The plan is to reread all of Stephen King’s works in the order that they were published. Richard Chizmar of Cemetery Dance had the vision. I’m doing it because I am a writer and I want to improve my fiction. And I love Stephen King’s stories. I think there is something to be learned through this process.
You can also go back to the beginning and read Before Carrie or any of my other posts up through this one and beyond by checking out this link to the Master List of all my #StephenKingRevisited posts.
Revival was published in 2014 and Stephen King lists off classis authors from the foundation of horror forward who he says “built his house” in his dedication of the book.
This novel is something special. King achieves an interesting connection of particular themes I have not seen in any other work. Between religion and experimentation, between God and electricity, between evangelist and carnival barker, and in the biggest sense of the story between faith healer and Dr. Frankenstein, King creates a story that connects all these things across a lifetime that leads to one of the darkest, most cosmically existentially horrific dark endings I’ve seen from a Stephen King novel. It all comes together, and it all unravels in the perfect way.
Ever since I read Cycle of the Werewolf, I’ve been confused by the notion of Methodist ministers wearing priest collars. I saw it in the artwork of that book and assumed it was an error. As it appeared again in this book, I started to wonder if it was a regional thing or something more common in the past than now. As it turns out, that is true. Some Methodist ministers, but not most, will wear the priest collar (often associated with Catholic priests) on occasion and it was more common in certain regions in the past. 1960s rural Maine seems to fit that bill nicely.
King used the name Mrs. Moran for school teachers in two different novels. And I taught with a Mrs. Moran in sixth grade back when I was a teacher. In Doctor Sleep, King’s Mrs. Moran was a sixth grade teacher. I also knew a musician from my church youth group named Jay Petterson, similar to I minor character in this novel.
King discusses a brief popularity of folk music that was usurped by the arrival of the Beatles and rock music’s ascension. My father talked about this at a camp he used to work at. Between summers, he and his friends worked on learning several folk songs for the next summer. By that summer, folk music was out, and rock was in. His friends were going to play the songs for the kids anyway. My dad stopped them and said, “It’s passed. We missed our window. They won’t think it’s cool.”
Feeling of an “unburned burning” is a great descriptor. Introducing the unintentional lightning rod at the top of the mountain early in the novel was a good touch.
“As empty as heaven” is a powerful line for characters that had lose faith in order to move forward along another, darker spiritual path.
Our character doesn’t like the movie Heathers. What a shame.
Like in the novel 11/22/63, we end up with a divorced teacher with an abusive ex-husband who hunts her down with the intent to kill her and himself.
Our lightning obsessed fallen minister Jacobs worked at Joyland before it went out of business. Since that novel, King has had an obsession with carnival subculture. The terminology appears in novel after novel. Here carnivals play a significant role in the middle portion of the story. He’s been carny to carny since Joyland.
“Something happened” is such a simple line to hold so much dread. The dark power of those words only grows as the story unfolds right up to and including the ending.
Prismatics experienced by one character hints at the “realer world” behind our own reality, similar to the ideas put forth in Insomnia. King goes to a much darker place in this novel though.
He recycled a joke from Mr. Mercedes very reminiscent of King’s Twitter account. King is also obsessed with the term “fifth business” which I first noticed him use in Mr. Mercedes as well. This was a term from drama, theatre, and opera that tended to refer to characters outside the cast of hero, villain, and confidants who come along typically later in the story to play another essential role in moving the main character and the story to its necessary resolution. King tends to use it for a nemesis of the main character.
Mysterious books with secret knowledge are introduced late in the narrative in a way that took me out of the story a little. This element stood out more, I think, because so much of the novel is so tightly and expertly woven
A lot of side stories are used in the novel to mark the passage of time, but none of it’s bad and in the end, every element is called back in powerful ways. Young romance, a child’s affections, side comments that seem like throwaway lines, and so many other details prove to be crucially woven into the plot in ways that are much tighter than they appear at first glance. All of it matters in ways that we don’t see in every aspect of other Stephen King novels, especially compared to earlier in his career. There is an argument to made that Revival might belong in a list of King’s top books and a list of his most underrated books.
My next post in this series will be Before Finders Keepers which will be linked on the Master List of all my Stephen King Revisited posts.
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