Kirkus Style Review

Revival   by Stephen King

Publication Date:  November 11^th, 2014

ISBN:  978-1-4767-7038-3

Publisher:  Scribner

The relationship spans over fifty years between Charles, the former minister and Jamie, the musician and former addict.  The themes of religion, obsession and revival by electricity to find loved ones in the afterlife are presented in this terrifying yet electrifying novel.  

The story starts in Harlow, Maine when Jaime is only three years old. He meets the Reverend Charles Jacob and a relationship forms between them.  I have always been interested in electricity so I could understand their mutual fascination with it.  Of course, something bad had to happen in a book of this nature.  I thought the accident involving his son and wife was particularly gruesome and I wasn’t sure if that was really necessary but maybe it had to be a freak accident and that horrible to have the Reverend denounce God and his faith.  Of course, he was fired after his infamous sermon.  Then it was years,  that  they didn’t  see each other and the story is focused on Jamie’s life growing up, falling in love, going to school, his family and finding his musical  talents and being in bands and then becoming addicted to narcotics.  The pace during all of these character development writing was a little slow to me at times because I really wanted to find out what Charles was up to and get to the really scary parts of the story which I knew were coming, I just didn’t’ know specifically when the moment would be in the story. I would have to add that I do feel some of it was necessary because that is one of the author’s strengths in his writing because you want to make the reader really care for the characters.  After they met up again at Joyland (which if you are a fan of Stephen’s King’s work will recognize the amusement park from his previously novel with the same title), I liked how he healed Jamie with electricity.  I was ‘hooked’ by that time and just wanted him to be better because he wasn’t’ a bad person.  Charles Jacob was a changed man because of his grief, angry and obsession.   When Jamie started experiencing strange behaviors after being cured and then he went seeking out others that had been cured by Charles as well, it reminded me of Frankenstein’s monster.  They were all of his monsters.   When Charles asked for Jamie’s help with an experiment in exchange to help his first love Astrid, he said yes even though he knew the chances of her actually being cured without any serious repercussions were very slim.  She is supposedly cured of cancer and then the experiment goes on.  This is where it got frighteningly and terrifying scary because Charles wanted to find his wife and son in the after world by using his electricity, Jamie and a terminally ill woman named Mary Fay.  They discover the afterworld doesn’t exist. There is only The Null who enslaves us and the leader named Mother who was trying to come out through Mary Fay but is prevented in doing so by Jamie.  The descriptions of the creatures and the setting in this world reminded me of old black and white science fiction movies depicting human like insects but when written in his descriptive prose, it is upsettingly scary.  Of course, it could also be because there might not be a Heaven or Hell and something like this could actually be waiting for us after we die.  Charles died of shock.  Jamie, lived waiting to join Mother.  Overall, this story was well written with character development so real that it drew you into this story and made you forget it was a horror novel until it was too late to turn back and it SCA