58 pages • 1 hour read
Stephen KingRevival
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 12-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 12 Summary: “Forbidden Books. My Main Vacation. The Sad Story of Mary Fay. The Coming of the Storm.”
Brianna emails Jamie to tell him that she looked up the book Jacobs mentioned in New York, De Vermis Mysteriis. The text is classified as a forbidden book or “grimoire” by the Catholic Church, as it teaches readers how to gain power by occult means. The church supposedly destroyed many of the book’s copies, but Brianna supposes that Jacobs may have acquired the last remaining ones. She quotes the American weird fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft, who lifted a line from De Vermis for his fictional grimoire, the Necronomicon: “That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons, even death may die” (389). Brianna urges Jamie to stay away from Jacobs, believing that his plans are dangerous. Jamie nevertheless decides to fulfill his promise not only to repay the debt owed for Jacobs’s help but also to satisfy his own curiosity.
Jamie asks Hugh for a few months off from work. Hugh becomes pensive thinking about the future of Wolfjaw. Jamie asks him if he’s had any prismatics lately. Hugh recalls a recurring dream in which he hears his dead mother knocking at the door of his childhood home. He wakes up before he can open the door.
After surviving a second stroke, Jacobs asks Jamie to return to Maine, promising to let him go after two months. Jamie calls Jenny afterward and learns that she is going on vacation soon. Someone else will look after Astrid. Jamie checks in at a hotel to wait for Jacobs’s next call. Near the end of July, a heatwave rolls into New England. Jacobs calls Jamie over that weekend.
Jamie is upset to see Jenny’s car in the Goat Mountain parking lot, worrying that Astrid is there. He soon learns that Rudy and Norma have quit their respective jobs, leaving Jamie and Jenny to fill in their roles. Because Jenny is busy preparing for the experiment, Jacobs asks Jamie to assist him with daily life. Jamie reminisces about the way Jacobs used to be when they first met, engaging Jamie with genuine curiosity. The current Jacobs orders people to do his bidding without explaining his reasons. Jacobs also mocks Jamie’s grief and drug addiction. Jamie retorts that Jacobs has an addiction to secret electricity.
Over the next three days, Jamie looks after Jacobs. The nightmare of his dead family and the moldy birthday cake returns. He later sees Jenny at the resort and learns that she has an agreement of her own to fulfill with Jacobs. Jamie realizes that Jenny and Astrid are partners. They intended to get married before Astrid became ill. Jenny leaves again to continue the preparations for Jacobs’s experiment.
The following day, a thunderstorm approaches Goat Mountain, and Jacobs declares it time for the experiment. Before they leave for Skytop, Jacobs explains that he used the money from his revival career to buy himself privacy and investigative services. He used the latter to locate people who had rare diseases. This led Jacobs to Mary Fay, a woman he describes as his “Patient Omega.” Mary Fay became an orphan at a young age when she and her family experienced a terrible car accident. During her hospitalization, Mary Fay received a blood transfusion that would give her variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (commonly known as “mad cow disease”) many years later. In the interim, she lived with relatives and became a legal secretary. She later quit law school to raise her son, Victor, as a single mother. At present, Victor does not have the prion that triggers vCJD. Sometime after Mary Fay began to manifest symptoms, Jacobs agreed to take on her case. He now instructs Jamie to bring his mahogany box, which contains a new device.
Jamie drives Jacobs to Skytop while Jacobs shares De Vermis’s insight about the force that powers the universe. Jamie suggests that it is lightning, but Jacobs answers that lightning and secret electricity merely feed the force he is seeking. His ultimate objective is to glimpse the other universe and see that force for himself.
At Skytop, the old cabin has been replaced by a small cottage where Jenny is waiting. Inside, Jacobs offers them whiskey before they begin, but Jenny refuses and enters another room. Jamie disrespectfully takes his drink before Jacobs can finish his toast. Jacobs challenges Jamie to admit that he is curious. When Jenny returns, she takes the drink, confirming that she has done what Jacobs asked of her. Jacobs informs Jamie about a revolver he can use during the experiment. He knows that there are sentient forces in the other universe that they are not meant to see, and he wants Jamie to arm himself as insurance against them.
Jamie asks how Jacobs hopes to cure Mary Fay. Jacobs reveals that he picked Mary Fay because he knows he can’t cure her. In fact, he instructed Jenny to turn off Mary Fay’s ventilator, meaning that she has been dead since the moment they left Goat Mountain. His experiment will be to revive Mary Fay and make her speak about her experience in the world beyond life. Jamie is livid with Jacobs, but Jacobs knows Jamie can’t escape in such strong weather. Jacobs entices Jamie to stay by asking whether he wants to know what happened to Claire after she died. He also reassures Jamie that Mary Fay consented to the experiment in exchange for financial support for Victor. Jamie follows Jacobs into Mary Fay’s room, hoping that nothing will happen.
Chapter 13 Summary: “The Revival of Mary Fay.”
Jacobs instructs Jamie to retrieve the new device from the mahogany box, a metallic headband that glows with every flash of lightning. They work together to fasten the device around Mary Fay’s head. Jamie realizes that Jacobs’s true motive for discovering the world beyond life is to expose the fraudulence of organized religion. When Jamie asks where the headband’s control box is, Jacobs reveals that it is Jamie. When Jacobs cured him years ago, he stored secret electricity in Jamie. He alone can activate the headband.
Jamie decides that he no longer wants anything to do with the experiment. He tries to pull off the headband, but Jacobs wrestles him away. As the storm intensifies, the headband glows brighter. Jamie hears the sound of everyone Jacobs ever cured wailing. Jenny abruptly leaves.
When the storm dies down, so does the headband. Jacobs tries to wake Mary Fay up, but she doesn’t respond. Jamie pulls him away. As they struggle with one another, Mary Fay starts humming. She opens her eyes, which are blank and no longer human. Jacobs demands to know what she’s seen. Mary Fay grabs his wrist, which nearly causes him to fall. Jamie grabs on to Jacobs to stabilize him and is granted the same vision that Mary Fay is passing along to Jacobs: a ruined city populated by naked, marching people. The people are pushed through the streets by giant ants. Jamie sees holes in the sky in lieu of stars, behind which are the entities that power the universe. Jamie understands that the ants serve the entities. Claire, Patsy, and Morrie are likely among the marching crowd. The truth of this universe shocks Jamie to his very core. He shouts, “No!”, eliciting the attention of the dead, the ants, and a new entity tearing through the sky. Jamie identifies this entity as Mother, whose only desire is to silence Jamie’s defiance.
Jamie pulls himself away from Jacobs, ending his access to the vision. Still bound to Mary Fay, Jacobs calls out for Patsy and Morrie, prompting Mother to respond that they are “[g]one to serve the Great Ones, in the Null. No death, no light, no rest” (442). Morrie and Patsy’s screaming faces appear on a claw that exits the mouth of Mary Fay. Mary Fay’s face continues to morph into something inhuman, forcing Jacobs to his knees. Jamie retrieves the revolver and shoots Mary Fay until her corpse goes still. The claw disappears.
Jacobs falls to his side, still frozen in shock. Jamie laughs over the way Jacobs looks like he has been shocked by electricity. When he is certain that Mary Fay won’t reawaken, he leaves the cottage. He sees a rainbow and is viscerally reminded of Hugh’s prismatics. He considers suicide but blacks out when he remembers Mother’s words to Jacobs.
Chapter 14 Summary: “Aftereffects.”
Three years later, Jamie is living in Hawaii near Conrad. He regularly sees a psychiatrist named Edward Braithwaite to help him process his experiences with Jacobs. Braithwaite interprets some of Jamie’s experiences as narrative flourishes.
Jamie recalls the aftermath of Jacobs’s last experiment. Half-conscious, Jamie drove himself back to Goat Mountain Resort to recover. He then returned to Skytop to inspect the scene. Everything was as Jamie had left it except for Jacobs, who appeared to have died while crawling to reach the revolver. Jamie realized that at some point around his blackout, he had returned to position Jacobs’s body as though he had killed Mary Fay.
Jamie tells Braithwaite that he decided to claim he was completely absent during Mary Fay’s revival and killing. Since Jenny was the only person who could have contradicted this story, he tried to contact her. However, after Jenny got home from Skytop, she was killed by Astrid, who died by suicide afterward. Many of Jacobs’s cured congregants, including Al Stamper, would go on to kill others before dying as well. Brianna cut off all contact with Jamie after Hugh killed Georgia and died by suicide. Jamie inherited Hugh’s estate after Brianna rejected it as “tainted.”
Braithwaite challenges Jamie’s vision of the Null by citing the many conflicting visions people have had of the afterlife. Jamie invites the doctor to indulge his own theory. His vision has made all of life’s endeavors seem meaningless. To get himself through each day, Jamie regularly tells himself that Mother lied.
After leaving Goat Mountain, Jamie returned to his childhood home to seek the comfort of Terry’s embrace. However, when Cara Lynne saw Jamie, she screamed in terror. Afraid of hurting them, Jamie now believes he will never see his brother’s family again.
Jamie assures Braithwaite that he doesn’t have the inclination to kill anyone or die by suicide. He privately infers that he has been spared this impulse because he was Jacobs’s key. He also fears, however, that Mother is planning a final act of revenge against him.
After his latest appointment with Braithwaite, Jamie goes to visit Conrad in the same psychiatric center. Conrad became a patient after attempting to kill his boyfriend. Conrad almost died by suicide as well, but his boyfriend regained consciousness and saved his life. This confirmed Jamie’s suspicion that Conrad’s cure was not a placebo. Nevertheless, Conrad’s survival gives Jamie hope that one can survive the worst of the aftereffects.
After leaving Conrad’s suite, Jamie sometimes hears a voice calling his name. When he turns to look, he sees the door covered in dead ivy. He walks away from Mother and the Null, knowing that someday, he will eventually come to her.
Chapters 12-14 Analysis
The last three chapters see Jamie and Jacobs’s final encounter, which coincides with Jacobs’s last experiment—a sign of how intertwined the two men’s lives have been. In this climactic moment, Jacobs’s motivations are finally revealed to both Jamie and the reader: He wants to assure himself of Patsy and Morrie’s fates in the afterlife while also exposing the frauds of religion. Despite his repeated attempts to reinvent himself, Jacobs has thus held on to the great tragedy of his first life as the driving force behind all the others. Ironically, this turns him into a fraud who mirrors the religions he claims to hate. He has become progressively less concerned with the collateral damage of his experiments. His contempt for the common person, as revealed in Chapter 9, comes out of selfishness: He wants people to know his pain, but because they want to heal themselves, he doesn’t mind hurting them or cheating them. This culminates in the way he uses Mary Fay, valuing her purely because of the disease she has.
Jamie is nevertheless drawn to Jacobs because of his own curiosity, which not only speaks to the complex dynamics of their relationship but also to The Dangers of Curiosity. Even though Jamie sees the worst of humanity through Jacobs’s character arc, he also relates to him as someone driven by grief to commit desperate actions. His own middle age compounds his curiosity, pushing him to see if Jacobs’s experiments can offer him some assurance of his loved ones’ well-being in the afterlife. However, he changes his mind when he realizes that Jacobs has never wanted to help him but has simply brought Jamie along as another tool to use. He thus becomes the oldest victim of Jacobs’s fraudulence, which even extends to Jacobs’s assurance that Conrad’s healing was a placebo. As an event that dates to Jamie’s childhood, this transforms Jamie’s understanding of their entire dynamic: Jamie declared his love for Jacobs in Chapter 3 but now feels that that love was built on lies.
Jacobs’s death eliminates the novel’s principal antagonist, but this is little comfort to Jamie, as the shadow of Jacobs over Jamie’s life is replaced by the shadow of Mother. The knowledge of what awaits him after death haunts him, making the rest of life feel meaningless. The other people who have been cured by Jacobs seek death to escape their visions of the world beyond life, accelerating the transformation of that vision into reality in a way that underscores the final chapters’ atmosphere of futility. This is where the novel dips into cosmic horror. The revival of Mary Fay plays on the reader’s expectations by introducing unspoken cosmic rules. Mother cruelly taunts Jacobs by drawing out the faces of Patsy and Morrie through the claw that emerges from Mary Fay. More haunting than the unknown nature of the creature that tries to enter the living world is the knowledge that it feeds on the suffering of innocents like Patsy and Morrie for some purpose that humans cannot comprehend.
When the novel ends, Jamie has reinvented himself one last time, starting life again in Hawaii. He feels powerless to stop whatever will happen to him after death, though his faith that he can escape the aftereffects of his treatment tempers the sense of helplessness. This brings the novel back to The Emotional Costs of Starting Life Anew as a theme, suggesting that as difficult as reinvention is, it is preferable to the alternative.
Related Titles
By Stephen King
