Stephen King is really good at acknowledging the human grief that underlies so much horror, and how that grief can twist a person into something monstrous—Pet Sematary, anyone? This is one of the themes of his new hair-raiser, Revival.

King brings the dread early. The novel begins with the shadow of a man falling over a little boy playing with his toy soldiers in 1962. The little boy is Jamie Morton; the man is the new preacher in his town, Charles Jacobs. The way King describes the meeting makes you want to stop reading right there because you know something ghastly is going to happen.

The only thing is, it doesn't.

The new reverend is very young, but he's a delightful man who befriends Jamie and his perfectly normal, loving family. He has a beautiful wife and an adorable little boy. He's a bit obsessed with electricity, but hey, everyone has a hobby.

Then, something horrifying does happen. It's in no way supernatural and no, it doesn't involve the good reverend interfering with little Jamie. But it is horrific, unforeseen and nobody's fault. The repercussions will affect thousands of people and persist for decades—at the end Jamie is middle-aged and Jacobs is elderly and ailing.

Between the tragedy and where it leads, life stumbles on with its big and little crises. The reader may wonder at some points if this is a novel where a character has to cope with gruesome but ordinary misfortune, à la Dolores Claiborne. But no, underneath it all, behind it all, nothing is remotely ordinary.

Don't do what this reviewer did and read the last pages of Revival in the middle of the night in a house way out in the woods. Once again, King proves that he's not a squillionaire best-selling horror author for nothing.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

King offers his expected unmatchable suspense in a novel that certainly sounds deeper than your average chillfest. Sometime in the mid- to late 20th century, Rev. Charles Jacobs arrives in young Jamie Morton's small New England town with his alluring wife and wows the community. Then, when tragedy strikes Jamie's family, Jacobs lashes out violently at God and religious belief and is therefore banished. Years later, Jamie, a drug-addicted rocker still running from familial woe, encounters Jacobs and enters into a relationship that turns positively Faustian. The conclusion promises to rock us to our bones while echoing Hawthorne and Poe. Awesome.

King's latest (after Doctor Sleep) is narrated by Jamie Morton, who is six years old when he meets Rev. Charles Jacobs. New to Harlow, ME, Jacobs, along with his pretty young wife and toddler, quickly become the local attraction. Jamie and his family discover that Jacobs has a love of electricity and is quite ingenious with his inventions. Soon, though, tragedy strikes the reverend, and the losses he endures cause him to give a sermon that gets him fired from the ministry and banished from town. Years later, Jamie, now in his 30s and addicted to heroin, meets Jacobs again. Noticing how Jacobs has changed, Jamie worries about the man's constant tinkering with what Jacobs calls "secret electricity." Jacobs begins to heal people using his knowledge of electricity, but Jamie finds that there are terrible side effects. VERDICT King (The Stand) fans will rejoice that the horror master is back in fine form. While there are fewer characters than in many of his other tomes, each character is well drawn and worth following. The ending is exquisitely horrific and will leave the reader hoping this is only a work of fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 5/19/14.]—Jason L. Steagall, Gateway Technical Coll. Lib., Elkhorn, WI

This spellbinding supernatural thriller from MWA Grand Master King chronicles one man's efforts to, as narrator Jamie Morton phrases it, "tap into the secrets of the universe." Charles Jacobs, a Methodist minister in rural Harlow, Maine, loses his faith when his wife and child die in a hideous car accident, but not his obsessive interest in electricity. Over the next 50 years, Jamie—a devoted congregant of Jacobs's when young, but a wary skeptic as he matures—crosses paths with his friend as the constantly experimenting Jacobs graduates from carnival huckster, to faith healer, and finally to mad scientist convinced that he can harness a "secret electricity" to get a glimpse of "some unknown existence beyond our lives." King (Mr. Mercedes) is a master at invoking the supernatural through the powerful emotions of his characters, and his depiction of Jacobs as a man unhinged by grief but driven by insatiable scientific curiosity is as believable as it is frightening. The novel's ending—one of King's best—stuns like lightning. Agent: Chuck Verrill, Darhansoff & Verrill Literary Agents. (Nov.)