Revival

Stephen King’s Revival is a novel that experiments with cosmic horror to tell a story much less interested in providing cheap scares than in discussing how our search for order (and justice) in life leads us to embrace a religion. The real horror of its narrative is not crafted around the danger of eldritch beings, but how our concept of an afterlife shapes our worldview and dictates our actions: to pose the question “but what if we are wrong”, that way madness lies.

The book is narrated in the first person by Jamie Morton, an old man who begins to recall his childhood, beginning on the day the new Methodist minister, Charles Jacobs, arrived in his town and changed his life for the worse. Jamie starts his account in typical Lovecraftian fashion, teasing the horrors to come – and how they will alter our perception of reality – while foreshadowing some of the more fantastical elements with his similes:

“I think of Charles Jacobs – my fifth business, my change agent, my nemesis – 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.”

Jamie first meets the reverend at the age of six, when he is playing with his toys outside and suddenly a shadow falls over him when Jacobs approaches. Jamie remarks how he felt that same shadow looming over him throughout his whole life, as they both kept bumping into each other over the years – they don’t know if by chance or fate, and if Jacobs believes the latter, the protagonist shudders at the thought. The novel is structured around their meetings, showing how time and death impacted their lives throughout the decades.

At first, the reverend makes a good impression on Jamie and his family. Despite his young age, he’s considered a good pastor by the community, being a family man who leaves politics out of his sermons, and is kind to the locals and especially to the kids, even if he’s a bit excentric: as it happens, the reverend has a thing for science, of all things, and he is always seen working on a mechanical contraption of some sort to use during his sermons.

Jacobs particularly enjoys showing Jamie his gadgets, finding delight in watching his work ignite a spark in the boy’s eyes. Jamie, however, is a bit bothered by the fact that the machines are designed to produce illusions to impress the people, such as one that displays the figure of Jesus walking over water. “It’s really just paint. I muse on that, sometimes, Jamie. When I can’t sleep. How a little paint can make shallow water seem deep,” Jacobs confides to the protagonist.

There was always a hint, then, that the reverend never fully believed in his work, that his love for science may have tainted his faith, making him question things that should be accepted blindly. However, it’s just when the first tragedy hits their lives that Charles Jacobs doubles down on his doubts and anxieties. The first horror scene in the book has no creature in it, no act of violence, no supernatural threat, but it leaves the characters scared and scarred nonetheless. Jamie calls it the “terrible sermon”, the moment when the reverend exposes how experiencing death has altered his views forever.

“Religion is supposed to be our comfort when the hard times come. God is our rod and our staff, the Great Psalm declares; He will be with us and bear us up when we take that inevitable walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Another Psalm assures us that God is our refuge and our strength, although the people who were lost in that Oklahoma church might dispute the idea … if they still had mouths to dispute with.”

In his terrible sermon, Reverend Charles Jacobs starts to list terrible tragedies, the deaths of countless people due to chance – natural accidents – or acts of cruelty. The terrible sermon is called so because people don’t go to church to be reminded of the harshness of the world, but on the contrary, to seek comfort in the belief that either God is merciful and provides safe haven in heaven, or is merciless and their suffering is a way for them to redeem themselves for their sins. Either way, religion offers control over the chaos of life, and what Charles Jacobs is saying is going directly against that idea, reminding them of deaths that happened with no rhyme or reason, tragedies that can only be explained by the ineffective “God works in mysterious ways.”

And Jacobs does worse than just remind his audience of chaos, he also urges them to imagine – even if just for a few minutes – a world where their belief in God and the afterlife is wrong: he wants them to think about what that would mean, to be in a world with no creator, with no order, with no sense of justice, with no heaven to reward the good, no hell to punish the bad. In other words, a world where earthly life must account for everything, where there’s no supernatural after to compensate for life’s failures. We can sense in his words the anger of someone who has just discovered they have been deceived:

“Religion is the theological equivalent of a quick-buck insurance scam, where you pay in your premium year after year, and then, when you need the benefits you paid for so – pardon the pun – so religiously, you discover the company that took your money does not, in fact, exist.”

The framing of this scene as belonging to horror is crucial to the novel’s central theme, the idea that people are usually so unwilling to budge in matters of faith because, to them, it forms the central pillar not only of their worldview but their entire sense of self: if this pillar crumbles that person’s whole world will come crashing down with it. This is why some suicides happen later in the novel, and why here Jacobs’s audience is so scared of the reverend’s words that they begin to cry or leave the place horrified, as if they were before a monster or a crime scene: “My mother was sobbing audibly, but I didn’t look around at her. I couldn’t. I was frozen in place. By horror, yes, of course,” Jamie describes.

But the thing is that Jamie also remarks that at this moment he felt “a wild, inchoate exultation, a feeling that at last someone was telling me the exact unvarnished truth. Part of me hoped he would stop; most of me wished fiercely that he would go on, and I got my wish.” Charles Jacobs is able to recognize this part of Jamie, which is one of the main reasons why the reverend remains so fond of the boy even decades after leaving town: he senses Jamie’s curiosity and hopes the protagonist’s yearning for the truth may connect them both.

If the sermon forms the backbone of the story told in Revival, Jamie and Jacobs’ relationship is the heart of it. The novel jumps in time again and again, showing the two characters meeting fortuitously, or as the reverend puts it, “We’ve been bouncing off each other like a couple of billiard balls for most of our lives.” Jacobs eventually wants to recruit Jamie to his cause – even though he seems unwilling to detail what exactly this cause is – but Jamie constantly refuses to help him, sensing danger in that path.

What the protagonist fears is Jacobs’ big discovery: a secret electricity that has the power to heal people, defeat tumors, and cure brain maladies. It seems a positive force, but the fact that not even Jacobs understands exactly how it works leaves Jamie with a sense of unease before the unknown. He becomes increasingly suspicious of this electricity, especially after he is subjected to it, discovering its wonders and… some unforeseen consequences.

The middle part of the novel is about the revival shows ministered by Jacobs, where people come for healing and he mostly delivers on his promise. This turns Jacobs into a sort of religious Doctor Frankenstein, framing Revival as the mad scientist story of the overreacher, the man who is condemned for crossing a forbidden line, for attempting something we shouldn’t dare to do, such as conquering death.

If the book has one fatal flaw is that it is told from the least interesting point of view. Jamie is the unwilling witness of the events, as the engine that moves the story along is Reverend Jacobs. This means that each time Jacobs is not present in a scene, the narrative comes to a halt, focusing on tangents, such as Jamie living his life (the fact that the main character’s life is a tangent is the problem).

Much of the book keeps building Jamie as a regular kid and then as a problematic adult. We follow his first crush, his discovery of his musical talent, his first shows, the drugs, and so forth. These moments feel like interludes and are only saved by the several stark jumps in time, which imbue these memories with the melancholy of someone who has just realized they got old. It’s when tragedy inevitably befalls Jamie’s loved ones through the course of his life that these interludes really become relevant, as the suddenness and injustice of death connects him precisely with… Reverend Jacobs.

During the revivals, the reverend tells people that he’s healing them with the grace of God and not with some “secret electricity” because he understands how faith is useful if one wants to avoid questions. His arc is fascinating because he goes from a man of faith, who is frustrated with his powerlessness in the face of death, to a man of science, who chooses to hide his conquest over it under the guise of faith. Jamie, however, doesn’t care too much about this.

Therein lies the problem with not following Jacobs’ point of view: for Jacobs, death is a mystery to be solved; for Jamie, it is a taboo, something that shouldn’t be talked about openly because it’s too painful. So, we become limited to the questions Jamie asks the reverend, and he has more pragmatic concerns than Jacobs’, such as investigating the authenticity of the healing, its side effects, and questioning the reverend’s ethics during the revivals.

Jacobs is the one who is thinking and philosophizing about death, God, and the afterlife, but we are only allowed rare glimpses of his thoughts when Jamie decides to indulge his nemesis. By following Jamie, Jacobs’ true goal becomes a mystery, but if we had followed Jacobs instead, with the mystery out of the way, we could have had more profound reflections on the novel’s main themes.

This becomes especially problematic during the climax, when Jamie just reacts like a normal person would to the events – with rejection, fear, and a bit of madness – and we are robbed of Jacobs’ thoughts after all the buildup regarding what the discovery would mean to him.

Nonetheless, Revival is still a great novel that borrows from cosmic horror to develop a fascinating discussion about death and God, crafting an impactful ending that offers an answer to the question of the afterlife that is much bleaker than we expect.

February 09, 2024.