The climax of Stephen King's novel Revival emphasizes how eternal life is absolutely not something pleasant or liberating on its own. While some people might stupidly wish for any kind of afterlife over the cessation of conscious existence, this story exemplifies why mere eternal life after bodily death is not necessarily the escape from woes that it could be: the narrator sees a landscape marked by decaying structures, bathed in colors that seem "alive" (echoing Lovecraft's Color Out of Space), where ant-like creatures serve the supernatural "Old Ones" above them—Lovecraftian-style eldritch beings, the most powerful of which seems to be Mother—by tormenting humans. The "ant-things" attack or herd people to an unknown but terrible fate in the brief glimpse of the protagonist, and Mother insists that there is only eternal torture and servitude for the human dead here. Old and young are seen, from babies to the elderly. The protagonist assumes that everyone comes here after death, no matter their worldview or deeds. He is wrong about this to at least some extent, as I will get again clarify below.
The Null is still an excellent example of an afterlife that illustrates the potential of cosmic horror, horror that is rooted in something demonstrable or hypothetical (which has to be logically possible at a minimum, as the Null indeed is) about the heart of reality. Though Revival also alludes to or is explicitly inspired by Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan and Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, it is Lovecraft's literature that homages are most thoroughly made to. Stephen King, referencing H.P. Lovecraft by name in the narrative itself and quoting his famous words "With strange aeons even death may die" in a context far more dreadful than anything Lovecraft actually wrote [1], had the novel build up to a conclusion that has driven many readers to fear the very idea of dying, lest something remotely like this await them. One can easily find online articles or comments expressing this. However, some people say the ending was too bizarre to impact them as intended or that the ant imagery struck them as more comedic or disappointing.
No, the real cosmic horror of Revival is not giant ants—the beings described are not ants, but ant-like, to be more specific—which the seemingly minority detractors of the book's ending might focus on as if these creatures alone are supposed to ground the horror. It is that there is/could be an afterlife of unrelenting suffering, one for all people, that does not even have the sheer facade of moralistic "justice" adherents to eternal torture in hell ascribe to it. Not only is eternal torture logically incapable of being just because it inherently punishes people more than their finite sins could ever merit, but it is also not at all what the Bible teaches [2]. Even in the short descriptions in the novel, it is clear that more than just ant-esque beings are seen. Extraordinarily malicious yet powerful consciousnesses have the ability to make us suffer there, without death, light, or rest according to Mother, and they bring this about simply, it would seem, because they can. The ant-things are in turn themselves enslaved by Mother and the other Lovecraftian entities that observe from behind the "paper sky", the physical universe containing Earth being like an illusion that the fundamental realm of the universe hides behind (real, but not as foundational or significant as the Null). Although he is absolutely wrong in light of other Stephen King stories in his connected literary world [3] and would still be in error for assuming anything to begin with, the protagonist of Revival does assume that every person who dies goes to the Null forever.
Again, it is not ants that are the focal point of the cosmic horror. Rather, the heart of the Null's terror is that of eternal torture, that of having no control over what afterlife you receive no matter what you believe and do, and that of there being a universalist, non-theological hell; that is, the idea that everyone is destined to suffer after death. Of relevance is that there cannot not be an uncaused cause, or a deity, as long as anything contingent exists at all [4], and Stephen King's multiverse has one by the name of Gan. However, Gan is doing nothing to stop any of this, unless the Null is a total illusion orchestrated by Mother rather than a real afterlife, albeit of a much more limited scope than Jamie fallaciously assumes. Nothing about God's necessary existence in light of contingent things, which does not require that the Biblical Yahweh in particular exists, means God has a moral nature or that he presides over any afterlife that might exist instead of something like Mother. The relationship of the Null to Gan is a very weighty one, though, since Gan appears to be more benevolent than entirely apathetic towards its creation.
In a way, it only adds to the cosmic horror of all these things that the aging protagonist is left wondering if the vision of the Null he has seen is a hallucination of some kind, if Mother has lied to him. Definitely no rationalist as far as his worldview goes, he does not actively doubt in the final pages that Mother is real, only if she tried to deceive him or not. The only way to really find out, even if he was a rationalist who makes no assumptions, is for him to wait until death to see if there is an afterlife for him and if it really is the Null. The inability for a human to reach absolute certainty about anything more than the likes of the Null being logically possible because it does not contradict the necessary truths of logical axioms, as well as what would and would not follow by necessity from the concept, is part of the existential terror of Revival. However, in the very last words of the book, after hearing what seems to be Mother's voice calling for him to come to her and live forever, the protagonist resigns himself to the belief that his death is inevitable at some point, and then he will go to Mother. Cosmic horror cannot be any greater than the likes of this unless someone existed past-eternally and was already in endless suffering, and only the degree of the agony could vary at that point.
[2]. Though I have written about this extensively, see posts like this:
[3]. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2023/07/a-kind-of-non-theological-hell-mother.html
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