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The dedication page of Revival reads:

"This book is for some of the people who built my house:

Mary Shelley
Bram Stoker
H. P. Lovecraft
Clark Ashton Smith
Donald Wandrei
Fritz Leiber
August Derleth
Shirley Jackson
Robert Bloch
Peter Straub

And ARTHUR MACHEN, whose short novel The Great God Pan has haunted me all my life."

If you're familiar with even half of those authors, then you'll most likely know what to expect from Revival. I've always thought of King as a key (if sometimes very subtle) contributor to both 'modern Gothic' and ‘cosmic horror’ fiction, and this book is undoubtedly a proud tribute to his biggest influences.

The novel is written as a memoir (...or a warning) of sorts, from the perspective of one James Morton; beginning in October 1962, when six year old Jamie (youngest of five children in an ordinary family, living in the sleepy little New England town of Harlow, Maine) first encounters the town's new pastor, Charles Jacobs; an amiable, likeable young man who is fascinated by what he calls secret electricity - experiments into which he eventually shares with Jamie.

As the years pass, Jacobs is destined to become Jamie's 'fifth business'; reappearing at various points during his life - first as a help, but later as a major cause for concern - with Jacobs’ obsession with harnessing the full potential of his secret electricity gaining momentum in a travelling evangelist revival show (with prayer healing that would even have the James Randi Education Foundation scratching their heads), before eventually drawing them both towards a final, terrifying revelation.

If you’ve ever read The Body and/or IT, you’ll already know just how well King taps into the nostalgic vein of his youth to breathe a sense of life into these worlds, and Jamie Morton’s journey through the decades in Revival is every bit as well-realised. The build-up is slow, but never ponderous; at no point did I ever feel bored with this story at all. It’s just a total page-turner and managed to hit all the right notes for me.

I confess that I haven’t loved everything that Mr. King has written over the years, and I may even have been slightly guilty of wondering if his best years of writing weren’t well-and-truly behind him. This book just makes me feel like an idiot for even considering it, quite frankly.

The ‘revival’ theme runs through the very heart of this novel - but not just the travelling show; or recovery from addiction; or terminal illness; or madness; or even… other things. No; Revival is, above all else, very definite proof that all the brilliance from Stephen King’s early days - those novels that made you sit up and take notice in the first place - is very much still alive and kicking.