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Title: Revival
Author: Stephen King
First published: 2014
Dates read: 29.05.-16.06.2023
Category: first time read, library book, horror, 20 Books of Summer 2023
Rating: 4/5
The book in five words or less: a modern Herbert West  

My thoughts:

I have been wondering how to start this review, not because I have nothing to say, but because what I have to say is so contingent of my more recent genre interests that I’m finding it difficult to make this review broadly appealing. I am someone who, after an initial spark that ignites a new interest, goes about diving into said new interest in a somewhat systematic (and often chronological) manner, and to anyone interested in horror, Stephen King is one of the household names you’ll come across with very little digging. So, naturally, I’ve been meaning to read Stephen King ever since I started getting more interested in the horror genre about four years ago, but I wasn’t sure he’d really be for me. I turned to my library for a compromise, but apparently they only started buying his books in English in approximately 2012 and have none of the ‘classics’ like It, Carrie, or Pet Sematarey in the original English. Since I really wasn’t in the mood for a translation, I picked a book at random from the remaining titles that were marked ‘horror’ instead of ‘thriller’ (according to which criteria? Who knows.), and Revival is what I ended up with. It proved right up my alley.

The novel tells the story of Jamie Morton, a New England musician who first meets charismatic preacher and later revivalist Charles Jacobs when he is six years old. Over the course of the next forty-odd years, Jacobs makes irregular but deeply impactful appearances that often push Jamie’s life into a new direction. Driven by grief, Jacobs experiments with faith healing through electricity and pulls Jamie along on an unsettling, increasingly hubristic journey towards unravelling the mystery of life beyond death. 

Revival is clearly inspired by and indebted to older classics of the genre, and much of the reading process felt like Steve Rogers saying ‘I understood that reference’: There are touches of Frankenstein, of Herbert West: Reanimator, of Edgar Allan Poe, and nods to charismatic faith healers and the ingrained horror of spiritual crises. It is a book that, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, asks the question ‘how far would you go?’, and both Jamie and Charles Jacobs often toe the line between faith and mania. Revival is also populated by deeply flawed and very human characters, especially that of the narrator and his family, and tinged with deep sadness.

All these things taken together made Revival not only a fast read for me, but also one that played in interesting ways with some of my favourite tropes and motives, among them spiritual horror, cosmic entities, mad preachers and scientists, and attempts at cheating death. Although I wish King had occasionally gone into more depth with his playing with the question of how much knowledge is too much knowledge, I definitely liked the novel well enough to continue my King journey, and may even want to revisit it again in the future. 

(I have also recently been rather obsessed with the concept of the Veil of Isis in the works of Herman Melville and various Romantics, and this book with its interest in the things that are beyond the known unexpectedly scratched that itch.)

Read if you like: the early Supernatural seasons, especially S1 Ep12 Faith, H.P. Lovecraft’s Herbert West: Reanimator, Midnight Mass, Blue Oyster Cult’s (Don’t Fear) The Reaper, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, morally questionable scientists and preachers