Revival (2014)
Revival is a 2014 drug addicts book written by Stephen King.
A boy kneels in the dirt with his toy soldiers when a shadow falls over him: Charles Jacobs, the young new minister arriving in small-town Harlow, Maine with a beautiful wife and a gift for making people believe. Jamie Morton loves him. Years later, after a tragedy shatters the reverend's faith and drives him from town, the two cross paths again and again across decades, bound by Jacobs's deepening obsession with electricity and what it might do to the human body. King folds in rock and roll, addiction, grief, and a very old kind of dread.
Quick answers
What is Revival about?
A boy kneels in the dirt with his toy soldiers when a shadow falls over him: Charles Jacobs, the young new minister arriving in small-town Harlow, Maine with a beautiful wife and a gift for making people believe. Jamie Morton loves him. Years later, after a tragedy shatters the reverend's faith and drives him from town, the two cross paths again and again across decades, bound by Jacobs's deepening obsession with electricity and what it might do to the human body. King folds in rock and roll, addiction, grief, and a very old kind of dread.
When was Revival published?
Revival was published in 2014.
Who made Revival?
Revival was written by Stephen King.
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Revival in our writing
- Companion guide: Cosmic Horror
A few thoughts on Revival
Fans of the slow-burn dread and cosmic final turn should try Frankenstein, the founding story of a man wielding electricity against death. Bloodborne pushes the same Lovecraftian horror further, trading small-town Maine for a plague-city where forbidden knowledge peels back reality. Both share Stephen King's core fear here: some doors should stay shut, and Jacobs keeps prying at them.
More Stephen King, same small-town dread
Revival follows a minister's decades-long obsession from small-town Maine into something much darker, King's usual territory. Mr. Mercedes and The Outsider keep that same patient, character-first build before the strangeness surfaces, Salem's Lot works the identical rural New England setting, and Night Shift collects the shorter, sharper version of King's small-town unease.
Mad science that reaches past the edge of death
Revival turns Jacobs's obsession with electricity into a decades-long experiment on what a body can survive, kin to stories about power pushed past the boundary of death. Frankenstein is the obvious ancestor of that ambition, Bloodborne builds an entire world on the same forbidden curiosity, and From the Dust Returned and The Gargoyle both linger on what's left when the experiment doesn't fully take.
Occult dread creeping into small-town America
Revival lets a small Maine town curdle slowly under one charismatic preacher's growing obsession, the same slow rot these stories bring to ordinary places. The Lords of Salem and Family Blood turn quiet communities into staging grounds for something old and unwelcome, Blood Punch keeps the dread close and claustrophobic, and No Dominion carries that same sense of a town that isn't what it seems.