Good morning, House of Madness miracle workers:
We all have that one friend who thinks they know better than the doctors, and will try just about anything to cure their ailments. Sore elbow? Put some yogurt on it. Gout? Soak your feet in vegetable oil for fifteen minutes a day until the symptoms taper off. A simple cold? Try rubbing butter on your knees while listening to every single Elvis record (except his gospel stuff, healing has no place for Jesus). Sound familiar? Well, probably not, but there are a lot of kooks out there with what they believe to be 'holistic' remedies, and they will try anything in order to avoid using modern medicine. For Reverend Charlie Jacobs however, it runs much, much deeper than that.
Jamie Morton is just your regular little kid. He lives with his parents, brothers Con and Terry, as well as his sister Claire. They live in a town so small, that the rumblings of a new pastor at the church are all everyone is talking about. One day while playing in his yard, Jamie is befriended by new pastor Jacobs, and the two hit it off straight away. At Sunday school the children are all smitten with Reverend Jacobs's projects and experiments with electricity, and life in their quaint little town couldn't be better; even the reverend's infant son Morrie has captured the hearts of all around him, and everything is grand. One day while skiing with his friends, Con is injured by a ski pole and loses his voice; the doctor says it will return on its own over time, but after a couple of months have passed, everyone in the Morton family is starting to question whether this prognosis is actually going to come to fruition. Reverend Jacobs invites Con and Jamie out to his work shed, where he shows them an experiment he's been working on, and once he tries it on Con's throat, he magically gets his voice back. Of course Rev Jacobs insists it was simply the placebo effect, but Jamie and the others are quite as convinced.
A short while later, Rev Jacobs's wife and son are driving into the city, when they're involved in a horrible car accident, and are killed instantly. At their funeral, Rev Jacobs goes on an unstoppable rant, denounces God, and gets himself banished from town; this is not the last Jamie Morton has heard of Charlie Jacobs, however - not by a long shot.
Jamie is grown now, and although he's managed to outrun his past, he can't outrun the demons that have had a strangle-hold on him for quite some time, and succumbs to them in the form of pills and needles on a daily basis. On his travels he ends up at a county fair, and to his shock he witnesses the one and only Charlie Jacobs performing tricks and miracles on stage for money. Charlie does a double take upon seeing Jamie after so many years, and invites him back to his trailer after the performance so they can catch up. Jamie is jonesing in a bad way, and passes out before the performance has finished, but wakes up in Charlie's trailer where they discuss exorcising his demons once and for all. Jamie agrees, and the ritual begins and ends before he can blink, but Jamie knows something everyone back at that fair doesn't - everything comes with a price.
The two men part ways once again, and the next time Jamie hears of Charlie, he's performing miracles on people suffering from ailments for money, and business is booming. The blind can see, the crippled can walk, and the diseased are cured, all while Charlie Jacobs reaps the financial rewards and basks in notoriety. What people don't realize, however, is that while the blind see, the crippled walk, and the cancers are squashed and people are cured, other recipients of Charlie's methods commit suicide, end up in the loony bin, and eat dirt. Everything has a price.
As time goes on, so does Charlie Jacobs and his insane fixation on electricity and the unknown, and Jamie must find out why before anyone else gets hurt. Is Charlie really doing all of this for money and fame, or is there an end game on some kind of sick, sinister agenda? All Jamie knows is that time is of the essence, and in order to get the answers he so desperately covets he will have to weather the storm that is surely headed his way, only this is one storm he's not sure he's prepared for, or even qualified to fight.
Madness Meter: 7.4/10
NB
