Struck by sparks

Stephen King’s second novel of the year, ‘Revival’,plays out an electrifying story of an enigmatic clergyman who has a boy’s life in thrall, writes Janet Maslin.

You can fall down a very deep rabbit hole just pondering the list of names to whom Stephen King dedicates Revival, his second skin-crawler published this year. (Mr Mercedes arrived in June.) Some, like Bram Stoker and H P Lovecraft, are familiar.

Others, like August Derleth, the author of more than 100 books that King must have devoured as a boy and a seminal figure in the creation of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos horror genre, are so far out of the mainstream that they can prompt long, dreamy voyages of discovery.

By all means, look up Robert Bloch or Derleth if you’d like to have more insight into what shaped King’s young imagination. But don’t do it until his new book, tenderly realistic despite its roots in horror and science fiction, has had its way with you. And steer clear of the ageless 1890 short novel that King says inspired Revival if you don’t want to kill its chances of scaring the hell out of you. King has the wind at his back again.

He hit the doldrums with Doctor Sleep (2013), his sequel to The Shining. And Duma Key (2008) seemed to have more to do with his spending time in the part of Florida the book describes than with any burning need to tell a story.

But the trifecta of Joyland (2013), Mr Mercedes and now Revival, the best of the bunch, finds him writing with the infectious glee that has always been at the heart of his popular success. How many writers have a biography that can begin something like this: ‘Stephen King is the author of more than 50 books, all of them worldwide best sellers.’?

Happily, he no longer confuses big books with long ones. He does not ramble on, as he did with Dreamcatcher and Duma Key, which at 600-plus pages each both seemed endless. Under the Dome, his best behemoth of recent years, might have been 1,074 pages, but each one was worth it. Revival is much shorter, but it, too, is a well-built book that unfolds on a big canvas.

It spans much of the lifetime of Jamie Morton, a Maine boy who is roughly King’s contemporary. It has a small cast of characters and a length to suit that. The book begins by comparing a person’s life to a movie, so that the leading characters are family and friends; supporting players are neighbours and acquaintances; bit players are walk-ons. But there are also wild cards. And they break all the rules.

Revival begins so benignly that King must warn the reader to watch out for Jamie’s perpetual nemesis, a kindly clergyman calling himself the Rev. Charles Jacobs. The year is 1962. Jamie is six, playing with soldier toys during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the Reverend stops by to introduce himself.

He invites Jamie’s family to attend his Methodist church and also has Jamie visit his garage to see the toys he has been inventing. The Reverend loves electricity. Using a photoelectric cell, he’s built a model of what he calls Peaceable Lake and a miniature Jesus who can walk on water.

Jamie is smitten; so is the Reverend, who is madly in love with his beautiful wife and little son. But three years later there is trouble in paradise: the Reverend’s experiments have taken a turn toward miracle cures, and he dares to suggest that electricity is more powerful than God. The Mortons adore him for having restored the voice of Jamie’s older brother after a terrible accident involving a ski pole — but nobody knows exactly what happens over the long run to people cured by the Reverend after he has run electrical currents through them.

And then, the worst possible bolt from the blue: A terrible accident takes the Reverend’s wife and child from him and turns him into a different man.

Raging and heartbroken, he gives a blasphemous but honest sermon that shakes the faith of all who hear it. And then he vanishes. Years go by; Jamie becomes a teenager in love, a rock musician and a drug addict. In a section of the book that seems written from intact and swooningly romantic memory, King summons the sensations of first sexual lightning that will never leave the heart and soul. Charles Jacobs is gone, and yet weirdly present, since Jamie and his teenage lover meet for trysts on the mountaintop most likely to be hit by electrical storms.

In the 1990s, their paths cross when Jacobs crops up in Tulsa with a new name, Dan Jacobs, new cynicism and new occupation: flimflam man at state fairs. He cons audiences with electricity-based magic tricks, and he’s figured out that this is a good way to continue his scientific experiments. Since Jamie is by now a raging addict and Dan is able to cure him, Jamie is forever in the debt of someone he knows to be a man of bad faith.

Jamie, like King (as he has said in recent interviews), wants to believe in a higher power, especially as an ex-addict who could not conquer drugs without that higher power’s help.
It all gets worse. Jacobs’ next incarnation is that of a tent-show preacher doling out miracle cures — and soaking the gullible for so much money that he has become a very rich and creepy recluse.

The only person in the world about whom he seems to care is Jamie, and he weaves an elaborate spider’s web to draw Jamie back into his world. The last part of the book moves from the raw emotion about family, love, aging and lost opportunity — all of it written with unusual candor, even for King — to the horror legacy of those names to whom the book is dedicated. And if you have read this far, you may as well know that Arthur Machen’s short novel The Great God Pan, which King says “has haunted me all my life,” inspires a nightmare of a finale.

Revival winds up with the idea that to be human, you must know what it is to be inhuman — and to know that only this thin partition separates that horror from ordinary life. So it’s not just a book that delivers its share of jolts and then lets the reader walk away unscathed.

Older and wiser each time he writes, King has moved on from the physical fear that haunted him after he was struck by a van while out walking to a more metaphysical, universal terror. He writes about things so inevitable that he speaks to us all.