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 7-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “A Homecoming. Wolfjaw Ranch. God Heals Like Lightning. Deaf in Detroit. Prismatics.”
Jamie returns to Harlow after his father dies in 2003. He observes how much the town has grown in his absence while also taking note of the things that have remained the same. Arriving at his old house, Jamie is filled with dread when he has a vision of his first car, which contains old novels gifted to him by his mother. In the dining room of the house, he does not find Terry, who still lives there, but his dead family members—Dick, Laura, Andy, and Claire—all in various states of decay. On the dining table is a moldy birthday cake, which breaks apart when a large ant climbs out of it. Patsy and Morrie Jacobs join them. All of them sing the words “Something happened…TO YOU!” to the tune of “Happy Birthday” (211). Jamie screams.
The encounter with the dead is revealed to be Jamie’s recurring nightmare. While Andy is still alive, Jamie uses the knowledge he gleans from his dream to warn Andy about his death from prostate cancer. Andy dismisses the warning, though he eventually gets screened for prostate cancer and has an operation. He dies a few years later of a stroke.
In 2008, Jamie wakes up from the dream, sensing something female and malevolent waiting for him. Now in his early fifties, Jamie lives a peaceful existence working as a foreman at the Wolfjaw Ranch recording studio. Jamie got the job after introducing himself to studio owner Hugh Yates, who owed Charles Jacobs a favor. Hugh intended to let Jamie work as the previous foreman’s understudy, but when the foreman was forced to take early retirement, Jamie was offered a permanent role. Jamie usually looks after the studio to make sure everything is running according to schedule, though he occasionally fills in as a recording session player and teaches music to teenagers.
One morning, after Jamie does an initial studio inspection, Hugh summons him to his office at the ranch. Jamie encounters Hugh’s bookkeeper, Georgia Donlin, who indicates that Hugh is both upset and amazed by whatever he’s discovered. Jamie enters Hugh’s office and learns that Hugh saw an advertisement for a grand gospel healing revival tour featuring C. Danny Jacobs. In the ad, Jacobs claims to have healed a boy who had muscular dystrophy using holy rings. Hugh wants Jamie to accompany him to see what has become of Jacobs.
Jamie explains his childhood connection to the pastor. Hugh shows Jamie a video testimonial of the boy Jacobs healed, Robert Rivard. Jamie points out that one of the Bible verses Jacobs includes in his advertisement concerns lightning not as a form of healing but as a manifestation of the apocalypse. However, Hugh continuously alludes to the favor he owes Jacobs. His own music career was cut short when he developed Ménière’s disease, which caused him to become deaf. Living briefly in Detroit, Hugh sought various treatments to relieve his nausea. During this time, he met Jacobs, who was working as the proprietor of a small electronics store. Hugh passed out in the store due to malnutrition, prompting Jacobs to offer a special treatment. Hugh hesitated to accept until Jacobs convinced him that electricity was the basic principle of all life and that the treatment would only use low-voltage electricity. Jacobs placed rings against Hugh’s ears and then activated the device, causing Hugh to black out. Hugh also experienced a snapping noise, involuntary movement, a metallic taste, and intense emotions. Afterward, Hugh was no longer deaf. In exchange, Jacobs asked Hugh for help storing his laboratory equipment.
Jamie theorizes aloud that Jacobs wanted to maintain some kind of relationship with Hugh to study him for aftereffects. The most prominent aftereffect Hugh experienced was a series of blackouts, during which Hugh would take off his clothes without realizing it. Soon after, he began to experience what he calls “prismatics,” a series of shapes and colors infringing upon his normal vision. As the shapes became clearer, Hugh could perceive the true nature of the world behind the one he lived in, which terrified him enough to wish that they would never happen again.
Jamie promises to share his experience of Jacobs’s treatment after dinner that night, saying that it is generally the same, with the exception of the prismatics. He withholds the details of his recurring nightmare. Hugh urges Jamie to come to Jacobs’s revival show. Jamie looks up Jacobs on Google and learns how the traveling pastor has built his reputation across the country over the last few years. To prepare for Jacobs’s revival show, Jamie asks Georgia if he can speak to her daughter, Brianna.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Tent Show.”
Hugh and Jamie travel to the Norris County Fair to attend Jacobs’s revival show. Jamie tells Hugh that Conrad never suffered any aftereffects from Jacobs’s cure, which suggests that it really was a placebo. He also reveals that Brianna is helping him to research Jacobs’s operations as a revival pastor. Her search has uncovered Jacobs’s skeptics, who discuss the stage tricks Jacobs employs to deceive his audience. Nevertheless, Hugh and Jamie live on as proof that Jacobs has healed people in the past.
Hugh speculates that Jacobs scams people to live off their money, though Jamie doesn’t think this is consistent with Jacobs’s character. If he is trying to amass money, it is to fund his electrical experiments. It is unclear to Jamie what Jacobs thinks the secret electricity will unlock.
They reach the fairground tent where the revival show is being held and take their seats among the audience. A musical act called Devina Robinson and the Gospel Robins sings evangelical songs to prepare the crowd for the show, and a man named Al Stamper comes out to share his conversion story. Hugh privately tells Jamie that Al was a musician with a particularly strong drug addiction. Al sings his own songs and then brings back the Gospel Robins to welcome Pastor Danny Jacobs. Jamie is shocked by how gaunt Jacobs has become.
Jacobs preaches that God loves and protects everyone. He briefly shares his story, indicating that his wife and son died in a drowning accident. He explains how this led him to consecrate himself to the teachings of Jesus Christ, discovering a ring that would signify this “marriage” in the dirt. Jamie is taken aback by Jacobs’s lies. He tries to express this to Hugh, but Hugh’s attention is fixed on the preacher. Jacobs narrates his discourse with God, who convinced him to spread the Gospel. He calls on everyone to kneel with him, which Jamie reluctantly does to avoid attracting attention. After the prayers, ushers emerge to collect offerings from the congregation. Jamie takes notes on the people who avail themselves of Jacobs’s healing ceremony, which finally elicits Hugh’s attention. People who use wheelchairs and have various diseases declare themselves healed after approaching Jacobs. In one case, Jamie sees Jacobs retrieving his stage props when one man with cancer comes up.
Just as the show ends, Hugh runs out of the tent. Jamie follows and finds him panicked and sick. Hugh explains that he saw an especially vivid prismatic. He describes the way the colors danced into clear shapes, revealing giant poisonous ants that terrified him. He indicates that when he tried to look at Jamie, another ant was standing in his place. When they get back to Wolfjaw, Hugh asks Jamie never to bring Jacobs up again.
Chapters 7-8 Analysis
Jamie reinvents himself once again as a studio foreman, crafting an existence more orderly than his life as a musician. Much like the previous set of chapters, the novel finds Jamie after he has settled into his new life. Relevant events like the deaths of Dick and Andy Morton are briefly discussed but understood to be part of the narrative past. In line with The Emotional Costs of Starting Life Anew, this suggests that despite Jamie’s revival, some fragments of his past lives still haunt him. Jamie’s recurring nightmare provides even more concrete evidence of this. Besides centering on the deaths that continue to shape his life, the dream invokes the (im)possibility of change with its depiction of Harlow, which both is and is not the town Jamie remembers.
That the narrative consistently finds Jamie at the precise moment his “revivals” bring him into contact with Jacobs reflects Jamie’s framing of his life story, which begins in the context of his relationship with Jacobs. In this case, however, Jamie isn’t drawn to Jacobs by coincidence. He seeks him out by choice, which introduces another major theme of the novel, The Dangers of Curiosity. Jamie finds that Jacobs has reinvented himself into something more explicitly devious: a pastor who uses a mythologized version of his life story to exploit the suffering of people with various illnesses. Jacobs relies heavily on spectacle to accomplish this, furthering his scientific agenda while also playing into his critique of religion. Jamie is appalled because he can see through the lies that Jacobs tells in his revival show, but he also can’t help seeing the pastor in terms of the man he knew: He knows that Jacobs’s devotion to Patsy and Morrie survives because Jacobs continues to wear his first wedding ring. However, this is not so reassuring as Jamie imagines, as this love for lost family fuels his desperation to complete his experiments.
Jamie finds a foil in Hugh, whose perception of Jacobs contrasts with Jamie’s and thus underscores the latter’s sympathy for his old mentor. Hugh is suspicious of Jacobs’s transformation, which compels him to investigate the show for himself. Jamie, who arguably knows Jacobs better than Hugh does, quickly refutes some of his speculations. Hugh can’t help being suspicious, however, because of the aftereffect of his healing—the prismatics. The prismatics provide the clearest foreshadowing of what Jacobs may be trying to access with his experiments. The giant ants that Hugh encounters in his visions connote the strange cosmic scale of the world that Hugh occasionally sees. They also resonate with Jamie’s dream of the ant bursting through the moldy birthday cake, and the haunting quality of Jamie’s recurring dream suggests that whatever Jacobs is seeking does not mean them well. The uncanny nature of these visions and dreams hints that Jacobs may not really know what he is looking for, which means that he is searching for this other world on the basis of unthinking faith. This underlines The Dynamics of Science and Faith as a theme, as what looks like a scientific endeavor is actually driven by belief.
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