After the paperback release of Doctor Sleep, a follow-up to The Shining, master of suspense Stephen King is back with Revival.
We meet the narrator of the book, Jamie Morton, when he is just a small boy in 1960s Maine. A new Methodist minister arrives in his hometown in the shape of Charles Jacobs and appears to heal Jamie’s brother. But a terrible tragedy befalls the man of God, leading him to leave.
Many years later, the two cross paths at a county fair. Jamie is now a drug-addicted session guitarist and Jacobs is travelling with a show of his own. After his family was wiped out in a car crash, the former preacher travels around small-town America professing he can heal the sick using his ‘secret electricity’.
The healer uses his special ‘powers’ to cure Jamie of his heroin addiction, and sparks the protagonist’s interest. Just who is this guy now calling himself Pastor Danny Jacobs? And is he helping or hurting?
King jumps between decades in ambling style and huge swathes of background seem to be missing, which would have increased the horror of what was really going on.
