"There were elder gods in those days; kings and queens they were."
--Duma Key, Stephen King
Starting as a story about disability, relationships, and therapy, Duma Key very gradually expands into cosmic horror territory. When protagonist Edgar Freemantle moves to a Florida beach to recover after an almost lethal accident, he finds himself entangled in the activities of Perse. Although Perse is much more mildly Lovecraftian than the likes of Mother from Revival, who is presented there as if she presides over an eternal afterlife of torture called the Null that every dead human goes to, and of Pennywise from It, she is one of many Lovecraftian creatures across King's extensive bibliography. There are great similarities between her and these aforementioned beings, indeed. Very specific similarities between her and one of Lovecraft's own literary creations are also present.
Like both Pennywise and Mother, Perse is described as being female. Perse speaks to Edgar's daughter Ilse through drains, something Pennywise does in It. Like Mother, Perse is connected with death, and like Mother, she can exert influence over people so that they carry out homicidal acts to further her goals. In Revival, Mother does this to many of the people who were healed by the "secret electricity" Charles Jacobs tapped into, which seems to accelerate the arrival of the victims to the horrendous afterlife of the Null. In Duma Key, Perse manipulates characters like Mary Ire to murder or attempt murder that serves her ends. The ocean "goddess", as she is sometimes inaccurately referred to as (inaccurate if she is not a true uncaused cause), might indwell a small china doll that comes to outward life at night, but she is powerful.
Perse's affinity for seawater and her sometimes slumbering state mirror, maybe intentionally, those very qualities of Cthulhu, the ocean-bound eldritch being of H.P. Lovecraft that calls to people telepathically from the sunken city of R'lyeh. Ironically, Ilse mentions how reading Lovecraft for a class might have made her more on edge about what turns out to be Perse's tampering with her life--and Lovecraft is also brought up by name in Revival. The malevolent abomination of Duma Key is said to have likely been ancient at the time that the Jews were enslaved in Egypt, her name Perse actually being short for Persephone, the queen of the underworld in Greek mythology. Whatever her origins, Edgar at one time has words come to mind without his input mentioning elder gods of the distant past. However, the Persephone of Greek mythology does not have an ocean vessel with the souls of human victims as its crew as does the antagonist of the novel.
Crucially, the crew of collected human dead on her ship, also called the Persephone, itself entails a sliver of subtle optimism. The interconnectivity of Stephen King stories, which would almost certainly contain Duma Key as well, means the Null of Revival cannot be where everyone goes after death forever. If Perse dictates the afterlife of those she claims by drowning as shown, then their souls cannot go to this other realm. Here is a further example of how the Null could not possibly be a universal, eternal afterlife destination of all people in Stephen King's multiverse, other examples including the ghosts in The Shining and the spirit of Pascal from Pet Sematary. Yes, Revival is explicitly in the broader multiverse, as places like Castle Rock from other stories are mentioned, so any afterlife in other interwoven stories limits the possible scope of the Null. Perse's connection to what is by all appearances an afterlife for certain characters, unless their reanimated forms are just puppets of Perse's own consciousness rather than vessels with their own captive souls, is of course relevant.
The tie between cosmic horror and the ocean is most iconic in Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu, but Duma Key combines this with an afterlife and the trappings of what is more commonly explored in pirate horror. Unlike in Revival, though its alleged afterlife is at a minimum not for everyone, there is an unspecified but perhaps theistic force aiding the protagonists as they seal away Perse, despite their inability to guarantee that she will not return to power yet again; she had already been put to sleep before the present-day events of the story. As unusual as a benevolent superhuman presence is in cosmic horror storytelling, this only reinforces that things are not as bleak as the finale of Revival would make them seem in isolation.
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