Stephen King's Revival is a very slow-burn story for the majority of its pages, following Jamie Morton from childhood to his sixties, but as early as the very first of these pages, there is already a great deal of foreshadowing. In the interconnected web of Stephen King stories, Lovecraftian metaphysics and horror surface more than once. It is one such tale. Revival builds up to a far greater type of Lovecraftian horror than almost any other story possesses because it explored the concept of an afterlife where eldritch beings--not beyond the necessary truths of logical axioms no matter what Jamie and King imply but very alien to humans--supposedly have people enslaved or tormented forever. It is not just about a Cthulhu-like entity awakening and triggering an apocalyptic event.
Much of the book echoes various aspects of the highly existential ending long before it arrives. There are all sorts of references to ants throughout the novel, for one thing. How does this relate to the ending? Using ordinary lightning and "secret electricity" discovered by a former pastor named Charles Jacobs, something he used to heal people of various ailments, Jamie and the ex-clergyman revive a woman to ask what awaits people after they die. They are shown a hellscape called the Null by a malevolent presence called Mother, described as a dimension where ant-like creatures serve Mother and Great Ones implied to be like her, humans in turn serving as their slaves. According to Mother, there is no death, no light, and no rest in this place where lights of foreign intensity swirl above and Mother and other eldritch beings observe.
At worst, the Null is only for every human to experience after death in just one of the worlds in King's multiverse, and that is if Jamie's assumption that everyone comes here is true--it could be no one at all or only the people who contacted the secret electricity. At best, it is an illusion projected by Mother in the same way Pennywise can exploit the fears of individual people by telepathically altering their sensory perceptions. Revival mentions locations like Joyland and Jerusalem's Lot from other Stephen King stories, and some of his other stories have afterlives that are very different from that of the Null, so there are either different afterlives for various people or the Null is an illusion crafted to terrify two aging men. In either case, Revival foreshadows this ostensible afterlife of cosmic horror rather well.
Humans are like ants in their holes, Jamie says in the opening, helpless before the greater forces that exert their power over people (what these forces are is not elaborated upon until the ending). Along with the apostate pastor Charles Jacobs, who was only a Christian on the basis of assumptions before gravitating towards non-religious assumptions to replace them, Jamie eventually sees a dimension where humanoid ants sometimes crawl on their legs and sometimes stand upright, biting at humans who stumble in the lengthy march of what is fallaciously thought by Jaime to be all of the human dead. He considers if this afterlife realm is/contains an anthill where people are enslaved and then consumed.
Ants and other things related to this vision come up again and again between these two points in the novel. Once Jacobs cures Jamie of his drug addiction with the secret electricity he has found access to, Jamie sporadically experiences strange but usually harmless periods of what appear to be distant telepathic mind control. On one occasion, he wakes up naked other than a sock and is lightly jabbing at his arm with a fork. Also after receiving his cure from Jacobs, when he sleeps, he sometimes has a dream where large ants crawl out of a birthday cake while corpse-looking versions of family members stand nearby. Each of these things foreshadows some aspect of the Null or at least in the first case happens to parallel it.
The human souls have replacement bodies in this so-called afterlife that Jamie and Charles see, and the people are naked. In this context, their nudity is not about comfort or sensuality or autonomy, but it does serve as an amplifier of their vulnerability to the assaults of their ant-like tormentors. The ants Jamie sees in his nightmares are, like the rest of these dreams, tied to the secret electricity, which is itself tied to the Null where the universal power greater than even the secret electricity is seen. Though they or course hint at the "ant-things" of the Null, the ants from the nightmare are described as large versions of ants from Earth. The bodies in the dreams foreshadow how, according to Jamie, all of the dead wind up in the Null to perhaps suffer eternally. One of Jamie's friends as an adult (Hugh) also has prismatic visions that include seeing other people as if they are giant ants, a side effect of his own exposure to the secret electricity when he was healed of a condition.
Now, it is not the ant-creatures themselves in particular that make the Null Lovecraftian, but the general nature of the Null, the atmosphere it has in the story, and Mother and the Great Ones who reside there in physical forms (at least Mother has what looks like a body when she reaches a leg down). Together, they contribute to a seeming afterlife that is a universalist, non-theological hell according to what Jamie assumes even though this cannot be true in light of other novels, despite how he never is said to have assigned those exact words to it. With the sporadic hints from Charles that he wants to use the secret electricity to uncover the afterlife and all of the repeated ant imagery and more, one of the most oppressively cosmic horror twists of all storytelling is telegraphed in part from the beginning, no matter if this was only noticed afterward.
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