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Review: Stephen King turns on an electrifying 'Revival'

 
Published Nov. 12, 2014

Jamie Morton is just a little boy the first time he meets the Rev. Charles Jacobs. Happily playing with his toy soldiers in the front yard of the Maine home of his large, affectionate family, Jamie is interrupted by a "human eclipse" when Jacobs suddenly appears in silhouette, his body a dark form blocking the sunshine.

In Jamie's memory, "at that moment everything seemed to fall still" — a stillness that is the first sign of the horror to come in Stephen King's new novel, Revival. Some of King's books drop the pedal to the metal from the first page, but Revival takes another tack, building tension slowly and then accelerating into dread. It's no accident that story about how to boil a frog shows up in this book — at a point when it's too late for the reader to jump out of the pot.

Jacobs starts out as a benign figure, the new preacher at the local Methodist church. The congregation likes him, especially its kids, who enjoy the science experiments he entertains them with. (He has a fascination with electricity.) They like his young son, Morrie, and the boys crush on his pretty wife, Patsy.

Jamie becomes close to Jacobs, so he turns to the minister when his brother Conrad loses his voice after a skiing accident. Using an electrified belt of his own invention, Jacobs restores Con's speech, but swears the kids to secrecy.

Then Jacobs loses Patsy and Morrie, and things change. Heartbroken and enraged, he preaches a barn-burning denunciation of faith and God that comes to be known as the Terrible Sermon, and then he's gone — after confessing to Jamie that his brother's "cure" was neither science nor miracle but a con job.

Jamie is disturbed, but he's a teenager with other things on his mind, such as his alluring girlfriend, Astrid. They lose their virginity together during a spectacular lightning storm at a mountain peak called Skytop — a place Jamie knows about from Jacobs, and where they will meet again much later.

Jamie is also charged up by his newly discovered musical talent. Starting out as a rhythm guitar player for a local band called the Chrome Roses, he launches himself into a career. Unfortunately, in his 20s, a bone-shattering motorcycle accident launches him into addiction, to heroin, morphine, whatever he can get his hands on. He's at rock bottom, broke and fired from a country band in Tulsa, Okla., when he wanders through the fairgrounds and discovers Jacobs, no longer reverend, running an eerie electricity-based carnival scam.

Jacobs recognizes him, takes him in and, just like that, cures him of his addiction with what he calls "secret electricity." Although Jacobs says it's just "a minor restructuring of your brainwaves," it's a terrifying experience — Jamie suffers memory loss, painful compulsive behavior and grotesque dreams. But he stays straight and stays on as Jacobs' assistant until the older man disappears again, leaving him a train ticket and a job contact in Colorado.

There Jamie finds the good life for years, staying off drugs and working for that contact, Hugh Yates, at his popular recording studio. Hugh is another one of Jacobs' "cures," a musician who lost his hearing. When Jamie is in his 50s, he and Hugh rediscover their healer in a new identity that perfectly combines his preacher and huckster sides (if they were ever very separate): Evangelist C. Danny Jacobs, running a tent revival tour and healing the faithful all over the country, with a little help from a pair of massive electrified rings he wears. Google him and get a million hits! But just what becomes of those people he cures?

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And so Jacobs and Jamie close the circuit for a third time, and the results will be beyond dire. The reverend is making buckets of money, but fleecing his flock is only a means to an end, and a horrifying end it will turn out to be.

Revival buzzes with allusions to horror classics like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and works by H.P. Lovecraft and Arthur Machen, as well as reminding the reader of other King books as various as Pet Sematary, Lisey's Story and Under the Dome.

But Revival gives familiar themes — the relationship between science and religion, the fine line between grief and madness — new power. It's King in electrifyingly fine form.

Contact Colette Bancroft at cbancroft@tampabay.com or (727) 893-8435. Follow @colettemb.