Revival

Stephen King has written 54 novels, but he has been interestingly mostly ignored in this blog. ECD did one book review on a book called Dr. Sleep, but that’s it. His review was not particularly favorable. King has sold 350 million books, but for whatever reason, he’s not captured my attention. I decided to give this very prolific author a chance with a recent novel, Revival. This isn’t a crime novel, and it should probably be classified as a horror/fantasy book.

The story is about Jamie Morton, a boy in rural Maine, and Charles Jacobs, the new young minister of the church where Jamie’s family attends, and the story follows the two of them through their lives. Charles suffers the fate of having his wife and son killed in an auto accident, and then getting fired from the church when he unleashes the “Terrible Sermon” about there having been no God watching out for his family. Charles said, “But as I stood in the back room of [the funeral home] and looked down at the mangled remains of my boy, who wanted to go to Disneyland much more than he wanted to go to heaven, I had a revelation. 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.”

But Reverend Charlie was also an experimenter and he was fascinated by electricity. He spent his life trying to understand its power and its uses, especially to heal people of various maladies. He developed a sham ministry in order to collect money that would fund his experiments and provide him with willing subjects. King takes us through the twists and turns of the reverend’s lfie and Jamie’s struggles through life until they encounter one another again, far from Maine, now with both as adults. I thought the dialogue and the attraction that they had to one another was compelling, and at 80% of the way through the book, King still had me in his grips, but then it came apart with the fantasy/mystical ending which I thought was absurd. If the ending was intended to be horror, it was not – just stupid. But, 350 million books sold – they can’t be all bad. Still, I’m no more motivated to read King than I have in the past. Oh well, at least I gave it a try.