I’ve been referred to by more than a few of my friends as a ‘King apologist’. I’m the guy who defends his weaker stories, the guy who insists that Under the Dome had no narrative problems, that Rose Madder makes perfect sense, that Doctor Sleep was a perfect sequel to The Shining, and that UR, his novella about a haunted kindle, was clever and fresh rather than trite and desperate. What can I say? Stephen King is my favorite writer. He’s the guy who got me into reading, who taught me that words on a page can be so much more exciting and involving than images on a screen. He’s the guy who taught me how to imagine, the guy who taught me that horror can be as intensely relatable and moving as the best works of literature. He’s the guy who gave me my favorite novel of all time with The Stand and the guy who scared me witless with It. He’s the guy who taught me the power of stories with his Dark Tower series. In other words, he’s the guy. So for me, it makes sense that I frequently wind up defending his lesser works. But I have no apologies to make in regards to his latest novel, Revival. It’s a true monster of a book, one that will keep me awake at night for many years to come. I’ve enjoyed most of his latest works: Joyland was a touching coming of age story wrapped in an obvious mystery. The Wind Through the Keyhole was a treat for Dark Tower fans, if for no one else. Mr. Mercedes was a well written, engaging thriller and Doctor Sleep was a fitting sequel to one of his masterworks. But none of them touch Revival. It’s the scariest book the master has written in decades.
A few years ago, King published a collection of novellas titled Full Dark, No Stars. It was a reminder that King could be a cruel bastard when he wanted to. Many of his previous books (Lisey’s Story, Cell, Duma Key) had been accused of being too melodramatic, too touchy feely, and too, for lack of a better description, soap opera-y. The master of horror had forgotten how to scare people, many critics said, and was becoming too new age-y for his own good. Then came Full Dark and fans and critics alike were reminded of what an evil bastard King could be. Each story in that book hurt and stung in ways he hadn’t touched in decades. They were refreshing but none of them come even remotely close to touching the dark depths of Revival, a book that King has been building to since he ever put pen to paper.
The story is deceptively simple. Our narrator is Jamie Morton, a troubled man who encounters a charismatic priest named Charlie Jacobs when he is a young boy. When they first meet, Jacobs is kind, big-hearted, funny, and full of life. Then, a terrible thing happens to the young preacher, a thing that sets both him and Jamie on a path to eternal damnation. Jamie describes Jacobs as his “fifth business”, a term I was unfamiliar with before reading the book. In movies, a ‘fifth business’ character is someone who comes in to fuck things up for the heroes and act as a change agent. I suppose The Joker in The Dark Knight could be described as ‘fifth business’, as could Hannibal Lectar in The Silence of the Lambs. This character acts as a ‘wild card’ and is central to the plot while forever remaining slightly outside of it. That’s true of Charlie Jacobs until the last fifty pages of the novel, which consist of some of the most terrifying prose and descriptions of otherworldly terrors that King has ever written.
If it sounds like I’m being coy when describing exactly what happens, it’s because that to say much of anything would be to spoil the joy (or terror) of reading the novel cold. I’ll just say that Charlie Jacobs is a man obsessed with a singular passion: he wants to know more than any man has ever known. Like Doctor Frankenstein, he is obsessed with testing the limits of science, both for his own ends and for what he considers to be the greater good. And like the aforementioned doctor, his passion eventually consumes and destroys him. How exactly, I’ll leave for you to discover. Let’s just say that I had an idea of what Jacobs was all about and then the novel completely subverted my expectations and gave me an answer far more terrifying than I could have ever imagined.
Part of the reason Jacob’s goal is so surprising and the result so shocking is because of the way the story is told. Jamie Morton encounters Charlie Jacobs intermittently throughout his life and we get the sense that Revival is really the preacher’s story, but told through the perspective of an outsider. In that sense, it’s Jamie, not Charlie, who is truly the ‘fifth business’. This allows King to keep his mysteries at bay until the last fifty pages or so and that makes the conclusion so much more affecting and terrifying.
Revival is the very definition of a ‘slow burn’. Idiots will dismiss the novel as ‘boring’ or ‘slow’ but they are examples of so much that is wrong with the way we consume media in any form. We all want answers now and are impatient to wait for them. Stories that take their time are knocked for being ‘long winded’ of ‘dull’. What we fail to realize is that stories that take their time, that build and build to a monstrous conclusion, are some of the most involving because of the fact that they earn their nightmarish ending. It’s not just cheap jump scares and parlor tricks that make a novel scary; it’s the way a novel builds and develops its ideas. In this sense, Revival is a masterpiece. It spends three hundred and forty pages explaining characters and giving hints of what’s to come before exploding into a tapestry of nightmares.
I wish I could say more, I really do but that would be to give the whole game away. What I will say is that before reading Revival, you should read Arthur Machen’s short novella, The Great God Pan. King has said many times that this is the story that made him want to be a horror writer and Revival is his ultimate tribute to it. Both stories involve men who need to know more than any man, both stories involve dark conclusions, and both stories are concerned with what lurks beyond the wall of life. Machen was an inspiration for the great H.P. Lovecraft and there’s a reason King opens the book with the following Lovecraft couplet: That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons, even death may die.
It’s as if King has been building to this story his entire career. He pays tribute to the horror masters who have come before him and lays his own stamp on their work. I cannot overstate how frightening the last forty pages of the book are. King goes to places he has never touched before and even longtime fans will be shocked by how deep he goes into the darkness. That he is able to do so while also reflecting on aging, nostalgia, guilt, and ambition is a testament to what a powerful, human writer he has become over the course of his career. Revival holds all the tropes he has become so fond of in recent years but it also spins them on their head in a way that leaves you shaking with fear.
To best describe what it felt like reading the book, I am reminded of a story about the actor James Coburn. You know him from Maverick and Payback and The Nutty Professor. He was also a reliable character actor who appeared in such masterpieces as The Great Escape. In 1997, he won an Oscar for Paul Schrader’s Affliction. Before Schrader cast him in the film, he had a conversation with the man. Coburn had been known for playing the same character over and over again. Schrader explained the movie to him and Coburn reportedly said, “Oh you want me to actually act again? Okay, I can do that.” I wonder if Stephen King had the same conversation with his publishers before writing Revival. “Oh you want me to actually scare people again?”, I imagine him saying, “Okay I can do that.” He can.
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