Recommendations of the Editorial team
“Revival”: Stephen King’s last 5-star novel appeared in 2014
Stephen King – the ranking
06. Revival (2014)
★★★★★
Every novel is also a tribute, since authors are at least subconsciously inspired in their works. Stephen King already comes down to business in its dedication. He gives eleven names, including primeval and original fathers of the horror (Mary Shelley and Arthur), fathers (HP Lovecraft, Bram Stoker), as well as companions (Peter Straub).
The priest Charles Jacobs, who is fallen by faith, who experimented with electricity as a circus hiking preacher and thus believes that he can explore life after death comes from the classic Ray Bradbury figure pool. The allusion can be found directly in the stage name “Dr. Electrico”.
King naturally took over the idea of the first-person narrator, who reports to a great misfortune from the first pages. But unlike his role model, the chronicles of announced tragedies constructed, he keeps his readers in the unclear whether there can be a happy ending for his figure of Jamie Morton. What blooms for him only reveals itself on the last pages. The target level remains in the dark.
Not death, not light, not calm
“In view of what I can expect after death, I want to live as long as possible,” is Morton’s conclusion. So far, Stephen King has come up with little cruelty than such a summary. Such a romance end has not existed since the “cemetery of the cuddly toys”. That is what awaits people after their death: “Not death, not light, not calm.”
The ex-junkie and musician followed the experiments of his former father figure Jacobs, whom he has known since childhood. After the death of his wife and child, the former reverend turned away from God. And wants to try to take a look into the hereafter by means of “secret electricity”, a “force that goes beyond human understanding” and “our universe founded”. For that he has to find people. They are ready to die.
Attempts to death
Electricity is of course not human. In his novel, King devotes himself to the question of what God, faith and religion are. An old man with a noise beard, an inexplicable energy? Morton believes that the ex-prison Jacobs is driven by a completely different engine than the search for the meaning of life. He could not take revenge on God who took the family, so he conducts his attempts at terminally ill.
Jacobs sees religion as a kind of insurance policy in which you pay with the faith as a currency, and of which you don’t get anything in the end. This is also why he wants to pre -press the hereafter: to refuse religion, show that God does not exist, all baptisms, prayers, all wars of faith took place for free.
In perhaps the most impressive dialogue, the pastor approaches the still young Jamie on a mound of earth while playing with plastic soldiers. Children want to be big and take control, there is also toys for that, and here is already in the oversized shadow of Jacobs’ that the child will never be able to solve himself from him; There is a military-strategic dialogue about what is happening with the action figures.
Stephen King has also put his own “faith” on paper: he plays in the band Rock Bottom of Rememinder, and his figure of Jamie Morton is also an enthusiastic guitarist. The electric guitar runs with electricity and there are quite a few people for whom music represents a wire to God.