He’s outside playing with his toy soldiers when a stranger appears: Jamie Morton, the novel’s narrator, recalls an incident from when he was 6 years old, the youngest of five children in a boisterous, big-hearted clan. “Revival” opens in a place nearly as remote from our modern world as Machen’s gaslit London: rural Harlow, Maine, in the early 1960s. King updates Machen’s fin-de-siècle setting and erotic subtext, in which a 17-year-old girl is subjected to a primitive lobotomy that allows her to glimpse the terrifying abyss that underlies our world. With “Revival,” he names Arthur Machen’s “ The Great God Pan” (1894), one of the greatest supernatural tales ever written. Stephen King’s splendid new novel, “ Revival,” offers 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.” King has always been generous in acknowledging the inspiration for his fiction.
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