I'm a big fan of Mary Shelley and H. P. Lovecraft as well as (obviously) Stephen King, so Revival is right up my alley. Somehow this mash up works for me, although I understand why some elements, like a plot that seems meandering until you see where it's going, may not work for others. I particularly love the dread that builds up and those last few dozen pages are filled with delightfully eldritch creepiness.
We meet young Jamie in Harlow, Maine (also a setting for a few other King stories) in the 1960's. He befriends a local pastor in town, Charles Jacobs, who is experimenting with electricity. We follow Jamie throughout his childhood until Pastor Jacobs has a crisis of faith and delivers the Terrible Sermon, losing his job. Jamie grows up, but in adulthood in the early 90's he again meets Pastor Jacobs, who is now a former pastor who has continued his work on electricity. And again over the years he meets Jacobs a few more times, culminating in an electrifying and chilling conclusion in the 2010's.
Many of this novel's detractors probably don't like the way it jumps around and meanders a bit, but I found that if I paid attention carefully it wasn't so bad. With King over the years I've learned to let him do his thing when he has to meander, because he usually ends up somewhere interesting or at least the journey is all worth it. A lot of the novel is just the story of Jamie's life, and the freaky stuff seems incidental. Until it's not. But if you pay attention, the clues are there all along.
Philosophically I found the Terrible Sermon to be a great example of the Problem of Evil in literary form: that is, how can an all good, all powerful, benevolent God allow so much seemingly unnecessary bad stuff in the world? There's a particularly heart-wrenching example of such seemingly senseless suffering in the novel that really makes the point.
Jacobs becomes something of an obvious Victor Frankenstein figure, which I appreciated as a fan of Frankenstein, and as for the Lovecraft influences... well, those are even more obvious, even if King's writing style is (thankfully?) not much like either Shelley's or Lovecraft's (I mean, if you think Revival is slow or hard to follow....).
Frankenstein is often read as a "playing God" parable, and I guess that's there, but I've always found the story of Victor's loss of his own humanity as he pursues immortality to be the more interesting angle. In my horror and philosophy class, we discuss Victor's descent into madness as a result of his denial of death in the existentialist sense: in overcoming death he is denying one of the basic elements of the human condition (it also doesn't work out very well for anyone he knows, much less the poor creature, but we don't get much of a creature parallel in Revival, so I'll leave that point).
As for Lovecraft, King shows here that he has learned from the eldritch master in giving us something just as mind-bendingly disturbing as Lovecraft's uncaring universe. I was getting a lot of the same horrific delight I get from trying to wrap my mind around the clammy appendages of the Lovecraftian mythos. And King uses all this to raise another question, related to the existentialist issue I raised earlier, albeit in a sublimely unsettling narrative: Do you really want life after death?
So all in all, this may not be King's best constructed novel, but it is one of his most disturbing for both narrative and philosophical reasons. On that latter point but maybe not the former, I'd put this almost up there with one of my favorite King novels, Pet Sematary.
See also my Goodreads review.
PS: Check out this great episode of The Kingcast on Revival.
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