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
Contrary to all my expectations, April to June was a super strong quarter for me. The reason why I thought it wouldn’t be was that I had two articles due at the end of April and May respectively, and some galley revisions to boot. Usually, that takes up all my brain space to the point where all I do in the evenings is play Startdew Valley. But, and here’s the but, I also spent a lot of time on public transport this quarter, partly because I had appointments to get to, and partly because I started a part-time job as an English tutor, and that added up to a lot of reading time.
On top of all that, I low-key took part in the Magical Readathon again (despite my earlier vows not to do so), which also gave me a bit of a boost when it came to prioritizing reading. This April, however, I opted out of most of the socializing and especially the Discord community, which I think helped with not feeling so overwhelmed and, at times, annoyed. And in June the first month of Cathy’s (476 Books) 20 Books of Summer rolled around, which was exactly the kind of motivation I needed to get back to reviewing books more regularly.
Overall, I’ve had a very good three months in terms of both quality and quantity. Unlike my first quarter of 2023 and much of 2022, I’m actually quite happy with the fiction books I’ve read, and I’m also still reading a lot of non-fiction of consistently high quality (or, if you like, catering to my specific tastes).
Books:
Robert Macfarlane – The Old Ways ★★★★☆.5
Structurally, I found The Old Ways slightly less stringent than Underland and Mountains of the Mind, but I just love Macfarlane’s writing style, his willingness to be amazed and surprised, and his lyrical use and appreciation of language. I have yet to read one of Robert Macfarlane’s books that didn’t make me incredibly happy when reading it while satisfying my linguistic and intellectual curiosity in equal measure, and I’m glad that I started April with this book.
Do I think Daniel Schreiber’s books – including this one – are objectively flawless to a point where they deserve unquestionable five stars? Not necessarily. Are they – also including this one – some of the most personally relatable writing I’ve read in a long time? You bet. And if a book feels equal parts intellectually stimulating and like a warm hug, it gets five stars from me. (Schreiber is also very bad for my to be read list because he’s noticeably fond of some of my favourite writers, which makes me trust his other reading choices in turn.)
I’ve never read Tove Jansson’s Moomin books (though I was aware of her in the vague way we Europeans are usually aware of other countries’ famous writers), and I bought this short story collection on a whim from my favourite local feminist bookshop. Turns out I struck gold. Jansson’s style is precise and often subtly ironic, and as a bonus several of the stories were unexpectedly (and explicitly) queer.
Michelle McNamara – I’ll Be Gone in the Dark (audio, Scribd) ★★★☆☆
I think this book ended up on my TBR way back in the days when I was more interested in true crime than I am now, and since I’ve finally figured out a way to focus on podcasts and audiobooks (the secret is called public transport), I decided it was high time to get to this. I will say that I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is a very thorough, detailed account of the search for the Golden State Killer, but it’s also a very fragmented one. This is partly due to the nature of the book – the author died before she got to finish it – but also stems from McNamara’s narrative choices and her tendency to juxtapose past events and locations with those of the present. I’m not sure if it was just because I listened to the book on audio, but I found these jumps a bit hard to follow at times. That said, I liked the bits where I learned about the author almost more than what I learned about the case, and I do appreciate that the author consistently foregrounds the victims.
Tori Dunlap – The Financial Feminist (audio, Scribd) ★★★☆☆
I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, it contains a couple of good tips, how-tos and motivational content for women and other non-cis/male people who want to take their finances into their own hands. On the other hand, it isn’t substantially more informative or thorough than the author’s podcast by the same name, nor nearly as intersectional as the author seems to think (and that’s ignoring that large parts are useless for anyone living outside the US. Credit score whomst.)
Tennesse Williams – Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (library) ★★★☆☆.5
Every once in a while, I read a book that everyone and their mom read in school and that I missed out on because I didn’t go to school in an English-speaking country. Nine times out of ten, I’m surprised by how much better than its reputation the book ends up being. This is just such a book. I was unexpectedly fond of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, not least of all because the play is full of horrible people suffering exquisitly, with a second act that feels like an inquisition tribunal. I’m sure I’d enjoy watching it on a stage even more; and I can see myself rereading this play even though I didn’t fall head over heels in love with it.
Natasha Brown – Assembly (library) ★★☆☆☆.5
Not sure if I’m just tired of this kind of book or if there’s something actually not working with it, but I wasn’t nearly as impressed as everyone else. I liked Assembly enough to finish it but was very far from loving it. I think I have the same issues with Assembly as I do with Jenny Offill and my recent foray into Rachel Cusk’s work: I found the subject matter timely, poignant, and well-observed, but the style altogether too detached and vague. It’s not the fact that the novel is fragmentary per se (I still like that as a stylistic device), it’s that each fragment has too little substance and emotional depth, and that all of them put together don’t actually make anything even vaguely resembling a story. What is more, there are no people in this story; there are people-shaped blobs with no depth or personality.
Joan Didion – The Year of Magical Thinking ★★★★☆
My second Didion after Blue Nights, which I read in 2019. Originally, I wanted to read some of her essays, but my local bookshop only had this book available when I browsed there in person. I didn’t regret buying it, thouhg, because I flew through it. Turns out, it was just the right mix of memoir and culture/literature-inspired reflection on grief. I enjoyed The Year of Magical Thinking a lot despite its heavy topic, and I really appreciate Didion’s clear-cut, precise language.
Kim de l’Horizon – Blutbuch ★★★★☆.5
I’ve been meaning to read this book even before it won the German Book Prize in 2022. It’s a very queer and linguistically experimental debut by a non-binary Swiss author that consciously tries to deconstruct and de-gender the German language in a way that I found extremely fascinating. Thematically, Blutbuch is a book about identity, family, and the lost, female parts of one’s heritage. Highly recommend if you can read German.
I’ve been meaning to read Stephen King ever since I started getting more interested in the horror genre about four years ago (has it been that long already?), and now I finally took the plunge. My library didn’t have any of the more well-known classics in the original and I really wasn’t in the mood for a translation, so I picked Revival at random from the remaining titles that were marked ‘horror’ instead of ‘thriller’ (according to which criteria? Who knows.). I liked this well enough to continue my King journey, and I will say that I found it a surprisingly fast read, too. Plus, some of my fave horror tropes made an appearance, which is always something I appreciate.
Jade Miles – Fair Living (orig. Futuresteading, library) ★★★☆☆
I’ve been leafing through a lot of gardening and sustainability books lately (mostly while planning and tending to my balcony garden), but I read this one cover to cover. It’s a work of art, but really more of a coffee-table book than an actual how-to manual. Mills does share interesting tidbits about seeds, garden planning, and farming and interesting recipes (that I haven’t tried yet), but a lot of the wisdom she has to impart isn’t really adapted to the reality of anyone who isn’t living an actual farm.
My edition of this polar horror classic also contains The Shunned House, The Dreams in the Witch-House and The Statement of Randolph Carter. Out of the four, At the Mountains of Madness was definitely my favourite, and a solid installment of the polar horror genre. I wouldn’t say it’s a new favourite, but reading it did feel educational and often amusing, mostly because of Lovecraft’s nods to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.
Short stories, poems, etc.:
H.P. Lovecraft – Herbert West: Reanimator ★★★☆☆
I have this low-key, ongoing project where I slowly read my way through H.P. Lovecraft’s works. I don’t expect to love every single one (I’d be surprised if I did, really), but Lovecraft’s influence on horror (and, to a lesser extend, fantasy) is so pervasive that I still consider this a worthwhile endeavour. This one was weird; not because I found the subject matter horrifying per se (that raising the dead is ill-advised is a bit of a staple in horror fiction these days), but because the format (several shorter stories in the form of newspaper articles and personal accounts) didn’t work for me that well.
On the blog:
I’ve finally gotten back into reviewing books! (See the links above; more reviews forthcoming in the next couple of weeks.)
For those interested in what I plan to read for the 20 Books of Summer readathon, my very tentative TBR can be found here.
Life and other shenanigans:
I spent a lot of time on academic writing this quarter and am really, really looking forward to my upcoming holiday in early July.
I’ve also been watching quite a bit of horror in series and movies form, and have been thinking about devoting a separate post to that eventually.
I got an e-bike last year, and since it’s one that finally fits my size (I’m super short), I’ve discovered that I do actually like biking.
Oh, and my balcony garden is in full swing! I’ve already harvested lettuce (twice) and Swiss chard and the courgettes and tomatoes are coming along nicely.
Here’s to an equally productive and inspiring quarter 3! Let me know your thoughts?