A revival needing revision…  ***

Stephen King is a master storyteller.  He has the ability to grip you and keep you anxious to turn the page to see where a story is headed.  Unfortunately, Revival is not one of them..

The story starts out well enough, setting the expectation that this will be one of King’s gems.  Using first person narration, the main character, Jamie Morton, takes us back to his childhood and reveals how he was introduced to the Reverend Charles Jacobs. King has a way of describing childhood experiences that invoke one’s own memory of  days gone by.

Sadly, once we leave Jamie’s early years, the story begins to drift with long narrations of events that at times can only be described as boring.  There is very little conflict to keep us interested and what does exist only makes the reader want to get to the end.

The end is where I had the biggest problem.  Having several options of how to bring the story to an end, King opts for one that left me shaking my head, asking what was his point.  He attempts to make it scary but fails, philosophical but fails. I heard Stephen King  in an interview say that he writes about the things that scare him.  Based on the ending, he must be terrified of death.

As I closed the book, my first thought was, is King just getting lazy.  This had the potential of being a good story, and with another revision or two, Revival could have been another gem from the master storyteller.

This one gets three stars.