king.JPG

Stephen King's new novel, "Revival," is getting great reviews, and he's not done yet.

(The Associated Press)

Stephen King keeps going. And, if anything, the prolific author's work is still getting better -- deeper, more emotionally resonant, steeped in recent history and our view of ourselves.

King has expressed concern that, unlike pop music, "pop fiction goes away." He seems to be trying to make sure his own pop fiction lasts by going even darker than he has before, into the realm of earlier horror masters Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker and H.P. Lovecraft. His new novel, "Revival," about a preacher who loses his faith, is dedicated to "some of the people who built my house," such as Shelley, Stoker and Lovecraft. It's garnering some of the best reviews of his long career.

The New Statesman calls "Revival," King's 58th novel, a "serious book by a major writer," insisting that it "reads like a populist sequel to Sinclair Lewis's evangelical satire 'Elmer Gantry.'"

The New York Times calls it "a well-built book that unfolds on a big canvas." The paper adds, teasingly, scarily, that the novel "winds up with the idea that to be human, you must know what it is to be inhuman."

That sounds like Shelley's influence, but The Guardian says "it is Lovecraft, and the quote 'That is not dead which can eternal lie, / And with strange aeons, even death may die,' that reverberate throughout the book."

King, 67, happily admits he's been influenced by "everything" Lovecraft has ever written.

He told Goodreads that the initial inspiration for "Revival" came from reading Arthur Machen's 1894 horror classic "The Great God Pan." "I wanted to write a balls-to-the-wall supernatural horror story, something I haven't done in a long time," he said. "I also wanted to use Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos, but in a new fashion, if I could, stripping away Lovecraft's high-flown language." Cthulhu is a gigantic, horrific god-creature in Lovecraft's fiction.

What's amazing about the high praise for "Revival" is that King is cranking out product faster than ever. In June he published "Mr. Mercedes," which came quickly on the heels of "Joyland" and "Doctor Sleep," the latter being the sequel to "The Shining." He's also written a musical, "Ghost Brothers of Darkland County," with John Mellencamp.

Lovecraft

King, a dedicated Boston Red Sox fan, says "Revival" is a scorching fastball high and inside. "I've found in my later years, a lot more I've had to go to the slider and the change-up," he told the Bangor Daily News, his hometown paper. "But I can still bring it when I have to. I'm old, but I'm not dead. So I can still wind up and fire."

Though he always seems to have brand-new stories percolating, he admits he has a hard to time leaving behind some of his classic works. He says that Randall Flagg, from 1978's "The Stand," is the scariest representation of evil he's ever written "because there's a little of him in all of us."

So now that he's written a follow-up to "The Shining," could we also get a "Stand" sequel? Maybe.

"There's one 'Stand' story that still needs to be told, although it's not a long one," he told Goodreads. It would feature the characters memorably played by Gary Sinise and Molly Ringwald in the 1994 TV miniseries. "I happen to know that when Stu Redman and Frannie Goldsmith headed back to New England (with their baby), Frannie fell into a dry well," King said. "That's all I know. I'd have to write the story to find out what happens."

-- Douglas Perry