Q: Looking back at Tracing The Trails, it would be safe to say that Revival was not one of your favorites. Can you rehash what your problems were?

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A: I liked the premise of the book. I thought it started and ended strong, particularly the ending. It’s just that in between, it was overly stuffed with a bunch of other content that I wasn’t as crazy about. And ultimately I felt like the narrative was focused in the wrong direction. 

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Q: Meaning?

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A: I loved the character of Charles Jacobs, a devout minister who is obsessed with the beauty and power of electricity. The problem was that as soon as I got fully hooked into the tragedy and potential of his story, he just vanishes. The story meanders too much and after such a captivating start to the book, following along with the protagonist after that made me feel like I was being given the leftovers. So by the time the ending came around, for as great as it was, I had checked out to such a degree that it didn’t make that much of a difference. 

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Q: Stephen King has a vast library of offerings. Did you think you would ever come back to this book?

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A: Honestly, I didn’t think so. Part of what drew me to the book was my excitement at seeing King perform a sort of homage to Frankenstein. Whether or not that was actually his intention with the book, I will never know.  It shaped my expectations and while the opening of the book seems to be setting up a sort of Victorian take on Pet Sematary, I felt like the narrative fell too far away from the central heartbeat. It seemed like it would have functioned better as a much shorter novella, or as an even longer novel. 

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Q: So, why revisit it?

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A: I recently was conducting a deep-dive into another of his books: Tommyknockers, specifically how I felt like the TV adaptation addressed and corrected a lot of the problems with the book. And in the process of this I think I finally unlocked the secret to enjoying a book I had been long since disappointed with. 

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You shouldn’t read Tommyknockers like it’s a novel. You have to treat it like a short story collection. A collection of stories with common characters and in the same setting. The closest comparison I can make would be Hearts In Atlantis. The book moves from one story to the next, each having very little to do with what came before or what will follow. But it all combines to form a beautiful sequence of narratives. So the secret to Tommyknockers is to stop looking for this big, overarching plot thread. Instead, focus on the individual moments and the smaller plots that all these characters are experiencing around each other. 

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My thinking was, maybe this is the kind of lens I should be using to look at the story in Revival. Maybe it isn’t about finding a global narrative and maybe instead it’s about seeing the journey, itself. Another book that came to mind for me was Robert McCammon’s novel, Boy’s Life. It’s easily one of my favorite books of all time and I’ve read it in several different phases of my life. 

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But the thing about Boy’s Life is that from moment to moment, I don’t know if I could really say what the book is about. Not in any way that would be succinct anyway. And on a normal day, saying something like that would be a death sentence for a book. But with Boy’s Life, the writing is so beautiful and engaging, I just didn’t care. There are so many poignant moments and characters, the book keeps me turning the pages.

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I’m not saying that Revival is on the level of Boy’s Life. I’m not saying that yet, anyway. What I’m suggesting is that in the way that pomegranate makes you work a little harder to enjoy it, maybe I should give Revival another shot and maybe I just need to work a little harder at it. 

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As I got back into the book, I found myself feeling even more the comparisons with Hearts In Atlantis. This is not necessarily a book of the horrific but it’s hard to deny the sentimentality of it. There are moments when I read Jaime Morton’s musings on these events when I feel like I could be reading my own reflections on childhood. 

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Yes, there is a massive fault line in the narrative when Charles Jacobs departs and the story is left to rebuild itself from scratch. And I still felt some frustration as the character I was most interested in was gone. And I know I can’t be alone in this. Look up different plot descriptions of the book online and often, Jacobs is the first character mentioned - as if he is the protagonist of the story, not Morton.

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But that feeling was just as present when we departed from Bobby Garfield and Ted Brautigan and plunged into a completely unrelated story about Vietnam and Hearts. But again, even though I don’t really get where things are going, I stay engaged because of the quality of the writing. I don’t get what one story has to do with the next but the characters are compelling, so much so that I just want to keep reading and can’t get enough. 

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Still, even though there are parts and passages of Revival that are quite engaging, I still feel like I’m being kept separate from the heartbeat of the story. Jacobs doesn’t completely vanish from the book. He does make appearances throughout Jaime’s life and each time we see him, he seems like he’s in a progressively darker place. The problem I have is that the key events in his life that seem to be driving him to that place aren’t seen. There’s too much feeling of scenes in between scenes. Not unlike Doctor Sleep where it seems like the most dramatic aspects of Danny Torrence’s life are merely referred to and we never get to see them.

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Take Jaime’s path. Evidently he managed to make a name for himself as a musician and along the way developed a serious drug habit. But most of that story isn’t on the page, it’s simply referred to. We jump over large periods of time and I’m often left feeling like I missed out on something important. I think there is a ton of potential in here for a staggering story but the narrative doesn’t seem able to hold still long enough for that to happen. 

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I remember in high school seeing a production put on by a dancer. Her act was to perform in total darkness with a light set to strobe on and off in a rapid sequence. She had her jumps timed so well that from the sporadic blips of illumination you had the illusion that she was floating around the stage. It’s the best way I can describe how this book makes me feel. Do I like what I see? For the most part, yes. I just feel like it isn’t close to being the whole story and I really needed more. Jumps across time, being told what happened while we were away, with important events happening off-stage. I can follow the factual events of the story, it’s just that I’m held far enough away that the emotional weight is lessened. 

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There are moments when this book drips with beautiful and poignant nostalgia. And other moments are brilliant in the sense of dread and foreboding you are shoved in to. That Jacobs is clearly dipping his toes into a darkness that is incredibly powerful. There are passages of the story that are emotional in how they show the experience of getting older, of the sadness for things left behind and for loved ones lost. Then we are again given the creeping dread that something terrifying is about to happen. 

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The two sides of the plot work well when we get them. I just think the book could have been stronger if it was about one or the other, not both. Stephen King has proven himself capable of bringing readers to tears as well as disturb. And while it may seem like an attractive challenge to do both in the same book, sometimes it’s stronger to just go down one path. 

The ending for the book is fantastic. It’s visually striking and disturbing. And the denouement rides a perpetual wave from this point as that handful of minutes proves to change Jaime’s life forever. My issue is that the end of the book feels largely detached from the rest. I was able to appreciate the buildup a little more this second time around because I knew where the story was driving at. But for first-time readers I have to think that a lot of this story comes off as dry and uninterested meandering along a plot that seems at times to go nowhere in particular. 

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I stand by my original belief that what this book needed was a massive shift in perspective, similar to what King did in Christine. We needed to see more of Jacobs and I think the book would benefit a great deal to see some of his actual perspective. It actually occurred to me that the book would be more effective if it had been flipped. Spend the entire book with Jacobs so that we can see his actual journey. It allows for his character to be more dynamic and sympathetic. Then, if we get occasional appearances from Jaime in his timeline, we can get an outside perspective on Jacobs, to provide a moral measuring stick for how far he is straying from his own sanity. 

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Did I enjoy the book more this time around? Without a doubt. I would even be willing to shift this title from the list of books I didn’t like. And maybe when the time comes to give this yet another read, I would like to think that I would end up holding it in even higher esteem. But I still feel like the story has some issues. It’s unfortunate that King didn’t tackle a book like this earlier on in his career because I think what the story really needs is another four hundred pages or so. Bring the page count on this up to something more along the lines of It or The Stand. There are some beautifully disturbing storylines in here that deserve to be expanded upon and developed even farther. Ultimately, King needed to spend less time telling me what the story was and spent more time just giving me the story. For as much as people poke fun at him for apparently being paid by the word, what we ended up with here felt far too truncated and thin.

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I was able to enjoy it more this time around, but I still have to see this as a less than successful endeavor. Plenty of people love the book and I’m all for that. After revisiting it, however, I will remain in my conviction that even though the concept is engaging, much of that potential fizzled out as we entered into the middle of the book. There’s still too many sections that I found overly dry and slow.

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That’s it for now. Thanks very much for your time and interest. I’d love to hear what you think about this book. Click on over to my Facebook page and leave some comments on the post for this review!

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My name is Chad Clark and I am proud to be a constant reader.