In 1933, nine-year-old Stella is left in the care of her grandmother, Motty, in the backwoods of Tennessee. The 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.
Revelator is a brisk work of Southern Gothic horror and an intriguing, female-centric portrait of a family in conflict. It’s funny, too ... [Stella's] a complex character, a pleasure to follow for 300-plus pages.
Daryl Gregory is among our most inventive and eclectic writers ... For a novel which has largely unfolded as a family saga, with its supernatural (or apparently supernatural) effects carefully modulated, Revelator turns into a pretty effective suspense tale in its final chapters, unraveling key plot mysteries as it amps up the tension and the special effects ...Revelator is a novel in which the magic is real, but the real magic lies as much in figures like Stella and her oddball community as in the spectral figure of the Ghostdaddy.
Shirley Jackson Award winner Gregory (We Are All Completely Fine) spins an addictive tale of historical horror ... as the narrative toggles between Stella’s childhood and her present day, and the truth about Stella’s family and their folk religion unfolds, Gregory ratches up the tension in stunning prose, and the book goes from frustratingly opaque to un-put-downable. Readers who stick with this are in for a thrilling ride.
