![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I think Revival
benefits from not knowing much going in, so I’ll be vague about the plot over the cut. It’s an uneven book, extremely gripping and with some interesting themes, with a fantastic beginning and an ending that would have really worked for me if it had made some choices other than the ones it actually made.
For most of the book, the horror elements are backgrounded rather than foregrounded. The first third, which begins with the narrator’s childhood meeting with the new young preacher, who has an interest in electricity and departs under a cloud, is absolutely riveting even though for most of it, nothing particularly dramatic is happening. It’s beautifully written, vivid, and has a masterful use of foreshadowing. (The “cloud” does not involve child abuse. However, there is child death.)
The middle of the book, which follows Jamie into adulthood, is also compelling reading, with some genuinely scary moments. The climax went in a direction that didn’t work for me.
It’s hard to either rec or anti-rec this without spoilers. It’s extremely gripping, has some great moments of subtle horror, and is very beautifully written for the most part. For much of its length, it could be a mainstream novel with magic realist touches, about the inexorable passage of time and age, what we gain and what we lose and what we only realize in retrospect, and whether there’s anybody out there but us. The fantastical elements have one strand that really worked for me but I suspect comes across as totally ridiculous to some readers, and another that did not work for me at all but I suspect really worked for some readers. So, caveat emptor. I really enjoyed reading it but I wouldn’t rank it as a favorite King; I’d suggest reading the first chapter and seeing if it grabs you.
Huge spoilers.
The fantastical element that I liked was the “secret electricity.” It’s scientifically absurd but it fit with the settings and themes: the young man building things in his basement, the carnival where the blatant fakery disguises the reality beneath, the old-schoolness of it in a book that’s largely about ageing and the passage of time. I also found its details and uses really vivid and fascinating. “Something happened” was genuinely scary, as was the door covered in ivy.
The fantastical element I did not like was that the absolute worst and most terrifying thing, the Greatest Horror of Horrors, was… an Old One and giant ants. Whenever I hit surprise!Lovecraft, my reaction is not to shudder, but to roll my eyes. I’ve read individual Lovecraftian stories that I liked, but I just do not find the mythos scary and in fact find it hard to buy into on an emotional level, so for me, its introduction distances me rather than drawing me in. Also, ants are scary because a million tiny ones could eat you bite by bite. Giant ants are less scary to me than regular ones. So the Ultimate Horror felt flat for me. Similar to IT, where Pennywise scared me way more than a giant spider ever could. Maybe I’m just not into big bugs.
The idea that death is not the end but a gateway to unending horror is a genuinely disturbing concept. It’s just that the nature of the horror fell flat for me. If it was being conscious but lost in an endless void, like “The Jaunt,” or eternally trapped in the pain of your death moment, until you go insane and then you just stay insane and still suffering forever, that would have made it a reveal to give me nightmares.
benefits from not knowing much going in, so I’ll be vague about the plot over the cut. It’s an uneven book, extremely gripping and with some interesting themes, with a fantastic beginning and an ending that would have really worked for me if it had made some choices other than the ones it actually made. For most of the book, the horror elements are backgrounded rather than foregrounded. The first third, which begins with the narrator’s childhood meeting with the new young preacher, who has an interest in electricity and departs under a cloud, is absolutely riveting even though for most of it, nothing particularly dramatic is happening. It’s beautifully written, vivid, and has a masterful use of foreshadowing. (The “cloud” does not involve child abuse. However, there is child death.)
The middle of the book, which follows Jamie into adulthood, is also compelling reading, with some genuinely scary moments. The climax went in a direction that didn’t work for me.
It’s hard to either rec or anti-rec this without spoilers. It’s extremely gripping, has some great moments of subtle horror, and is very beautifully written for the most part. For much of its length, it could be a mainstream novel with magic realist touches, about the inexorable passage of time and age, what we gain and what we lose and what we only realize in retrospect, and whether there’s anybody out there but us. The fantastical elements have one strand that really worked for me but I suspect comes across as totally ridiculous to some readers, and another that did not work for me at all but I suspect really worked for some readers. So, caveat emptor. I really enjoyed reading it but I wouldn’t rank it as a favorite King; I’d suggest reading the first chapter and seeing if it grabs you.
Huge spoilers.
The fantastical element that I liked was the “secret electricity.” It’s scientifically absurd but it fit with the settings and themes: the young man building things in his basement, the carnival where the blatant fakery disguises the reality beneath, the old-schoolness of it in a book that’s largely about ageing and the passage of time. I also found its details and uses really vivid and fascinating. “Something happened” was genuinely scary, as was the door covered in ivy.
The fantastical element I did not like was that the absolute worst and most terrifying thing, the Greatest Horror of Horrors, was… an Old One and giant ants. Whenever I hit surprise!Lovecraft, my reaction is not to shudder, but to roll my eyes. I’ve read individual Lovecraftian stories that I liked, but I just do not find the mythos scary and in fact find it hard to buy into on an emotional level, so for me, its introduction distances me rather than drawing me in. Also, ants are scary because a million tiny ones could eat you bite by bite. Giant ants are less scary to me than regular ones. So the Ultimate Horror felt flat for me. Similar to IT, where Pennywise scared me way more than a giant spider ever could. Maybe I’m just not into big bugs.
The idea that death is not the end but a gateway to unending horror is a genuinely disturbing concept. It’s just that the nature of the horror fell flat for me. If it was being conscious but lost in an endless void, like “The Jaunt,” or eternally trapped in the pain of your death moment, until you go insane and then you just stay insane and still suffering forever, that would have made it a reveal to give me nightmares.
From:
no subject
I sometimes wonder if giant bugs as Just That Horrific are a side effect of cultural and literal backgrounds where there aren't that many big bugs. People I know who come from continents and areas where there are actual giant bugs tend to find Giant Insect/Spider narratives perplexing, whereas the people I know who are freaked by the idea of Giant Bugs tend to come from places where the biggest insect you're likely to come across is an ordinary common cockroach.
From:
no subject
ETA: I just remembered that King wrote a couple Lovecraftian stories that did work for me. My favorite was the short story "1408," which focused on being trapped in an ordinary space (a hotel room) that gets more and more distorted in horrific, inexplicable ways. So the atmosphere of Lovecraft can work for me, but once it gets into literal creatures like big bugs and Cthulu it starts seeming silly.
From:
no subject
I mean I also find his obsession with "I cannot fully understand it therefore it is horrible" kind of a non-starter - like as far as I can tell the deep-horror-augh of Yog-Sohoth is . . . basically that it is beyond human imagining and without the bounds of time and space and so on and THEREFORE is evil which does not make sense to me. XD But on the other hand I know a lot more people that does really freak out.
Whereas he does honestly do pretty well (and thus the aesthetic does pretty well) with the creeping horror of things twisting slowly nauseatingly wrong and malignant, perhaps because it seems that's what he spent his whole life feeling about everything. Which is kind of sad really.
/rambling
From:
no subject
Totally agree, on all points. I also feel kind of bad for Lovecraft. I normally don't feel sorry for bigots but he seems to have been literally phobic, which is not the usual case.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
I guess I thought of it as a possibility because unlike the traditional Hell where you go because you are so great a sinner that there is no hope of redemption through Purgatory, every human ever--good, bad, or indifferent--is enslaved by ants and Mother. Clearly divine judgment is not involved in Revival; instead, people's souls have been grabbed by an alien abomination and her ant farm. So I figured that all bets were off, and that the best thing the humans could do would be to rebel, kill the ants and Mother, and then set about building a place where all humans could be happy and at peace. I.e., heaven.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
Re surprise!Lovecraft: there's a bit in Danse Macabre where he talks about how the audience's imagination can always outdistance what's on the page. The door opens and....behind is a ten-foot bug! "Oh that's okay," the audience says, "I thought it might be a twenty-foot bug." I think Caitlin Kiernan handles Lovecraftian stuff well, mostly because she keeps it very hidden and intense and only lets you see flashes of the horror. Straight up Lovecraft is like a guy in a bug suit.
From:
no subject
But yeah, I am so not-scared of giant bugs. Being chased by a giant bug would be scary, but no more scary than being chased by a mountain lion or being chased by a bunch of people who wanted to hurt/kill me.
From:
no subject
1) There are sufficient links in this for me to think it's in the wider DT universe--stock car number 19, the Gunslingers that become the Chrome Roses--and, basically, this doesn't fit with the DT afterlife at all, and I have a hard time believing King would undermine his primary universe by adding a trapdoor where everyone in it is tormented by giant ants for all of eternity.
2) The resurrected dead doesn't gibe with what Jamie "sees" of the afterlife--he sees people trying to help each other a little, even though they've been there for a while, but the woman who comes back is maddened right away. Less horrified and helpless and more Gage Creed, i.e., not really herself but a trick.
3) The whole book has all these nightmarish reversals of regular King tropes, like the way the "fifth business" concept echoes the ka-tet but this time means they keep reappearing to ruin each other's lives and keep getting further and further apart emotionally the more often they meet. So I buy that King thinks it's his most horrifying book, because it turns all of his usual reassurances inside-out--but he also fundamentally doesn't believe it, so there are loopholes enough to suggest that it's a lie.
Way more theorizing than anyone ever asked for!
From:
no subject
2) That's true. So maybe Cthulhu's mom and her ant army are real, but she's not actually getting everyone in the afterlife, and maybe not getting anyone in the afterlife. She wants to manifest in this world, and is fucking with people in the hope that someone will get desperate enough to do exactly what happened?
3) It feels like King was thinking "What's the most horrifying thing I can imagine?" rather than "What's the most horrible thing that's actually possible?" He has a lot of books where the most horrifying thing is that terrible things happen just because; the aspects of the book that are like that (the car crash, the illnesses people are desperate to have healed, the sister's murder) feel a lot more plausible and visceral to me than the ants.
My big problem was I just didn't believe the ending. I initially attributed it to not believing in the specifics of it, as I have had emotional reactions to eternal damnation stories with different specifics. But now I wonder if there was also the issue of King not believing in universal eternal damnation, period, making the whole thing not ring as true as the earlier bad stuff that he obviously does believe in.
Fifth Business is from a Robertson Davies novel of that title, by the way. I recommend it if you haven't read it.
From:
no subject
I have not, and should. I haven't read any Davies at all.
That's what I was thinking on (2), that she wants despair--I feel like that also fits with the fact that so many people respond to their visions of the terrifying afterlife by killing themselves, which feels like a choice borne of desperation, since it doesn't logically fit. (I personally would vote for as little time with the giant ants as possible, even if only by a day or two.)
My big problem was I just didn't believe the ending. I initially attributed it to not believing in the specifics of it, as I have had emotional reactions to eternal damnation stories with different specifics. But now I wonder if there was also the issue of King not believing in universal eternal damnation, period, making the whole thing not ring as true as the earlier bad stuff that he obviously does believe in.
This sounds right to me. It doesn't scare me, and I also thought that was because it was so ludicrously specific, but I feel like I'm inclined to find holes in its internal plausibility because eternal damnation, let alone universal eternal damnation, is a giant, scarred-from-childhood DNW for me. So I'm glad to see other people feeling like he also just didn't sell it.
I do kind of wish he would borrow the biographical structure of the novel and use it again, because seeing Jamie's whole life from childhood to late middle age (if I'm remembering right) was really affecting, and I found a lot of the bits about getting older and making compromises and relating differently to your family to be moving and compelling.
From:
no subject
I also find eternal damnation or any bad afterlife really scary, also due to childhood issues. I had my parents and their cult telling me that after death some essence of me would live on eternally but my personality would be erased, which I found HORRIFYING, and the nuns at my abusive Catholic school telling me I'd go to Hell. So Revival should have been much scarier to me than it was.
I love Robertson Davies. He has a very specific point of view and some strange opinions, including on Womanhood, but makes up for it by writing some really great female characters.
He has two trilogies; in both, oddly, the middle book is the best. They both involve myth in the contemporary world, and have touches of magic realism. The Deptford trilogy starts with Fifth Business but my favorite book is the middle one, The Manticore, about Jungian analysis and the roots of myth. It made me expect reading Jung himself to be fascinating. (Jung is totally impenetrable.) The third book is about a spooky carnival. The Cornish trilogy is about art and academia, art forgery and spying and the production of an ambitious opera about King Arthur. The first book has some very funny parts but is not my favorite; the second book is wonderful; the third book is also really funny, has fantastic backstage drama (it's mostly about producing the opera) and has really great lesbian and bisexual characters. (The first book has major gay and bisexual characters, but not depicted in a flattering way, though I did enjoy the bisexual antihero.)