Meeting our maker is an experience generally expected to happen after we die. Revelator by Daryl Gregory begins: “Stella Wallace met her family’s god when she was nine years old.” It’s 1933 and Stella is a Revelator, one of the women in her family who takes messages from a god who bears no resemblance to John Gielgud, and wears no white robe. Stella’s family lives in Cade’s Cove, in the Smokey Mountains of Tennessee. Fifteen years later, she returns. She’s a moonshiner, but that’s the least important of her secrets.
Revelator is a Southern Gothic, the bastard child of Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner via HP Lovecraft. If that seems like a spoiler, it’s not. Gregory, a true chameleon of a writer, pulls off the prose and pacing of the great Southern Gothicists with ease. But Revelator is a slow burn that feels like a wildfire. Gregory mines the power of place and time (he grew up in the town he writes about) as he effortlessly twists the genre into almost serene vistas of surreal horror. He carefully crafts a compelling cast, humans of good and evil intent, who have come to the attention of something beyond both. Unsurprisingly, given the title, this is a novel where revelation sets the suspense, and with Gregory’s moonshiner prose, it’s a smooth, quick descent into character-driven terror.
How all this spins out speaks to the power of the written word to evoke love, horror, belief, faith, family and the uncaring gaze of the might-as-well-be almighty between the words, in the mind of the reader who cannot turn the pages either slow or fast enough. Set aside quality quiet time (and your version of the best moonshine) because Gregory manages a payoff as intense as the setup. Beauty and horror are thought to be opposing forces, but Gregory combines them as if they’re potent liquors swirled in a short, heavy glass. The follow-on is a sense that gods, monsters and each of us are not only stranger than we do imagine, but stranger than we can imagine.
Given all the intense strangeness on the page, Daryl Gregory was an easygoing every-day fellow when we spoke via Zoom. Here’s a link to our conversation, or listen below.
Narrative Species 