Readers unfamiliar with Revival may prefer to read the below only after reading the novel
And after a pause, he added: 'I believe that there is a perichoresis, an interpenetration. It is possible, indeed, that we three are now sitting among desolate rocks, by bitter streams.
'. . . And with what companions?'
"N" by Arthur Machen
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When writers the caliber of Ramsey Campbell and Elizabeth Hand praise a piece of fiction, it's best not to delay. Catching up to Revival (2014), Stephen King's powerful novel of addiction, family calamity, and cosmic horror, only took me eight years.
It's hard to keep up with Stephen King. The compelling novels demand attention. Their settings and characters appear in our dreams if they are too long neglected. Even weaker, prolix books consume energy; I came to terms with not finishing Duma Key, but the resolve to give up only came at the halfway mark.
Generally, I avoid contemporary novels. The banal rigamarole of beginnings is enervating. Happily, King solves this in Revival by using the first-person. Jamie Morton is a kid from a big working class family in Harlow, Maine. Jamie has been through life's ringer, and his shorthand style is excellent medicine for an easily distracted reader.
All the horrors, and there are many in Revival, have been suffered before Jamie starts page one. We know he survives, and wants to keep on living.
My life these days is far from happy, but the antidepressants have put a floor under me. Suicide isn't on my radar. And given what may come after death, I want to live as long as possible. There's something else, too. I feel—rightly or wrongly—that I have a lot to atone for. Because of that, I'm still trying to be a do-right daddy....
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Revival is carefully equipoisal between sf-horror and supernatural-horror.
As a child, Jamie Morton idolizes Harlow's new Methodist minister, the electricity-obsessed Rev. Charles Jacobs. Throughout the novel, their lives keep intersecting. After the death of his wife and young son in a spectacularly gruesome car accident (which King magnificently distances and makes strange), Jacobs publicly rejects Christianity and his ministerial calling. Jamie Morton becomes a successful rock musician and, after a motorcycle accident, an addict.
When they meet again, it is at the 1992 state fair in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Under the name Dan Jacobs, Jamie's former hero is offering "PORTRAITS IN LIGHTNING." His stage show is popular, but Jamie detects a whiff of the uncanny in its effects. But strung-out on heroin, the most uncanny effect turns out to be Jacobs curing him of his addiction and chronic pain.
I looked at the chair, but didn't sit on it. "You were going to give me a little hit first."
"So I was." He produced the brown bottle, considered it, then handed it to me. "Since we can hope this will be your last, why don't you do the honors?"
He didn't have to ask twice. I took two heaping snorts, and would have doubled down if he hadn't snatched the small bottle away. Nevertheless, a window on a tropic beach opened in my head. A mellow breeze wafted in, and I suddenly no longer cared about what might become of my brainwaves. I sat down in the chair.
He opened one of several wall cabinets and brought out a pair of battered, taped-up headphones with crisscrosses of metal mesh over the earpads. He plugged them into the amp-like device and held them out to me.
"If I hear 'In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,' I'm taillights," I said.
He smiled and said nothing.
I put the headphones on. The mesh was cool against my ears. "Have you tried this on anyone?" I asked. "Will it hurt?"
"It won't hurt," he said, not answering the first question at all. As if to contradict this, he gave me a mouthguard of the type basketball players sometimes wear, then smiled at my expression.
"Just a precaution. Pop it on in."
I popped it on in.
From his pocket he took a white plastic box no bigger than a doorbell. "I think you'll—" But then he pressed a button on the little box, and I lost the rest.
There was no blackout, no sense of time passing, no discontinuity at all. Just a click, very loud, as if Jacobs had snapped his fingers beside my ears, although he was standing at least five feet away. Yet all at once he was bending over me instead of standing beside the thing that wasn't a Marshall amp. The little white control box was nowhere to be seen, and my brain had gone wrong. It was stuck.
"Something," I said. "Something, something, something. Happened. Happened. Something happened. Something happened, happened, something happened. Happened. Something."
"Stop that. You're all right." But he didn't sound sure. He sounded scared.
The headphones were gone. I tried to get up and shot one hand into the air instead, like a second-grader who knows the right answer and is dying to give it.
"Something. Something. Something. Happened. Happened, happened. Something happened."
He slapped me, and hard. I jerked backward and would have fallen over if the chair hadn't been placed almost directly against the metal side of his workshop.
I lowered my hand, stopped repeating, and just looked at him.
"What's your name?"
I'll say it's something happened, I thought. First name Something, last name Happened.
But I didn't. "Jamie Morton."
"Middle name?"
"Edward."
"My name?"
"Charles Jacobs. Charles Daniel Jacobs."
He produced the little bottle of heroin and gave it to me. I looked at it, then handed it back. "I'm good for now. You just gave me some."
"Did I?" He showed me his wristwatch. We had arrived at midmorning. It was now quarter past two in the afternoon.
"That's impossible."
He looked interested. "Why's that?"
"Because no time passed. Except . . . I guess it did. Didn't it?"
"Yes. We spoke at great length."
"What did we talk about?"
"Your father. Your brothers. Your mother's passing. And Claire's."
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After the 1992 state fair, Jamie is clean, sober, and fully employed with a recording studio. Charles Jacobs becomes arena-filling faith healer C. D. Jacobs. Jamie's conclusion: "You're self-teaching, aren't you? All your customers are actually guinea pigs. They just don't know it. I was a guinea pig."
Most of the healings are spectacularly successful. But as Jamie tracks the healed, he finds a minority that have gone wrong.
"I don't know if it was God working through him or not," Hicks told me over coffee in his office. "My wife does, and that's fine, but I don't care. I'm pain-free and walking two miles a day. In another two months I expect to be cleared to play tennis, as long as it's doubles, where I only have to run a few steps. Those are the things I care about. If he did for you what you say he did, you'll know what I mean."
I did, but I also knew more.
That Robert Rivard was enjoying his cure in a mental institution, sipping glucose via IV rather than Cokes with his friends.
That Patricia Farmingdale, cured of peripheral neuropathy in Cheyenne, Wyoming, had poured salt into her eyes in an apparent effort to blind herself. She had no memory of doing it, let alone why.
That Stefan Drew of Salt Lake City had gone on walking binges after being cured of a supposed brain tumor. These walks, some of them fifteen-mile marathons, did not occur during blackouts; the urge just came on him, he said, and he had to go.
That Veronica Freemont of Anaheim had suffered what she called "interruptions of vision." One had resulted in a low-speed collision with another driver. She tested negative for drugs and alcohol, but turned in her license just the same, afraid it would happen again.
That in San Diego, Emil Klein's miracle cure of a neck injury was followed by a periodic compulsion to go out into his backyard and eat dirt.
And there was Blake Gilmore of Las Vegas, who claimed C. Danny Jacobs had cured him of lymphoma during the late summer of 2008. A month later he lost his job as a blackjack dealer when he began to spew profanity at the customers—stuff like "Take a hit, take a fucking hit, you chickenshit asshole." When he began shouting similar things at his three kids, his wife threw him out. He moved to a no-tell motel north of Fashion Show Drive. Two weeks later he was found dead on the bathroom floor with a bottle of Krazy Glue in one hand. He had used it to plug his nostrils and seal his mouth shut. His wasn't the only obit coupled to Jacobs that Bree had found with her search engine, but it was the only one we felt sure was connected.
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Such anecdotes, and older lore, are the materials King assembles to create Revival's cosmicist, indifferentist horror. Revival's picture of human life out-Ligotti's Ligotti. But unlike Ligotti, or Mark Samuels, King brackets his story of macabre revel culminating in apocalyptic vastation with an everyday world of individual physical carnage: addiction, painful disability, and cancer. Those whom "C. D. Jacobs" successfully heals are put in tow to an incomprehensible reality that will, ultimately, spare no one. As John Clute sums it up: "we are soon told that the inherent aspect of the world is malice...."
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Revival (a title with many and often contradictory cutting edges) is a focused and compelling novel. Don't lose sight of it among other King titles.
Jay
15 July 2022
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