The Hero's Journey Through the Perils of Miracle Cures: A Critical Study of Stephen King's Revival

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to delineate the hero Jamie Morton’s involvement with the negative snowballing of the miracle cures initiated by Charles Jacobs in Stephen King’s horror novel Revival. The negative snowball effect is a process of continuous acceleration that brings about changes in size, importance and magnitude leading to detrimental effects that negatively impact the situation. In the novel, Charles Jacobs is a pastor who is fascinated and obsessed with a mysterious power source he calls ‘secret electricity’. He offers miracle cures and manipulates people suffering from debilitating illnesses into getting zapped by the electricity, driven by self-centred motives to help improvise his devices and techniques. He performs the cure on Jamie too and heals him from his addiction to heroin. Jamie and the other healed persons suffer long-lasting aftereffects that lead only to death. He also forces Jamie to assist him in his final experiment using lightning to learn the fates of his dead wife Patsy and son Morrie through the revival of the dead Mary Fay. Though, through the revival, Jacobs gains insight into what lies in store after death, his actions snowball into an irrepressible monster that ultimately demands his life, freeing Jamie from his obligations to him and the world from the unimaginable terrors of the secret electricity.