REVIVAL journal #1: Electricity Is In The Air

I started through revival tonight.

About the Journal entries:

Here’s the deal: Journal entries are my thoughts as I read through a book.  There are lots of spoilers because – gasp – I’m talking about the book!  If you don’t want to discuss the book yet, don’t read the journal entries.  Sorry that sounds grouchy.

I’m not offering reviews.  I decided years ago that there are great sites that do reviews of King’s books; my favorite is Lilja’s Library.  Reviews are usually written after the book has been read at least once, sometimes multiple times.  A brief overview of the book is given and usually a final verdict, declaring if the novel is top grade meat or a second edition of The Tommyknockers. I decided instead to journal through the books.  That is: To talk as I read, not knowing as I write each portion how the book will end.  It also allows me to include much more personal notes.

The Old Stephen King Is Back! – not really

The book is being pushed as King back to his old self.  The Stephen King who gave us Pet Sematary and The Shining is “back.”  Whatever.  He never left, ya know?  I understand that the publisher and writer want us to know up front that the novel will be dark; maybe really bleak.  It’s as if everyone has forgotten a set of short novels in Full Dark, No Stars.  Remember 1922?  That was pretty bleak.  And there were rats.

The “old Stephen King” (which makes no sense, because we now HAVE the OLD Stephen King!) won’t be coming back.  Why?  Because even if things have a similar tone to his earlier novels, King himself is a better writer.  The writing is crisper, in many ways even more energetic.  King dives into the story itself with more vigor.  The young Stephen King eased his way into a dark novel – the old guy dives in.  Yeah, there’s character development and stories that build toward the main story; but there are not the long sidebars that King used to offer up.  I can’t think of another way to put it, but his writer is crisper.  That sounds like potato chips.

Army Men

A strange thing happened as I read the opening scene in Revival – I became suspicious that Stephen King had somehow spied on a childhood event.  In the novel, a boy named Jamie meets the new preacher, a man named Charles Jacobs.  The boy, six I think, is playing his army men in front of his house when the shadow of a man disturbs his play.

When I was a boy, I had a huge collection of army men.  Our family lived next to the church.  One day while I was playing, a big ethnic church event was taking place.  (Korean, I think.)  As I played a shadow fell across my army men.  I looked up, and an Asian man had come up to the house.  At first I thought he was going to ask for my parents; but instead he began to speak to me.  “I want one,” He said.  Huh?  He held up a single finger. “Just one.”  Then, rather boldly, he reached down into the grass where I had sat up my army men and plucked up one of the troops.  “Just one,” he said.  I did not protest – I had a billion and my parents had taught me to “share,” (something Jamie’s parents have also taught him to do with his army men.)

I have wondered sometimes what that man anted with my single green soldier.  Was there something unique about mine? Was he an Asian preacher who used that toy to hold up in church and condemn American kids for playing war?  Was it personal for him? I don’t know.  I was too young to look at an adult and say, “You can have it, but what do you want it for.”

Electricity

Revival is a book about electricity. The power of electricity to heal a boys voice.  Electricity as a picture of the Gospel.  Electricity to light a miniature town.  As I was walking/running (mostly walking) and listening to the novel, I was loving all the electricity talk.  But at points, buzzing over me in the quiet desert was that sound of electricity.  It burns in the air at spots, humming a steady reminder that it’s there.

Over the town was a pretty bright moon tonight.  I ran down a long hill beside the highway coming into town, and then looked back.  Overhead the electric lines hummed.  The moon hung over the hill, and the nights sky was absolutely huge.

The promise of something Frankenstein-like – something with electricity – has me excited.

Haunted Religion

Remember that short novel of King’s, Secret Window?  The writer is accused of stealing a story.  Part of me keeps doing a slap to the head.  For years I’ve been thinking that an evil preacher would be the perfect set up for a novel.  What if a preacher fame to town with the power to heal – maybe raise the dead – but his powers were not from God?

Some church’s are spooky places.  Send the crowd away and walk through long corridors, and you might be surprised.

No real fears about losing the novel I’ve got tied up inside.  Just real pleasure at reading King do his magic.

Why Revival Makes Me Uneasy:

I approach Revival with some hesitation.  I’m not sure I’m going to like this.  In fact, I’m pretty sure I won’t.  I downloaded the book to my ipod last night, but waited all day to even start listening.  In fact, I put off walking tonight because – why?  A new Stephen King book should propel me into the dark desert.  I realized that I was dreading this book.  A new Stephen King book about a preacher who loses his faith?  I wasn’t sure I was totally game. This one promised to strike home a little closer than I was totally comfortable with.

The book is quite addicting.  And here’s what I appreciate so far; what makes it less painful. Thus far, the people of faith are painted as genuine believers.  They aren’t nasty hypocrites – though I’m sure there are plenty of those.  The church goers have arguments with their spouses, financial and health problems, and suspicions about the preacher.  They’re very real; and King doesn’t mock their faith.  Why am I on edge about this?  Two words: Needful Things.  In Needful Things in particular, and several other novels as well, it has seemed King painted Christians – Baptist and Methodist in particular – with a pretty wide brush.   “Self righteous worms,” would seem to be words that would appropriately describe some of the people who inhabit Castle Rock.

Now King has written some great stuff about religion – and Christianity in general.  And I’ve documented that pretty carefully in Stephen King, A Face Among The Masters.  The Green Mile in particular was almost a parable of Christianity.  But there is a stark difference in a book like The Green Mile and Needful Things; organized religion.  In The Green Mile, King gives an enthusiastic retelling of some central aspects of the Gospel.  What the novel does not have is any real hint of church.  After all, they’re on death row.  But when we get to Needful Things, we have Baptist and Catholics calling names, fighting and getting pretty nasty – in Jesus name.

Of course, I’m well aware that happens.  But the people who do those things are all a little deeper than King has previously shown the ability to explore.  It seemed that the religious church goers were simply sprinkled into Needful Things when King needed bias, ignorant wide-eyed idiots spoiling for a fight.  And there are certainly folk like that!  But most people in church aren’t; and many in church are the salt of the earth type.

The question I approach the book with is: Are you going to play fair, Mr. King?  Or are you going to use your big paint brush and cast everyone who loves the church in the same hues?

King’s own views on church, religion and God seem to be evolving as he moves further away form the Methodist faith he grew up with.  Some of this thinking is really digging at a question: can King deal with characters who he might personally disagree with -- politically or spiritually?  Will be draw a literary straw-man and use them as a kind of punching bag, or will he show them as truly three dimensional characters?  So the question seems valid.  Is everyone going to be Carrie White’s mama, or Mother Carmody, or reverend Rose?

In the early pages of Revival, we are given people of genuine faith living out very real lives.  They are not fanatics or nuts.