Revival
Published: 11, November 2014
Genre: American, Classic, Fiction, Horror, Literary, Literature, Mystery, Psychic, Supernatural, Suspense, Thriller
Check out the review of this book here:
Summary
Jamie Morton is ecstatic when Charles Jacobs, a new Methodist pastor, arrives in town. Almost everyone in the little Maine community falls in love with Jacobs, his lovely wife, and their young boy.
Jacobs leads weekly Ministry Youth Fellowship meetings for the children of the community, where he discusses his interest in electricity and innovations with them, his wife performs music for them, and they play with his little son Morrie (although Jamie is clearly favored over all the other children by Jacobs).
When Jamie's elder brother, Conrad, better known as "Con," is injured in a skiing accident, rendering him unable to talk and creating family hardship owing to the high expense of care, Jacobs urges Jamie to bring him over as he may be able to assist him.
When Jamie and his elder sister Claire accomplish this, Jacobs wraps a low-voltage belt around Con's neck, and to everyone's surprise, Con is able to talk almost immediately.
Mrs. Jacobs and her kid are killed in a horrific car accident, and everything changes all too quickly.
Bereaved, the reverend denounces God and religion during a sermon and is expelled from the town.
Jamie, distraught that Jacobs would be leaving town, goes to visit him before he departs, thanking him for all he accomplished for Con, but Jacobs maintains it was all a placebo effect.
Jamie grows up to be a musician and begins to use heroin. His band abandoned him at a hotel when he was on tour after he missed many of their shows due to his addiction.
He goes to the hotel desk to pay for another night, but his credit card is already maxed out. That night, he travels to a state fair in quest of drugs but instead discovers Charles Jacobs playing "Portraits in Lightning" in front of a big audience.
Jacobs gets Cathy Morse, a young lady, to volunteer for the performance, in which she sits in a chair blindfolded while he photographs her, and after a blue burst of light flashes all across the theater, an image of her emerges on a plate.
He then offers to do the same for anyone else for a fee. Jacobs recognizes Jamie in the crowd right away, and Jamie quickly falls out and wakes up in Jacobs' camper van, where he offers to "cure" Jamie's ailment with a modest application of electricity when he is healthy enough.
Jamie experienced bizarre side effects after treatment, including sleepwalking and jabbing himself in the arm with sharp objects while in a dreamlike state as if attempting to inject heroin.
Jacobs is subsequently assaulted by Cathy Morse's father when he claims Jacob's image inspired her to attempt to steal a set of diamond earrings from a jeweler, which resulted in her incarceration.
Before Jacobs leaves town again, he sends Jamie to Hugh Yates, who hires him at a music recording studio.
Many years later, Yates summons Jamie to his office and they discuss their experiences with Jacobs' treatments and the consequences of them (Yates had been cured of Ménière's disease many years before and had suffered blackouts and visions he calls "prismatics" where he could see colors shifting back and forth and felt like he could see into another world shortly after being treated).
Yates shows Jamie a banner from a website where Jacobs is holding revival tours using electricity (despite appearing to be a faith healer, utilizing God's power to cure people), and they go to one of his performances, but Yates immediately departs.
When Jamie asks him what occurred, he claims that for the first time in a long time, he had a "prismatic" experience while Jacobs was curing people, in which he saw the people as huge ants.
Jamie begins to investigate the many people Jacobs has treated. Many of them, it turns out, have had similar negative effects, and some have even murdered themselves and others as a result (including Cathy Morse who recently took her own life).
He eventually learns that Jacobs has been reading esoteric works such as De Vermis Mysteriis.
Jamie hunts down Jacobs and visits his home to confront him about his treatments and to inform him about the side effects that the individuals he is helping have been suffering.
But to his surprise, Jacobs has been keeping track of them all along and claims that only a small number of people have significant aftereffects and that he is no longer healing people.
Jacobs offers to make Jamie his assistant and pay him much more than Yates does, but Jamie declines and goes.
Several years later, Jamie receives a letter from Jacobs, which includes a letter written by his childhood girlfriend Astrid to Jacobs, stating she has a terminal illness.
Jacobs promises to treat her, but only if Jamie agrees to be his personal assistant for one more experiment. Jamie agrees hesitantly, and Astrid is cured.
Jamie assists Jacobs in preparing for his final experiment: Jacobs has found what he refers to as "hidden electricity," an all-powerful energy source that he has used to produce his miraculous cures throughout the years.
He now plans to channel a large rush of this energy through a lightning rod into a terminally ill woman called Mary Fay, whom he has transferred to his lab.
Jacobs aims to resurrect Mary Fay after her death, not in the traditional sense, but in the sense that she will be clinically dead but able to interact with Jacobs and inform him about the afterlife and what happened to his wife and child after they died.
The experiment is successful, but not in the way that Jacobs intended. The resurrected Mary Fay does become a portal to the afterlife, but, much to Jacobs and Jamie's chagrin; there is no Heaven and no reward for faith.
Instead, the afterlife is revealed to be "The Null," a horrible world of disorder where departed souls are tormented by Ant creatures who serve crazy, Lovecraftian deities, the most powerful of which is known as "Mother."
As "she" possesses a claw formed of human faces, it is inferred that victims are fed to Mother.
Mother takes over Mary Fay's body, changing her into a monstrous creature, and tries to murder Jacobs.
Jamie shoots Mother with Jacobs' revolver and she flees the scene, leaving Mary's body behind.
A terrified Jacobs has a deadly stroke, and Jamie arranges his corpse to appear as though he shot Mary. Jamie runs away from the situation and relocates to Hawaii.
Several of the people Jacobs treats later go insane and murder themselves and others, including Hugh Yates and Astrid, who murders both her lover and herself.
Jamie, one of Jacobs' few survivors, is forced to rely extensively on pharmaceuticals. He tells a psychiatrist about his vision of The Null, but he is dismissed.
He admits and finds solace in the idea that the visions were "false." but the novel ends with Jamie going to visit his brother Con, who has spent the last two years in a psychiatric hospital after attacking his partner (which Jamie blames on Jacobs's treatment of Con's injury decades before), but as he goes to leave, he sees a door calling his name and ignores it, but realizes that one day he would die and be confined in The Null under Mother's tyranny.
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