The Books

Dark Revival

The Great War taught men how to kill efficiently and forget the reasons why. America's Second Great Revival taught them those reasons were already written — in blood, and in faith.

When a young priest uncovers fragments of a forbidden ancient text, what he glimpses isn't a warning. It's a mandate. The faithful weren't meant to await the apocalypse. They were meant to orchestrate it.

Miles away, a shell-shocked veteran crosses the country carrying a dead comrade's journals, compelled by something he can't name toward a family he's never met. He was forged in the trenches — in poison gas and machinery and the particular silence that follows mass death. He knows how to survive. He doesn't know what he's walking into.

The Hargrove family's faith doesn't look like anything he's seen in the churches back home. It runs deeper. Hungrier. And it's been waiting for exactly the kind of man the war made him.

Dark Revival is Scott Kennedy's debut novel — a collision of America's most violent century and its most fervent spiritual moment, where devotion curdles into fanaticism, and a soldier trained for war discovers that some battles aren't fought with guns.