The two lives wind up intersecting at various points of the book. However, when his wife and child die in a freak automobile accident, we see a transformation as he leaves the priesthood to become a carnival huckster and then something much more sinister as he experiments with unseen electricity. The other character is Charles Jacobs, who is a young pastor when we meet him.

Over time, he grows up, learns to play the guitar, has sex for the first time, and becomes a strung-out junkie. On one hand, you have Jamie Morton, who is six years old in the 1960s and living in Maine when we are introduced to him. This is really a novel about the relationship between two people as they move from being friendly to being each other’s nemesis. In fact, this is one of those books that work better the less you know about it (including how it ends). This is a book where the plot is almost inconsequential. In that way, King is the master of the character study, and this proves to be true in Revival. While it’s true that he’s prolific and being prolific means that you turn in the odd dud from time to time ( The Tommyknockers, anyone?), what King does best is write about ordinary people living in small towns whose lives are upended when some sort of calamity strikes them.

Stephen King has always maintained that he’s the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries, but I think he diminishes his work by saying that. All in all, I must heartily recommend this book, and here’s why: And it is quite creepy, though probably not quite as scary as I initially thought - I was spoiled, remember. Everything about the ending here is reasonably paced and plotted. Bag of Bones’ ending is nearly incomprehensible because it happens so fast. Usually, Stephen King kind of rushes his endings, I’ve found. I’m glad I decided to tackle it, though, because it turns out that even though it meanders quite a bit, this might be one of the best King books that I’ve read. Thus, Revival was a book that I wasn’t sure I was ever going to read - at least until I had forgotten about it. Second, that ending - years later - was spoiled for me when I read an online list of the worst to best King novels ranked in order. Now, if Stephen King is freaked out by his own writing, you know that you’re probably in for one scary book. First, I saw an interview with King shortly after the book came out and the gist of it was that he didn’t want to think about this novel, owing to how it ends. Revival is a book by Stephen King that I almost didn’t read.

Stephen king later review