[1] The novel was first mentioned by King on June 20, 2013, while doing a video chat with fans as part of promoting the then-upcoming Under the Dome TV series.
He goes to a state fair that night in search of drugs, instead finding Jacobs performing an act in front of a large audience called “Portraits in Lightning”.
Jacobs asks a young woman named Cathy Morse to volunteer for the act, where she sits in a chair blindfolded while he takes her photograph.
After being treated, Jamie experiences strange side effects, including sleepwalking and jabbing himself in the arm with sharp objects while in a fugue state, as if trying to inject heroin.
Yates shows Jamie a poster on a website where Jacobs is performing revival tours using electricity (although he is pretending to be a faith healer, using the power of God to heal others).
Several years later, Jamie receives correspondence from Jacobs, including a letter from his childhood sweetheart Astrid, claiming she has cancer.
He now intends to harness a massive surge of this energy from a lightning rod and channel it into a terminally ill woman named Mary Fay, whom he has relocated to his lab.
Revival generally received positive reviews, with many critics noting the book's nods to classics of the horror genre, such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan, and the cosmic-horror of H. P. Lovecraft.
Trussoni noted that the book "is filled with cultural allusions both high and low: In addition to the Bible and Frankenstein, there are references to Thomas Edison's work at Menlo Park, Dan Brown, The X-Files, the Forbidden Books (that is, grimoires banned and burned by the Catholic Church) ... As the Kingian references pile up, and become layered into the events of the fictional world, you fall deeper and deeper under the story's spell, almost believing that Jamie's nightmarish experiences actually happened.
"[5] Elizabeth Hand, writing in The Washington Post also highlights Revival's influences: "King's restrained prose explodes in an ending that combines contemporary realism with cosmic horror reminiscent of H. P. Lovecraft's fiction and the classic film Quatermass and the Pit.
The tormented relationship between Jamie Morton and Charles Jacobs takes on the funereal shading of an Arthur Miller tragedy."
King's storytelling is praised as offering "the atavistic pleasure of drawing closer to a campfire in the dark to hear a tale recounted by someone who knows exactly how to make every listener's flesh crawl when he whispers, 'Don't look behind you.
East praises the story's beginning, but opined that "Revival takes a turn for the ridiculous" after moving past the protagonist's childhood.
Club, offered a similar criticism: "Virtually all of Revival is a slow build that sometimes feels suspiciously like a shaggy-dog story, one which may not have a punchline.
King's fans, familiar with his sprawling voice and comfortably compelling style, may be perfectly content to hang out with him on this leisurely stroll toward eventual horror.