Sections
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 [...]
Written by Ada Hoffman, The Outside, is a good sci-fi novel that taps into Lovecraftian cosmic horror to tell a story about perception, religion, and compliance. Despite its compelling worldbuilding and strong protagonist, the novel is ultimately marred by an unnecessary point of view, which adds nothing but exposition and repetition to the narrative.
The protagonist is Yasira, an autistic scientist that is on board a space station working on a new reactor. When the day comes to turn it on, Yashira is in the middle of a nervous breakdown, thinking something horrible is going to happen. She warns her superiors, but there is no evidence to support her alarm. They don’t [...]