Revival

I was raised in the insignificant village of Polk, Ohio, the population of which has stubbornly hovered around the three hundred mark for the last four decades. It was the type of small town environment where, despite it representing to some extent the pastoral and idyllic assumptions of rural life, a vein of darkness assiduously pulsed, occasionally spilling over in the form of intimate partner abuse, racism, incest, molestation, murder and suicide. While none of these iniquities are uncommon in society, they are made particularly disquieting and ominous when one realizes such childhood occurrences were neither shocking nor unexpected when committed by friends and neighbors, ultimately shielded behind the weighty veil of small town Americana. A decade ago, when I heard the news that my childhood bully murdered his wife while still living in Polk, I was shockingly nonplussed, writing it off as the unfortunate effect of living so intimately with the river of repression that surged just below the surface of the forgetful burg; the dimmed reality behind the sublime bucolic mural.

          
The sizeable oeuvre of Stephen King has consistently peeled this veneer of society back through the narrative lens of the supernatural and the horrific. From the vampires of ‘Salem’s Lot uncovering the mundane terrors embedded within provincial life, to a rabid dog exposing the raw nerve of divorce in Cujo, to the demented and demonic Pennywise representing the suppressed nightmares of childhood in It, King’s voice reveals the musty and dank detritus of American life. It is interesting, then, to see the Master of Horror somewhat reverse this machinery and use the dynamics of lifelong relationships (both good and bad) to explore the mystery of what exists beyond the physical confines of this life. In his new novel Revival, King is saying, “You know all that horrible shit I’ve written about for the last forty years? None of it compares to what happens after we die.”

         
As such, Revival is a passionate love letter to the works of H.P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, and Robert Chambers, paying homage to these monarchs of weird fiction and their explorations of cosmic fear and religious faith. Lovecraft in particular viewed these seemingly disparate experiences to be coetaneous, two sides of the same enigmatic coin. It is no surprise, then, that King uses a wrecked pastor, Charles Jacobs, as the conduit for his journey into the numinous. After a particularly horrific personal tragedy, Jacobs addresses his congregation, preaching, “We came from a mystery and it’s to a mystery we go. Maybe there’s something there, but I’m betting it’s not God as any church understands Him…Believe what you want, but I tell you this: behind Saint Paul’s darkened glass, there is nothing but a lie.” This lament from Jacobs bears a striking resemblance to the words of Lovecraft from the novella The Call of Cthulhu:

"The most merciful thing in the world…is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

The unspeakable reality of the Divine that takes amorphous shape in the Lovecraftian mythos modeled in The Call of Cthulhu is the conceptual progenitor of Revival, as the growing fanaticism of Jacobs, fueled by his desire to simply know, leads to the opening of a terrifying vista of truth revealing the horrific reality beyond our placid island of ignorance. King’s foreboding prose builds an unbearable creeping sense of dread as Jamie Morton, protagonist and narrator of the novel, escorts the reader through his somewhat unexceptional life made substantial only by his seemingly destined, yet fleeting, engagements with Jacobs. Morton says, “I can’t bear to believe his presence in my life had anything to do with fate. It would mean that all these terrible things – these horrors – were meant to happen. If that is so, then there is no such thing as light, and our belief in it is a foolish illusion. If that is so, we live in darkness like animals in a burrow, or ants deep in their hill. And not alone.”

Not nearly King’s finest work, Revival suffers somewhat from an ending that attempts to be more shocking than it really is. The novel, surprisingly scare free throughout most of the narrative, builds to what promises to be a ghastly conclusion, only to stumble slightly at the finish line. The moment of revelation that Morton and Jacobs confront is, if one has read their share of the aforementioned legends of weird fiction, astonishingly anticlimactic. The true horror emerges from the relationships that Morton has developed over the five-decade span of the novel, and how nearly everyone he loves is forever and irrevocably broken by their entanglements with Jacobs.

Despite the wayward conclusion, Revival is still a solid novel with strong echoes of the early work of the author, particularly the sinister and forbidding atmosphere of Pet Sematary and The Shining, and places King back in his wheelhouse of supernatural horror driven by layered and powerful characterization.