediate future.