Running from Faith and Doubt: A Review of Stephen King’s Revival
With the title “Revival,” Stephen King prods one’s curiosity about religion and spirituality. Throughout this 2014 novel, King resembles a culturally and politically hip H.P. Lovecraft, hinting at an undefined power (is it God or something else?) while throwing popular references at the reader. It’s frustrating, then, that this book is more of a derivative adolescent joke than a distinctive tale involving questions about God. The dramatic, much less intellectual, potential of King’s story is ultimately undone by King’s secularism: judging by Revival, he’s not interested in or capable of diving into contemporary spiritual concerns.
In the first three chapters of Revival, King reveals a tantalizing crisis of faith that occurs in Bangor, Maine. Writing from the perspective of Jamie Morton, a boy in a Christian home, King focuses on the pastorship of Charles Jacobs, a new Methodist minister in the Bangor community. Jacobs befriends Morton, who likes that the preacher seems to care about him. Morton notices, though, that Jacobs has an unusual interest in electricity. In fact, Jacobs can perform miracles with it: after Jamie’s brother Conrad loses his voice, Jacobs hooks Conrad up to an electrical device and shocks his voice back. (If King’s early allusion to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein here doesn’t register as clumsy or contrived, just wait.)
The crisis of faith happens after a car accident takes the lives of Jacobs’ family. This disturbing event leads to the “Terrible Sermon,” during which Jacobs proclaims there is not a higher power as defined by the church. Rather, Jacobs says truth and power can be found in lightning. (If nothing else, this concluding statement from Jacobs proves that King is more than dedicated to an extended Frankenstein reference.) Unsurprisingly, this message from the pulpit doesn’t go over well, and Jacobs is forced to leave Bangor. But Jacobs’ reaction lives on in the mind of Morton, who, for the remainder of Revival, expresses little more than snarky cynicism about anything remotely spiritual or religious.
Conceptually, the “Terrible Sermon” is sort of like a “Red Wedding” that provokes outrage and shock from those who believe in the Christian God. But once the sermon elapses, King is content to suggest that the matter of a higher being is immaterial at best and settled at worst. For the last three hundred or so pages of Revival, it’s as if King forgets about or doesn’t want to follow through on this crucial, suggestive dialogue from Morton’s mother on page 28: “‘God isn’t as important to people now,’ my mom said one day after a particularly disappointing turnout [at church]. ‘A day will come when they’ll be sorry for that.’”
After Jacobs gets out of Bangor because of his newfound atheism, King goes on to outline the unimpressive musical career of a teenage and adult Morton. This tangent is the dreariest part of the novel. Not only does one have to wade through well more than 100 pages for the book to rescue the sense of pacing it establishes in its first 80 pages, but one must tolerate King’s “new guitar player” syndrome. I don’t know the ultimate truth about King’s personal life, but this section of Revival gives off the impression that King learned how to play the guitar just before writing the book and was excited to bring an extra air of authenticity to Morton’s dialogue. Yet when King, through Morton, makes reference to the challenge of nailing the chord progression to “The House of the Rising Sun,” the detail feels contrived and obvious as opposed to natural.
Given that this part of the book involves drugs and sex and says little about faith and doubt, you might say King attempts to use this section as a way to metaphorically illustrate the “backsliding Christian” phenomenon. In other words, why would King, the author, waste time exploring faith and doubt when the narrating character, during the current point in his life, has zero interest in thinking about these things? This theory doesn’t work, however, because even after King finishes his tedious rundown of a common musician’s life, he never seriously returns to the themes that appeared critical in the early chapters of Revival.
Instead, King first decides to pay lip service to interracial relationships. It’s not surprising when King connects Morton, a white man, to a black woman named Brianna. After all, Brianna has sex with Morton and assists him with tasks like a secretary, which is exactly the role her mother, Georgia, plays for another character earlier in the book. King only makes this stereotypical situation worse by trying to look politically “down” with nontraditional couples. On page 238, when Morton says, “We got it on, and it was terrific,” and when Brianna says, “You white boys can be so dumb,” King’s desperation to be hip is laughable.
As the story continues, Morton uncovers information about different people that Jacobs, the former minister, has healed throughout his life via electricity. Turns out, several of the healed individuals winded up experiencing crippling or fatal side effects. One interpretation here is that Jacobs is unwittingly harming people because he left God behind and tried to do things his own way. But this line of thought doesn’t occur to King, based on the dialogue of his characters. In a late rant, Jacobs says of churchgoers, “They don’t want the Beatitudes of the Song of Solomon, either. They only want to be healed.” Terry, Morton’s sibling, shares these remarks about the “Terrible Sermon”: “What I think now is that every word [from the sermon] was right.” And last but not least, Morton says of Jacobs, “He spoke with the patience of a true believer. Or a lunatic. Maybe there’s really no difference.”
The truth is King doesn’t care about the difference between a believer and lunatic in this novel. In the final chapter of the book, he essentially dooms every character, regardless of what they did or believed. King writes the ending with a juvenile type of abandon, casually but grotesquely killing off creation after creation. By the end of Revival, belief or lack thereof is irrelevant.
King’s refusal to delve more into spiritual concerns is fashionable in contemporary society. His approach in Revival was followed by the 2016 pop indie game Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, which invokes religious terms and concepts in superficial fashion (worse, most of the game’s critics ignored the game’s Christ-related themes altogether). In another case, most film critics avoided grappling with Zach Snyder’s blunt references to Christ and God in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. King’s failure in Revival, sadly, is an all-too-accurate reflection of how many modern artists and audiences deal with some of the most important questions in the history of humankind. Don’t believe. Don’t doubt.
