Revival

Lore & Background

In the small Maine town at the heart of Revival, Frank Dodd occupies a role that defies easy categorization. By day he is the electrician who keeps the lights on and the machinery running; by night and on Sundays he functions as a kind of itinerant pastor, holding revival meetings in the church basement where the townspeople gather to feel something larger than themselves. He is beloved, trusted, and deeply strange—men who speak of him describe a warmth that borders on the uncanny, a sense that he is listening to frequencies no one else can hear.

The inciting event of the story is the death of Jake Epps's father in a car accident. His mother, Ruth, desperate and grieving, turns to Dodd, who performs a ritual that should not work but does: the father returns. But he is not the man who left. Something has been added to him, something that hums and crackles like a live wire, and Dodd's relationship with the Epps family—and with the town—shifts from benevolent to possessive. Over the years that follow, Dodd's influence spreads, his revival meetings grow more fervent, and the boundary between the sacred and the monstrous erodes until the town itself becomes a kind of organism sustained by his will.

Jake, now an adult, looks back on these years with the detached horror of someone trying to understand a childhood that was, in every meaningful sense, a captivity. The novel's central question is not whether God exists but what happens when a single human being decides he is the conduit, the priest, and the congregation all at once—and what the dead have to say when they are forced to speak through a living mouth.

Reader's Guide

Revival | 2014 | Supernatural Horror / Literary Fiction

The novel follows Jacob Epps, a young boy in a small Maine town whose father is killed in a car accident. His mother seeks the help of Frank Dodd, the town's electrician who also serves as an informal pastor, and Dodd performs a ritual that resurrects the father—though the man who returns is fundamentally altered. As Jake grows from childhood into adulthood, Dodd's influence over the town intensifies, his revival meetings become all-consuming, and the true, terrifying nature of the power he wields is gradually revealed. The story is told in two time frames: Jake's childhood and his adult retrospective.

The primary setting is a deliberately unnamed town in Maine, giving the story a universal, archetypal quality. The key characters are Jake Epps, his mother Ruth, the resurrected father, and Frank Dodd. The novel is a standalone work and does not connect to the Dark Tower, the Dan McCrae series, or any other King franchise. It stands as a self-contained exploration of faith, power, and the thin membrane between the living and the dead.

Readers who enjoy King's more literary, character-driven horror—works like The Stand's quieter moments or the psychological depth of The Shining—will find Revival's slow, creeping dread and its focus on a single family's unraveling particularly resonant.

Did You Know?

• King has stated in interviews that Frank Dodd was loosely inspired by a real electrician-pastor he knew, though the character is entirely fictional and the story is his own invention.
• The town in which the novel is set is deliberately left unnamed, a choice King made to give the setting a universal, archetypal quality rather than anchoring it to a specific real place.
• Unlike many of King's novels, Revival contains no overt supernatural entities in the traditional sense—no demons, no cosmic beings.