The Hero’s Entanglement with the Negative Snowballing of the Miracle Cures in Stephen King’s Revival

Abstract

This paper attempts 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 continuous acceleration process 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 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 also cures Jamie. Jamie and the other healed persons suffer long-lasting aftereffects that lead only to death. He 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. 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.