Books: Revelator By Daryl Gregory (2021)

 "In 1933, nine-year-old Stella is left in the care of her grandmother, Motty, in the backwoods of Tennessee. These remote hills of the Smoky Mountains are home to dangerous secrets, and soon after she arrives, Stella wanders into a dark cavern where she encounters the family's personal god, an entity known as the Ghostdaddy. Years later, after a tragic incident that caused her to flee, Stella--now a professional bootlegger--returns for Motty's funeral, and to check on the mysterious ten-year-old girl named Sunny that Motty adopted. Sunny appears innocent enough, but she is more powerful than Stella could imagine--and she's a direct link to Stella's buried past and her family's destructive faith."

A lot of Daryl Gregory’s own personal family past is imbued in this fantastic novel of Southern Gothic (Grady Hendrix could learn something from this tale) horror. In his afterword, he talks about his ancestors that came out of Tennessee, of being bought out when the Great Smokey Mountain National Park was created, of his father, “Darrell Gregory being a direct descendant of Russell Gregory, who was murdered by North Carolina Rebels at the tail end of the Civil War.” But the book, Revelator, is just as weird as some of his other tales. He splits the narrative into decades, which alternate in the chapters. We see Stella from 1933 to 1938 and her return in 1948. This takes a bit to get used to, but then when you do, the pages fly by. As I noted, it’s weird, it’s creepy, it leaves you with a sense of What did I just read?

I don’t think it’s scary, and some of the revelations are bit easily identified, but the book worked for me, even if Gregory leaves a lot things unanswered. While he deals with what appears to be primitive Baptists here, the book also does take religion on, pointing out its flaws, especially how only men have controlled religion, written so much about God and the Bible, about the arrogance of them printing their own interpretations, choosing to leave things out, editing and no one ponders whether what they’re doing was directed by their God or Satan’s.

It’s unsettling at times, and Gregory does this on purpose (it’s a through line through a lot of his books), because I think he enjoys it more than anything, but this book also carries a lot his dark humor, another of his traits. A wonderful tale that I highly recommend.