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3.72 AVERAGE
3.72 AVERAGE
I am a fan of King's and unlike most people, I have liked his last decade or so of explorations, particularly with his female characters. But, like any King fan, I have also read enough to know his eccentricities: the ones I like and the ones I don't.
The older King grows, the more reflective on the olden days be becomes. While many people may like his trips into the 60's and 70's, (his Kennedy book for instance), it's not my favorite thing. It's not to say it's a terrible book. At this stage in his writing career, I think he would have to try hard to write bad prose. It's just not something that I feel to be truly interesting.
On top of that, unlike most people, I figured out the ending at about page 75. It's not hard to do if you read a lot of the classics like I have been doing for the past 3 years. So not a big interesting story for me and no surprise ending.
Sorry King. Not all of your books can be good but enough that I will keep reading you.
The older King grows, the more reflective on the olden days be becomes. While many people may like his trips into the 60's and 70's, (his Kennedy book for instance), it's not my favorite thing. It's not to say it's a terrible book. At this stage in his writing career, I think he would have to try hard to write bad prose. It's just not something that I feel to be truly interesting.
On top of that, unlike most people, I figured out the ending at about page 75. It's not hard to do if you read a lot of the classics
Spoiler
Frankenstein, not a novel I likedSorry King. Not all of your books can be good but enough that I will keep reading you.
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I loved this book. I had my own theories about the "secret electricity", which proved to be wrong, and I am glad, as my theory was a bit disturbing. I have a feeling that what lies beyond the door will haunt me for some time.
I really enjoyed this one and I don't understand why so many people dislike it. It's definitely one of the better ones in this new era of King.
adventurous
challenging
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
Strong character development:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Steve-- You had me until you showed me the monster. Still, a good story with real characters I cared about.
My review ratings are based upon the following:
1 Star, “I did not like it and wasted my time or couldn’t finish it”;
2 Stars, “I think it is just Ok, but I’ll never think about it again”;
3 Stars, “I think it is an entertaining, enjoyable book, and I’ll think about it again”;
4 Stars, “I really love this book, and I may read it again”;
5 Stars, “I think this book is excellent, I will read it again, and it will likely stand the test of time.”
My review ratings are based upon the following:
1 Star, “I did not like it and wasted my time or couldn’t finish it”;
2 Stars, “I think it is just Ok, but I’ll never think about it again”;
3 Stars, “I think it is an entertaining, enjoyable book, and I’ll think about it again”;
4 Stars, “I really love this book, and I may read it again”;
5 Stars, “I think this book is excellent, I will read it again, and it will likely stand the test of time.”
The first Stephen King novel I read was IT, way back in my early teens 30-some years ago. My parents wouldn't allow me to watch the ABC miniseries that aired in 1990, but by the time I was 14 or so they, oddly, had no objections to my reading the big-ass novel it was based on (other than my mom warning me that King was a weirdo and that he looked like a weirdo, too). I sank into the 1100+ pages of that book and barely came up for air over a handful of days. It felt like a homecoming of sort, and I believe that discovering that book as a teenager was the best possible time to find it. For those few days of marathon binge-reading, I lived in Derry with Stuttering Bill, Richie, Bev, Ben, and Mike, and felt like I was a member of the Losers Club. I could relate to those kids so deeply, and it's an experience that never left me.
I've been a dedicated Constant Reader ever since, although I do have a few King titles still unread. Revival was among those few in my own personal Mount TBR. Originally published in 2014, this book has sat on my shelf virtually untouched for a decade. That hardly seems or feels right, no more than my having discovered IT 30 years ago, but time is funny like that. Sometimes you find the right book at the right time. Other times, a story calls to you and lets you know it's time, that you're ready for it, or it's ready for you now. I believe that's how it was for Revival now.
I turned 45 this past summer. King's narrator, Jamie, is a nomadic rock-and-roller pushing into his mid-fifties when we meet him. I don't know that I would have enjoyed Revival as much had I read it when it first hit shelves a decade ago. A whole hell of a lot of life has happened to me in the last ten years. I've become a father, and I saw both of my parents into their graves. My wife and I worked our way through some difficult times, some heartbreaking times, and moments of personal tragedy. We've lost, and came close to losing more a few times, even if we won more often than not in the end. Jamie lives in the dark shadow of Reverend Charlie Jacobs, and it took those ten years for plenty of shadows to cast their pall over my own life.
Maybe that's why Revival hit so close to home for me, and so frequently, too. Like a number of latter-year King titles, he's writing from a place of having grown older and in realizing his own mortality, knowing that he's much closer to the end than the beginning. King, at the time this was written anyway, and Jamie both are entering in their late middle age. The novel is told in a series of flashbacks as Jamie recounts the last 5o years and the sporadic appearances of Jacobs, and Jacobs's experiments with electricity and healing, in his life. There's a certain melancholy to it, an occasionally maudlin nostalgia for the experiences of yesteryears, too often seen through the rose-tinted lenses of hindsight, and an owing up the mistakes that help shape us. It's not a novel King could have written half as well in his twenties or thirties. No, it's an older writer's book, from an author who's put a lot miles behind him, and is perhaps best appreciated by those readers who grew up alongside horror's elder statesman and have laid plenty of their own track in the intervening years. Jamie's our Everyman hero here, but I think all those years and all those shadows also helped to make me all the more sympathetic to Jacobs, too, for the things he's lost and the way those have shaped his obsessions and driven him across the years, and he's a strikingly sympathetic antagonist.
Revival is measured in losses and tragedy, and bittersweet memories. King and Jamie both understand that the lights are getting dimmer, the music is getting softer, and that the party is almost over. And like almost all pondering of one's own life and the finite state of existence, there comes a preoccupation of what comes next, of what lies beyond the veil between life and death. The god-botherers promise eternal paradise and the reward of Heaven. H.P. Lovecraft, who's quoted in Revival's epigraph, offers an alternative view centered around the uncaring universe and mankind's place within it, and King borrows heavily from the nihilism of cosmic horror in the latter chapters here, as Jacob's plans gather clarity. It's some of the best and scariest shit King has written, and the way it's all grounded in the otherwise slow-burn mundanity of life itself makes it all the more terrifying, maybe especially for those us who are closer to the end than the beginning.
I don't think my 35-year-old self would have cared for this book half as much as my present-day 45-year-old self. I think that, like Jamie, I had to lose damn near everything, like my friends and family, and work to rebuild myself, both physically and mentally, to strengthen those relationships that remain and matter most to me, and to carve out some new ones that I hope will stand the test of time, however much of that might be left to me. I don't know what lies out there in the Great Beyond (I suspect nothing at all; the same nothingness we inhabited before our birth, and shall return to in our death), but Revival reminds us of two truths simultaneously: 1. We best not squander our time here, and 2. We're probably better off not knowing.
Or maybe I'm just getting increasingly maudlin my own damn self as the years go on...
I've been a dedicated Constant Reader ever since, although I do have a few King titles still unread. Revival was among those few in my own personal Mount TBR. Originally published in 2014, this book has sat on my shelf virtually untouched for a decade. That hardly seems or feels right, no more than my having discovered IT 30 years ago, but time is funny like that. Sometimes you find the right book at the right time. Other times, a story calls to you and lets you know it's time, that you're ready for it, or it's ready for you now. I believe that's how it was for Revival now.
I turned 45 this past summer. King's narrator, Jamie, is a nomadic rock-and-roller pushing into his mid-fifties when we meet him. I don't know that I would have enjoyed Revival as much had I read it when it first hit shelves a decade ago. A whole hell of a lot of life has happened to me in the last ten years. I've become a father, and I saw both of my parents into their graves. My wife and I worked our way through some difficult times, some heartbreaking times, and moments of personal tragedy. We've lost, and came close to losing more a few times, even if we won more often than not in the end. Jamie lives in the dark shadow of Reverend Charlie Jacobs, and it took those ten years for plenty of shadows to cast their pall over my own life.
Maybe that's why Revival hit so close to home for me, and so frequently, too. Like a number of latter-year King titles, he's writing from a place of having grown older and in realizing his own mortality, knowing that he's much closer to the end than the beginning. King, at the time this was written anyway, and Jamie both are entering in their late middle age. The novel is told in a series of flashbacks as Jamie recounts the last 5o years and the sporadic appearances of Jacobs, and Jacobs's experiments with electricity and healing, in his life. There's a certain melancholy to it, an occasionally maudlin nostalgia for the experiences of yesteryears, too often seen through the rose-tinted lenses of hindsight, and an owing up the mistakes that help shape us. It's not a novel King could have written half as well in his twenties or thirties. No, it's an older writer's book, from an author who's put a lot miles behind him, and is perhaps best appreciated by those readers who grew up alongside horror's elder statesman and have laid plenty of their own track in the intervening years. Jamie's our Everyman hero here, but I think all those years and all those shadows also helped to make me all the more sympathetic to Jacobs, too, for the things he's lost and the way those have shaped his obsessions and driven him across the years, and he's a strikingly sympathetic antagonist.
Revival is measured in losses and tragedy, and bittersweet memories. King and Jamie both understand that the lights are getting dimmer, the music is getting softer, and that the party is almost over. And like almost all pondering of one's own life and the finite state of existence, there comes a preoccupation of what comes next, of what lies beyond the veil between life and death. The god-botherers promise eternal paradise and the reward of Heaven. H.P. Lovecraft, who's quoted in Revival's epigraph, offers an alternative view centered around the uncaring universe and mankind's place within it, and King borrows heavily from the nihilism of cosmic horror in the latter chapters here, as Jacob's plans gather clarity. It's some of the best and scariest shit King has written, and the way it's all grounded in the otherwise slow-burn mundanity of life itself makes it all the more terrifying, maybe especially for those us who are closer to the end than the beginning.
I don't think my 35-year-old self would have cared for this book half as much as my present-day 45-year-old self. I think that, like Jamie, I had to lose damn near everything, like my friends and family, and work to rebuild myself, both physically and mentally, to strengthen those relationships that remain and matter most to me, and to carve out some new ones that I hope will stand the test of time, however much of that might be left to me. I don't know what lies out there in the Great Beyond (I suspect nothing at all; the same nothingness we inhabited before our birth, and shall return to in our death), but Revival reminds us of two truths simultaneously: 1. We best not squander our time here, and 2. We're probably better off not knowing.
Or maybe I'm just getting increasingly maudlin my own damn self as the years go on...
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes