Revival - Stephen King in Reading Journal

It’s one of his better ones, so we can start there. Yeah, it had disappointing bits, but they weren’t as apparent as some of his other works, where I kind of forgot to get scared. The trouble with this one is that the “scare” feels tacked on at the end.

So, yes, obvious homage to Shelley’s Frankenstein, but there’s no “creature” here. Well, I take that back. Mother, at the END - like the last frickin section - had potential. If he’d sprinkled her into the book more, that last standoff could have felt like, well, a standoff. Instead, it feels rushed and unformed. Blobular, in Subeta speak.

If you want to read this one and get a thrill, you could do the last few chapters by a fire some winter evening. If you read the whole thing, you’ll get a dual character study: a man and his hero, who slips slowly from God and grace (very related terms in this work, and the hero who begins the book is a minister. The villain that ends it…isn’t.) I don’t want to give away the fun because it’s so damn short in this one.

You’ll mostly be reading about miracle cures and what if they weren’t actually miracles, due to the price charged. Then, you get to ask the question “what price do you pay to be a miracle man? And who to?” That’s what the horror section answers. The rest of the book is about the rock’n’roll life.

It’s a quick read, for King. But it feels like it should have been a short story. As a short story, it would have had a punch. At 400 pages, it feels like a tickle.