csmonitor.com: for the millions of us who keep ignoring Camus and Proust in favor of “Cujo” and “Carrie,” King scatters a few Easter eggs in “Revival.” Among them: references to the amusement park setting in his short novel “Joyland” and a setting in Maine near Castle Rock, King’s version of Yoknapatawpha County. This book isn’t as much fun as “Mr. Mercedes,” published way back in the summer of 2014, but King fans won’t lose any faith in his powers while breezing through “Revival.
nytimes.com: He does not ramble on, as he did with “Dreamcatcher” and “Duma Key,” which at 600-plus pages each both seemed endless. “Under the Dome,” his best behemoth of recent years, might have been 1,074 pages, but each one was worth it. “Revival” is much shorter, but it, too, is a well-built book that unfolds on a big canvas.
. . . and: “Revival” winds up with the idea that to be human, you must know what it is to be inhuman — and to know that only this thin partition separates that horror from ordinary life. So it’s not just a book that delivers its share of jolts and then lets the reader walk away unscathed. Older and wiser each time he writes, Mr. King has moved on from the physical fear that haunted him after he was struck by a van while out walking to a more metaphysical, universal terror. He writes about things so inevitable that he speaks to us all.
bostonglobe.com: Stephen King has taken a more expansive — and less apologetic — approach to describing the world. In book after book, he has poked, prodded, and thumbed open loopholes in the fabric of reality. He has questioned the mysterious, and then expanded on it in novels of fabulous and intensely wrought prose.
I wish I liked it as much as most other readers seem to have liked it.
ReplyDeleteWell, I'm still reading it, and I'm on the fence. But, so far it's a lot better than anything that's been put to screen this year bearing Stephen King's name.
ReplyDeleteThat Boston Globe article seems a bit extreme to me, despite it's positive review.
ReplyDeleteThen again, based on hints and otherwise outright statements, this books seems to be doing something different that none of the others perhaps technically never did. He's mentioned religion and ideas of Faith in his other books before, but so far as I can remember, it's never been something people thought needed going into all that much. I'll admit I didn't even think it worth mentioning. I don't even know if it should be considered all that important even now, except that a lot of comments, both here and in various reviews, make me wonder if at least King is taking a more confrontational stance on these ideas than in earlier volumes.
I don't know if that's true or not, though for what it's worth, I doubt that the character of Jacobs stands for King's convictions. This whole story seems to me to be more about King's ruminations on the state of religion in America today, and perhaps his fears about what happens when people are "half-hearted" (lukewarm I think is the word I'm looking for).
That's just a guess, but I admit, it's interesting to see a King book generate this much depth of discussion.
ChrisC