Revival is a novel by American writer Stephen King, published on November 11, 2014, by Scribner.[1]
Background information
The novel was first mentioned by King on June 20, 2013, while doing a video chat with fans as part of promoting the then-upcoming Under the Dome TV series. During the chat King stated that he was halfway through writing his next novel, Revival.[2] The novel was officially announced on February 12, 2014.[3] An excerpt was included at the end of the paperback edition of King'sDoctor Sleep, published on June 10, 2014 (ISBN978-1451698855).
In an interview with Rolling Stone, King stated that Revival was inspired by Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and, like several of King's preceding novels, he has had the idea for this novel since childhood.[4]
Plot
When Charles Jacobs, a new Methodist minister, arrives at his new parish in Harlow, Maine, young Jamie Morton is excited. Almost all of the townsfolk come to love Jacobs, his beautiful wife, and their young son Morrie. During weekly Ministry Youth Fellowship sessions for the town's children, Jacobs shares his interest in electricity with them. When Jamie's older brother, Conrad ("Con"), is rendered unable to speak by a skiing accident, Jacobs asks Jamie to bring him to the minister's house as he may be able to help him. When Jamie and his older sister Claire do so, Jacobs places a low-voltage belt around Con's neck. To everyone's amazement, Con is able to speak again almost immediately.
Things change all too suddenly when Jacobs' wife and child die in a gruesome car accident. Stricken with grief, Jacobs denounces God and religion during a sermon and is subsequently banished from town. Jamie, devastated that Jacobs will be leaving, visits him before he leaves. Jamie thanks him for what he did for Con, but Jacobs claims it was purely a placebo effect.
Jamie grows up to become a musician and starts using heroin. While on tour, his band abandons him at a hotel after he misses several of their concerts. He goes to the reception desk to try to pay for another night, but his card is maxed out. He goes to a state fair that night in search of drugs, instead finding Jacobs performing an act in front of a large audience called “Portraits in Lightning”. Jacobs asks a young woman named Cathy Morse to volunteer for the act, where she sits in a chair blindfolded while he takes her photograph. After a blue burst of light flashes all around the stage, a portrait of her appears on a plate. He then offers do the same for anyone else for a small price.
Jacobs immediately recognizes Jamie in the audience. Jamie passes out and wakes up in Jacobs' camper van, where he offers to “treat” Jamie's condition with a small application of electricity. After being treated, Jamie experiences strange side effects, including sleepwalking and jabbing himself in the arm with sharp objects while in a fugue state, as if trying to inject heroin. Jacobs is later assaulted by Cathy's father, claiming that Jacobs' portrait caused her to attempt to shoplift a pair of diamond earrings. Before Jacobs leaves town again, he sends Jamie to a man called Hugh Yates, who gives him a job in a recording studio.
Many years later, Yates calls Jamie into his office and they tell each other about their experiences of Jacobs' purported medical treatments. Yates shows Jamie a poster on a website where Jacobs is performing revival tours using electricity (although he is pretending to be a faith healer, using the power of God to heal others). They go to one of Jacobs' meetings, but Yates quickly leaves. When Jamie asks what happened, Yates claims he had a vision (which he calls a “prismatic”) where he saw the attendees as giant ants.
Jamie starts investigating other people who Jacobs has healed. As it turns out, many have experienced similar side effects; some, including Cathy, have even killed themselves and others as a result. He later discovers that Jacobs has also been studying occult texts, such as De Vermis Mysteriis. Jamie tracks down Jacobs about the aftereffects of his healings; to his surprise, Jacobs knows about them but claims that only a small number of people suffer from such phenomena, saying that he is no longer healing people. Jacobs offers to make Jamie his assistant, but he refuses and leaves.
Several years later, Jamie receives correspondence from Jacobs, including a letter from his childhood sweetheart Astrid, claiming she has cancer. Jacobs offers to heal her, but only if Jamie will become his assistant for one last experiment. Jamie reluctantly agrees, and Astrid is cured. Jamie helps Jacobs prepare for his final experiment: Jacobs has discovered something he calls "secret electricity", an all-powerful energy source that he has been using to achieve his healings over the years. He now intends to harness a massive surge of this energy from a lightning rod and channel it into a terminally ill woman named Mary Fay, whom he has relocated to his lab. Jacobs' plan is to revive Mary Fay after her death–not in the conventional manner, but in the sense that she will be clinically dead and yet able to communicate with Jacobs and tell him of the afterlife.
The experiment works, but not in the way Jacobs intends. The revived Mary Fay becomes a doorway to the afterlife, but to the horror of both Jacobs and Jamie, there is no Heaven and no reward for piety. Instead, the afterlife is revealed to be "The Null", a hellish dimension of chaos, where souls of the deceased are tormented by Ant creatures who serve insane, Lovecraftian beings, the most powerful of which is known as "Mother". Mother inhabits the body of Mary Fay, transforming her into a grotesque monster, and attempts to kill Jacobs. Jamie shoots Mother with Jacobs' gun, and she leaves Mary's body. A horrified Jacobs has a fatal stroke, and Jamie arranges his body to make it look like he shot Mary. Jamie flees the scene and relocates to Hawaii.
Later, many of the people cured by Jacobs go insane and kill themselves and others, including Yates and Astrid. Jamie, one of the few survivors of Jacobs' treatments, is left relying heavily on antidepressants. He recounts his vision of The Null to a psychiatrist, who does not believe him. He takes some small comfort in the possibility that the visions were "lies". However, the novel ends with Jamie going to visit Con, who has spent the last two years in a psychiatric hospital after attacking his partner; as Jamie goes to leave, he sees a door calling his name and realises that one day he will die and have to face being trapped in The Null under the yoke of Mother.
Danielle Trussoni of The New York Times described Revival as "pure Stephen King ... reading Revival is experiencing a master storyteller having the time of his life." Trussoni noted that the book "is filled with cultural allusions both high and low: In addition to the Bible and Frankenstein, there are references to Thomas Edison's work at Menlo Park, Dan Brown, The X-Files, the Forbidden Books (that is, grimoires banned and burned by the Catholic Church) ... As the Kingian references pile up, and become layered into the events of the fictional world, you fall deeper and deeper under the story's spell, almost believing that Jamie's nightmarish experiences actually happened."[5]
Elizabeth Hand, writing in The Washington Post also highlights Revival's influences: "King's restrained prose explodes in an ending that combines contemporary realism with cosmic horror reminiscent of H. P. Lovecraft's fiction and the classic film Quatermass and the Pit. The tormented relationship between Jamie Morton and Charles Jacobs takes on the funereal shading of an Arthur Miller tragedy." King's storytelling is praised as offering "the atavistic pleasure of drawing closer to a campfire in the dark to hear a tale recounted by someone who knows exactly how to make every listener's flesh crawl when he whispers, 'Don't look behind you.'"[6]
Other reviews were less enthusiastic, with The Guardian's Ben East describing Revival's ending as "a bit odd." East praises the story's beginning, but opined that "Revival takes a turn for the ridiculous" after moving past the protagonist's childhood. "In the context of a novel with so many interesting things to say about growing up and growing old in the 21st century, the more fantastical elements feel a little silly."[7]
Tasha Robinson, writing for The A.V. Club, offered a similar criticism: "Virtually all of Revival is a slow build that sometimes feels suspiciously like a shaggy-dog story, one which may not have a punchline. ... Revival could have trimmed all the buildup and instead been an extremely unnerving short story. King's fans, familiar with his sprawling voice and comfortably compelling style, may be perfectly content to hang out with him on this leisurely stroll toward eventual horror."[8]
Film adaptation
On February 2, 2016, it was announced that an adaptation for Revival was written by Josh Boone while he was working on adapting The Stand. The script was being looked at by Universal Pictures and would be shopped around if the producers refused it.[9] In December 2016, Boone announced that Russell Crowe was attached to star in the film.[10]
On May 8, 2020, Deadline Hollywood confirmed that Mike Flanagan would adapt Revival for film in partnership with Intrepid Pictures.[11] That July, Flanagan confirmed that he had completed the first draft of the screenplay, which was met with King's approval. However, he expressed doubt as to the likelihood of Warner Bros. greenlighting the project.[12] On December 23, 2020, Flanagan confirmed that the adaptation was no longer in development, saying in conversation with Boone on the podcast The Company of the Mad, "I stepped on the exact same landmine, and ended up in the exact same place... We should get together some day and share boards, and drafts, and scars. I kind of hit the same wall with it where it was just so expensive. Man, did I love it, though."[13][14]
