Stephen King's 'Revival: A Novel'

Stephen King has never been one to shy away from wrestling with the most important issues of life. He knows how to use the horror genre effectively as a vehicle for sobering reflections on God, good and evil, human nature, love, hope and despair, and the meaning of life.

King is also disturbingly inventive when it comes to portraying evil in all its gory detail. It's been said that we all have a better handle on evil than good because we understand it better. Maybe King's just more honest than most about following that trajectory to its conclusion.

In Revival: A Novel, King has reminded us once again why he is the master in his genre. By blending a number of significant influences in his life (Arthur Machen's "The Great God Pan,"  H.P Lovecraft's  Cthulhu, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein) as well as his religious upbringing, he has crafted a tale that I can best describe as bleak. To give you an idea of just how bleak, I offer something  Bertrand Russell wrote in A Free Man's Worship as a means of comparison:

"That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins--all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built."

Stephen King's 11/22/63: Defying the Dark

“I know life is hard, I think everyone knows that in their hearts, but why does it have to be cruel, as well? Why does it have to bite?”

There’s something about Stephen King’s writing that gets to me. Yes, he has a very grim view of the world.  The darkness in his universe is pervasive, but that's how King gets us to long for the light.

Perhaps I feel this way because I am intrigued by the religious imagery that permeates many of his books. In an interview with NPR, King said the following about his belief in God:

"I choose to believe it.... If you say, 'Well, OK, I don't believe in God. There's no evidence of God,' then you're missing the stars in the sky and you're missing the sunrises and sunsets and you're missing the fact that bees pollinate all these crops and keep us alive and the way that everything seems to work together. Everything is sort of built in a way that to me suggests intelligent design. But, at the same time, there's a lot of things in life where you say to yourself, 'Well, if this is God's plan, it's very peculiar,' and you have to wonder about that guy's personality — the big guy's personality.”

His mesmerizing 11/22/63 demonstrates this peculiar tension between the beauty of creation and the beasts with human nature. Men love their children while they beat their wives. People with the best of intentions inadvertently pave roads to hell. A winsome, religious small town hides perversions and excesses simmering beneath the surface.  These things stubbornly persists because something powerful and purposeful is shaping the course of human history. The past protects even moments of great tragedy as the world unfolds in ways that may be far better than we realize. That does not mean, of course, that we have to like it.

Stephen King's "Under The Dome": A Mid-Season Perspective

Stephen King has a way of peeling the veneer away from both civilization and the people that comprise it.  Most of his literary worlds are very dark, but they are always enlightening.


Under The Dome takes yet another look at what happens when people are given a chance to be themselves. Societal structures keep our collective evil in check; what happens when we are released from the obligation to conform to the moral expectations of those around us? Though the current series is not as good as the book (published in 2009), King's stories are good enough to translate onto the screen, and the series is crushing the summer competition.

"Wealth was the short beer of existence. Power was champagne."

When the mysterious dome descends, it does more than cover the town. It uncovers the true nature of the people trapped within its transparent and indestructible parameters. A love-struck boy kidnaps and imprisons his girlfriend;  a businessman publicly becomes the monster he was privately; a preacher's duplicitous life comes to life; a policewoman's nobility and courage shine.

"A cowardly leader is the most dangerous of men."

As the crisis escalates, the trajectory of people's lives do as well. Those inclined to evil find it increasingly hard to maintain a semblance of normalcy; those inclined toward good find they need to fight more and harder battles. It's not always easy to tell for whom we should cheer, but we certainly know what we hope will happen.

"Full Dark, No Stars": Stephen King's Worlds of Night

 As a writer with a clear eye for good and evil, Stephen King captures the depravity of the human condition remarkably well.  He writes in the afterward to Full Dark, No Stars: “If you’re going into a very dark place…you should take a bright light, and shine it on everything… Bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do.”  

If there were ever a question about whether or not we the people have within us a hidden self capable of doing remarkably foul deeds (as several characters in this collection of short stories do), King resolves it with a resounding, “Yes, there is.”  That light he shines is a revealing one.

The title captures the feel of the stories very well.  This is meant to be a book full of darkness, with no light shining down. One story belies the title – there are glimpses of stars – but by this point the light is small and distant, perhaps seen only because the stars have gone nova.  The bonus story puts out what light remains pretty effectively.

He also writes in the afterward that "people in these stories are not without hope.”  He follows this with the caveat that “our fondest hopes…may sometimes be in vain. Often, even.”  In spite of the evil in most of his characters, he believes “most people are essentially good. I know that I am.”  This seems promising, as he also writes that “the writer’s only responsibility is to look for the truth inside his own heart.”  If King is essentially good, and his stories come from the truth inside his heart, literary magic should follow.

And in some ways it does.  I suspect he writes so bleakly about evil because the goodness within him is appalled by the badness around him. It does seem incongruous, however, that while most of us are apparently essentially good, King’s literary worlds in this book are inhabited by people who are essentially not good at all.  This review of Full Dark will contrast King’s claims of hope, goodness and truth with the focus of his fiction.  I will try not to give away the plots as I offer some comments.