Revival

By the summer of 1984, televangelism has driven religious revivals to the brink of extinction. Struggling to make ends meet, charismatic preacher Elliot Prescott Chipps and his troupe of traveling revival performers will do anything to fill their collection plates. Putting down stakes in Akron, Ohio, the revival draws desperate and curious locals with its exotic music, acts of healing, and promise of eternal salvation. But Chipps, dissatisfied with the pittance of tithes, has a bigger score in mind.Over the course of five days, a bewildered boy, a pool-hustling alcoholic, a deluded beard, an unstable pianist, a deadbeat dad, a jilted young woman, a lovelorn local pastor, an estranged singer, and a nihilistic conman converge under the revival’s golden tent seeking something they’ve lost. What they’ll find is a revelation none of them could have foreseen.Advance praise for Revival...“Robert Scott Ross is a fearless author. The characters in Revival are compassionate, cruel, hilarious, and heart-wrenching. They are unafraid, like the charlatan evangelist leading them in revival, to ‘storm the gates of Eden’ in their quest for truth. This powerful debut novel is one to read, and read again.”— RHONDA BROWNING WHITEAuthor of Filling the Big Empty and The Lightness of Water & Other Stories“With characters reminiscent of those in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Robert Scott Ross has created a small world of dark truths, both hidden and revealed, in the ordinary lives of desperate people, people either losing or searching. In his beautiful and haunting Revival, Ross has written an ‘old-fashioned’ novel in the best sense of the term. Revival is a novel concerned only with love, death, and for the lucky few, redemption.”— JOE MACKALLAuthor of The Last Street Before Cleveland Read more