by George Beahm
110
REVIVAL
2014
The inspiration was Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan,” which is a terrifying story about the world that might exist beyond this one. Other influences were Lovecraft, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and my own religious upbringing. And I’ve been wanting to write about tent show healings for a long time!
I wanted to write a balls-to-the-wall supernatural horror story, something I haven’t done in a long time. I also wanted to use Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, but in a new fashion, if I could, stripping away Lovecraft’s high-flown language.
—STEPHEN KING, INTERVIEW, GOODREADS.COM
I live for rock and roll!
—STEPHEN KING, “LIVE AT POLITICS AND PROSE,” GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY, NOVEMBER 12, 2014
The roots, the real roots, to Revival go back to King’s life in rural Maine, as King explained in a joint interview with Jerry Jenkins for Writer’s Digest: “While I’m not a big believer in the Biblical apocalypse and end-times, I was raised in a Christian home, went to church a lot, attended MYF (Methodist Youth Fellowship—lots of Bible drills, which every writer could use, Christian or not).”
Here are some of the most obvious parallels:
King grew up in Durham. In Revival, Jamie Morton grows up in rural Maine (in Harlow, near Castle Rock).
King grew up in the Methodist faith. As Stephen King’s brother, David, explained to Spignesi in The Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia, “[W]hen Stevie turned twelve, we were in Durham by then, and we both joined the West Durham Methodist Church. So basically, we had a traditional Protestant upbringing.” In Revival, the minister is also of that faith.
By the time he was in high school, King became disenchanted with religion and walked away, after concluding that aspects of the Methodist faith simply made no sense. In Revival, it’s the preacher who walks away, after he feels God has abandoned him, selling him a bill of goods.
David King recalled that just before Easter one year, Charles Huff, a local Methodist preacher who wasn’t an ordained minister, “set up his own version of the Last Supper. We’d all go over to the parish hall where we’d sit around with candles, and we would have Za-Rex.1 I remember that specifically. Even when he used to take us down to picnics down at Bradbury Mountain, it was always Za-Rex.” In Revival, the young boys go often to the parsonage to partake of cookies and the preacher’s name is Charles Jacobs.
At a relative’s attic over the barn in Durham, King discovered his great interest to be horror fiction. Rummaging through books, he found a battered, worn paperback with H. P. Lovecraft fiction. In Revival, Lovecraft’s fiction is central to the book’s conclusion, as is Arthur Machen’s classic tale, “The Great God Pan,” which King considers to be an influence on his work in general and this novel in particular; so, too, is Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, a novel about which he wrote about at length in Danse Macabre.
For King readers who wanted a horror fix but didn’t get it with Mr. Mercedes, King’s latest, Revival, is his return to familiar stomping grounds, recalling Pet Sematary.
The novel opens with Jamie Morton playing with toy soldiers when a shadows falls over him, cast by the new preacher in town, Charles Jacobs. It is Jacobs who, for the rest of Jamie’s life, will continue to cast a long shadow over him, and many others. When he’s not preaching and teaching the gospel, Jacobs is tinkering with a “secret electricity” that he hopes will open “doorways to the infinite.” He is consumed by a single, driving question: What lies in store for us after death? “I want to know what the universe has in store for all of us once this life is over,” says Jacob. It is his Moby Dick, a quest that drives him relentlessly on, driving him a little mad in the process.
After suffering a personal disaster that shatters his faith in God, the preacher is forced to leave the small congregation he serves in Harlow, Maine, but Jacobs’s life becomes inextricably braided with Jamie’s. As a result of an electrical shock treatment that Jacobs administers to Jamie, to cure him of his heroin addiction, he realizes he’s changed: “Something, something, something. Happened. Happened. Something happened. Something happened, happened, something happened. Happened. Something.”
That shocking encounter sets up a final encounter in Revival that goes far beyond what the minister imagined: He gets his dark heart’s desire—a glimpse of what is in store for all of us after we die.
As with Pet Sematary, which King found too dark and put away in his fabled writer’s trunk, he felt even more so with Revival. “It’s too scary,” he told Buzzfeed. “I don’t even want to think about that book anymore. It’s a nasty dark piece of work. That’s all I can tell you.”
Here’s what I can tell you: The skeleton key to Revival can be found in “The Great God Pan,” which King says “has haunted me all my life.” It can also be found in the following H. P. Lovecraft quote from “The Nameless City”:
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons, even death may die.
As Lovecraft wrote in his story “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”
Charles Jacob would have been wise to heed Lovecraft’s words.
Novelist Danielle Trussoni, in The New York Times, wrote that “[r]eading Revival is experiencing a master storyteller having the time of his life. All of his favorite fictional elements are at play—small-town Maine, the supernatural, the evil genius, the obsessive addict, the power of belief to transform a life.”
Book editor John Freeman, in The Boston Globe, wrote:
There’s a strong moral current crackling through King’s fiction, so we know there will be a cost. Nothing good in King’s world comes for free.… Revival is a brave book because it dares to look closely at the way that religion is fiction, but perhaps a necessary one. It is a moving novel because it shows how religion’s assurances are just that, hardly guarantees of outcome. On that score, there is only one we can count on, and it’s that none of us know what’s coming in the beyond, not even this marvelous novelist.
Our body knows things, and our brain knows things that don’t have anything to do with conscious thought. And I think that it’s possible, when you die, that there is a final exit program that goes into effect. And that’s what people are seeing when they see their relatives or a white light or whatever it is. In that sense, there may really be a heaven if you believe there’s a heaven, and a hell if you believe there is one. But there’s some kind of transitional moment. That idea that your whole life flashes before your eyes.
—Stephen King, interview, The Guardian, April 28, 2012
1 A syrup concentrate popular in New England used to mix fruit-flavored drinks.
111
STEPHEN KING’S REVIVAL BOOK TOUR
In early 2014, on the message board of King’s official Web site, the moderator wrote that King was taking a break and wouldn’t be doing any on-road promotion for Revival. You could almost hear a collective groan of disappointment from his fans, who hoped to see him in person to promote his latest book. But as fall leaves fell and Halloween approached, King had a change of heart and revived his book tour, to his fans’ delight.
Clearly, King doesn’t need to go out and tour to promote his books. He sells up to a million copies in hardback of each new novel in the U.S. without touring, so why even bother?
Because it’s a way to directly connect with his readership, his die-hard fans. It gets him out of his self-contained, cocooned existence as a writer in a room and into the larger world, from which he draws his inspiration.
In the early years, King didn’t set up protocols for book signings or talks, with the result that fans giddy with anticipation, standing in long lines, went home disappointed when it was impossible for him to
sign books, after his writing hand cramped up. That’s what happened at a mall in Maine, after two hours of straight signing. Aware that there was a long line of fans in line with books who’d be disappointed, he asked if he could go out the back entrance, to avoid confronting them. The bookstore refused, and he had to walk out the front entrance, passing hundreds of unhappy fans who had waited hours to see him; they glared, and some made comments, as he kept his head down and kept walking. Afterward, King no longer left the logistics of book signings to chance: sensible protocols were instituted.
For the Revival whirlwind tour in November 2014, King limited it to six cities. In chronological order of appearance: New York City (the eleventh), Washington, D.C. (the twelfth), Kansas City (the thirteenth), Wichita (the fourteenth), Austin (the fifteenth), and, finally, home to South Portland, Maine (the seventeenth).
Of the six events, three were book signings, designed to accommodate as many people as possible. But attendance was strictly limited to what could reasonably be signed in the time period allotted, to ensure that no one went away empty-handed and disappointed. There were no personal inscriptions, and no time for personal chats or selfies.
The remaining three visits were composed of readings or improvisational talks:
Okay. I’m going to talk for a while.… I can’t really lecture—I’m not good at that—and I can’t speak with any sense from prepared notes. About the most I can do is chautauqua, a fine old word that means you babble on for a little while about the thing that you do, and then you sit down.
At his three talks, attendees got a hardback copy of Revival; the lucky ones got signed copies, which were randomly placed on seats or handed out when one left the auditorium. But everyone went home with an experience to remember.
King, over the years, has dutifully signed copies of his books, as well as napkins and other pieces of paper thrust at him in public, to the point where there are hundreds of thousands of his signatures floating around. Until a few years ago, King even accepted books mailed to him—one per person, please—to his office, which he would sign and send back; but it’s a practice he’s stopped for obvious reasons.
These days, King signs sheets of paper from specialty publishers for insertion in their limited editions, which cost 450 and up. He also signs at special events for charity or fund-raising purposes, and occasionally at bookstores.
At a talk King gave with J. K. Rowling and John Irving, I saw King leave the building as soon as possible out of a side entrance, but even then fans saw him, congregated around him, and thrust program books at him for his signature. He signed a few and then begged off, leaving in a waiting limo.
If his fans had their druthers, they would have stayed and gotten more signatures, and the small crowd would have grown to a large one, and pretty soon the situation would have become untenable.
The whole notion of getting a signature on a book is one that befuddles writer Harlan Ellison, who can’t understand why the book itself isn’t enough. After all, isn’t that what the reader is paying for? Why does he need the author’s signature on the book at all?
Well, eBay aside, the fact remains that a signature transforms a book into a personal treasure. It’s a keepsake and a collectible that can be passed down to the next generation: Out of an estimated one million copies of Revival that shipped, it is likely that fewer than five or six hundred were signed at the three signing events on his tour. (It explains why signed copies have sold for up to 400 on eBay.)
Of King’s talks, only one was recorded, at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium in D.C., under the auspices of Politics and Prose bookstore; the talk is available online.
As for the book signings, at the Books-a-Million in Portland, Maine, some fans grumbled that after standing in line in the cold, they didn’t have a chance to talk with King at all; they were moved through the line quickly and felt he could have just signed the books and left them on the table for pickup. Well, to be fair to King, by moving the crowd rapidly along, it allowed over a hundred more people to get a signed book who otherwise wouldn’t. I think those readers had no complaints whatsoever.
Stephen King on Death
Death is it. The one thing we all have to face. Two hundred years from now there won’t be any of us walking around and taking nourishment. That’s it. Sooner or later, God points at you and says, “It’s time to hang up your jock, the game is over, it’s time to take a shower. It’s the end.” But the point is, this is something that every creature on the face of the earth goes through, but so far as we know, we’re the only creatures that have an extended sense of futurity. We are the only ones who can look ahead and say, “Yes, that’s right, it’s going to happen. And how am I going to deal with the idea of my own conclusion?”
Well, if you stop and think about it, and you stop to realize how clearly we grasp the concept, the answer should be: “We can’t cope with it. It’ll drive us crazy.” For me, the fact that it doesn’t is one of the really marvelous things in human existence, and probably also one of the true signs of God’s grace on the face of this earth.
—Stephen King, public speech, in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, on November 19, 1983
112
ARE YOU THERE, GOD? IT’S ME, STEVIE
My view is that organized religion is a very dangerous tool that’s been misused by a lot of people. I grew up in a Methodist church, and we went to services every Sunday and to Bible school in the summer. We didn’t have a choice. We just did it. So all that stuff about childhood religion in Revival is basically autobiographical. But as a kid, I had doubts. When I went to Methodist youth fellowship, we were taught that the Catholics were all going to go to hell because they worship idols. So right there, I’m saying to myself, “Catholics are going to go to hell, but my aunt Molly married a Catholic and she converted and she’s got 11 kids and they’re all pretty nice and one of them’s my good friend—they’re all going to go to hell?” I’m thinking to myself, “This is bullshit.” And if that’s bullshit, how much of the rest of it is bullshit?
—STEPHEN KING, INTERVIEW, ROLLING STONE, OCTOBER 31, 2014
At an early age, King learned to think for himself. Religion, particularly, struck him as being largely a matter of faith but misplaced: It just didn’t make sense. There was heaven and there was hell, and you could go to hell just for believing in a different Christian faith.
Statue in the Bangor-Orono area.
By high school, as he told Rolling Stone, “that was it for me.”
Today he’s “totally agnostic” on the idea of heaven, but he wants to believe in God for the same reason that we all do: We want to believe that when our mortal lives end, our immortal lives begin, because it’s comforting. We want to go to heaven in whatever form it takes and reconnect with our loved ones who have preceded us into death. We want the afterlife to be better than what we have on earth.
The alternative, postulated by theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, is rational and cold comfort. As he told The Guardian, “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”
What logically follows, says Hawking, is that we should make the best use of our limited time in this world. “We should see the greatest value of our action,” he says.
King, whatever he says, seeks the greatest value of his actions: He writes as if demondriven.
King’s ongoing exploration of Christianity began with Carrie but clearly won’t end with his most current novel, Revival. From Margaret White, who locks her daughter Carrie into her “prayer closet,” to a fallen minister who repudiates his faith and seeks forbidden knowledge, religion is a recurring theme that bears frequent visitation in King’s fiction. There will likely be more books from King speculating on the afterlife.
In the end, as he told Rolling Stone, “I would like to believe that there is some sort of an afterlife.” To which I say
: Don’t we all?
What we don’t want to believe is what cartoonist Gahan Wilson depicted in a 1980 cartoon for The New Yorker magazine: Two monks, in robes, are seated and discussing life. One has a serene expression, and the other, who does not, says, “Nothing happens next. This is it.”
We each owe a death, there are no exceptions.
—Stephen King, The Green Mile
113
“I HEAR TIME’S WINGED CHARIOT DRAWING NEAR”
It’s always later than you think.
Stephen King, who is painfully aware of time’s passage, feels strongly that he wants to get as much written as possible, which means he doesn’t waste time. He’s structured his life around writing to maximize his literary output. He has no patience with writers whose books are published decades apart. What, he asks, are they doing with their time?
Critics often point out how prolific King is, to which he responds: I just work steadily, that’s all. That’s the King writing formula: Year in and year out, he writes every day of the year except Christmas, and the words pile up: a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter, a completed book. Then rinse and repeat.
When asked by Rolling Stone if he expects to still be writing in his eighties, he replied:
Yeah. What else am I going to do? I mean, shit, you’ve got to do something to fill up your day. And I can only play so much guitar and watch so many TV shows. [Writing] fulfills me. There are two things about it I like: It makes me happy, and it makes other people happy.
He doesn’t worry about his legacy. As he told Rolling Stone, “[I]t’s out of my control. Only two things happen to writers when they die: Either their work survives, or it becomes forgotten.”
