Revival: A Novel

Product ASIN:

1476770387

Product Description

A dark and electrifying novel about addiction, fanaticism, and what might exist on the other side of life.

In a small New England town, over half a century ago, a shadow falls over a small boy playing with his toy soldiers. Jamie Morton looks up to see a striking man, the new minister. Charles Jacobs, along with his beautiful wife, will transform the local church. The men and boys are all a bit in love with Mrs. Jacobs; the women and girls feel the same about Reverend Jacobs—including Jamie’s mother and beloved sister, Claire. With Jamie, the Reverend shares a deeper bond based on a secret obsession. When tragedy strikes the Jacobs family, this charismatic preacher curses God, mocks all religious belief, and is banished from the shocked town.

Jamie has demons of his own. Wed to his guitar from the age of thirteen, he plays in bands across the country, living the nomadic lifestyle of bar-band rock and roll while fleeing from his family’s horrific loss. In his mid-thirties—addicted to heroin, stranded, desperate—Jamie meets Charles Jacobs again, with profound consequences for both men. Their bond becomes a pact beyond even the Devil’s devising, and Jamie discovers that revival has many meanings.

This rich and disturbing novel spans five decades on its way to the most terrifying conclusion Stephen King has ever written. It’s a masterpiece from King, in the great American tradition of Frank Norris, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe.

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Product Details

• BooksCatalog Sales Rank: #245 in Books
• Brand: Stephen King
• Published on: 2014-11-11
• Released on: 2014-11-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 10.00" h x 6.50" w x 1.50" l, 1.20 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 405 pages

Features

• Hardback
• New York Times Best-Selling Author

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Editorial Reviews

BooksCatalog.com Review

An BooksCatalog Best Book of the Month, November 2014: How does Stephen King do it? In book after book, writing long (Under the Dome, 11/22/63) or short (Joyland) he manages, nearly always, to tell a compelling story that is both entertaining and somehow profound, or at least thoughtful. His latest, Revival, is vintage King. It’s the perfect mix of baby boomer nostalgia (think Stand By Me) – this guy remembers the 60s with details you usually can only find in photographs – and good old American horror, the kind that was first elevated by such minor writers as, say, Poe and Hawthorne. The story here centers on a reverend who comes to a New England town, befriends and mentors a young boy, and then goes wild with grief when his family dies in an accident; he gives a blasphemous sermon and is, basically, run out of town. Cut to: a couple decades later, when the boy, now a junkie, meets up by chance with the disgraced clergyman, and they form another disturbing relationship. Reverend Jacobs, it turns out, was always more complicated than the stereotypical man of God – he is fascinated by electricity, by science – and pretty demonic, too. How he and Jamie find and fight each other over their lifetimes is as shocking and inevitable as the explosive and, yes, horrorish, climax of the book. Never mind that King’s prose can sometimes lapse into laughable cliché – “like water through a sieve”? Really? – there is absolutely no better storyteller than Stephen King, who keeps us up at night, with fear and fascination and admiration. –Sara Nelson

Review
Scary and profound. Mail on Sunday King at his regal best, fully in command of a terrifying story, a great cast and page after page after page of top-notch writing ... the darkness of genuine horror. Absolutely superb. Daily Mail There are few writers able so effortlessly, so naturally and so intimately to lay out the details of a life. Perhaps that's why, when the book begins to slide away from our own reality, we're happy to follow where Jamie leads. Guardian He shows he can still pull off scenes with a characteristic combination of intensity and oddity. Sunday Times The strongest thing he's written for a decade, with the nastiest ending of any book this year. -- Tim Martin Telegraph Simply superb ... classic King: intimate, readable and convincing ... tastier than most bestsellers out there. Independent A serious book by a major writer. New Statesman King returns to his more familiar horror genre with a bang in this book and what makes Revival so genuinely scary a read is his uncanny skill in juxtaposing the minutiae of ordinary suburban or rural American lives with another, scarcely glimpsed, parallel world of chaos, darkness and monstrous evil. Irish Independent

About the Author
Stephen King is the author of more than fifty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His novel 11/22/63 was named a top ten book of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller as well as the Best Hardcover Book Award from the International Thriller Writers Association. He is the recipient of the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King.