When Charles Jacobs, a new
Methodist minister, arrives at his new parish in Harlow, Maine, young Jamie Morton is excited. Almost all of the townsfolk come to love Jacobs, his beautiful wife, Patsy, and their young son, Morrie. During weekly Ministry Youth Fellowship sessions for the town's children, Jacobs shares his interest in
electricity with them. When Jamie's older brother, Conrad ("Con"), is rendered unable to speak by a skiing accident, Jacobs uses a low-voltage belt around Con's neck to restore his voice by jumpstarting the nerves to everyone's amazement. Things change all too suddenly when Jacobs' wife and child die in a gruesome car accident. Stricken with grief, Jacobs denounces
God and religion during a sermon and is subsequently banished from town. Jamie, devastated that Jacobs will be leaving, visits him before he leaves. Jamie thanks him for what he did for Con, but Jacobs claims it was purely a
placebo effect. Jamie grows up to become a musician and after a motorcycle accident becomes addicted to pain killers and eventually
heroin. While on tour, his band abandons him at a hotel. With little money and nowhere to stay he goes to a
state fair that night in search of drugs, instead finding Jacobs performing an act in front of a large audience called “Portraits in Lightning”. Jacobs asks a young woman named Cathy Morse to volunteer for the act, where he uses a special camera he made to make a photo of her entirely out of electricity for a small price. Jacobs immediately recognizes Jamie in the audience. Jamie passes out and is treated by Jacobs who uses a form of electrotherapy to cure his addiction and fix his broken leg. After being treated, Jamie experiences strange side effects, including
sleepwalking and jabbing himself in the arm with sharp objects while in a
fugue state, as if trying to inject heroin. Jacobs is later assaulted by Cathy's father, claiming that Jacobs' portrait caused her to attempt to
shoplift a pair of diamond earrings. Before Jacobs leaves town again, he sends Jamie to Hugh Yates in Denver, who gives him a job in a recording studio. Many years later, Yates and Jamie discover Jacobs is performing revival tours using electricity (although he is pretending to be a
faith healer, using the power of God to heal others). Yates revealed Jacobs cured him of his deafness with the same treatment. They go to one of Jacobs' meetings, but Yates quickly leaves. When Jamie asks what happened, Yates claims he had a vision (which he calls a “prismatic”) where he saw the attendees as giant ants. Jamie starts investigating other people who Jacobs has healed. As it turns out, many have experienced similar side effects; some, including Cathy, have even killed themselves and others as a result. He later discovers that Jacobs has also been studying
occult texts, such as
De Vermis Mysteriis. Jamie tracks down Jacobs about the aftereffects of his healings; to his surprise, Jacobs knows about them but claims that only a small number of people suffer from such phenomena, saying that he is no longer healing people. Jacobs offers to make Jamie his assistant, but he refuses and leaves. Several years later, Jamie receives correspondence from Jacobs, including a letter from his childhood sweetheart Astrid, claiming she has
cancer. Jacobs offers to heal her, but only if Jamie will become his assistant for one last experiment. Jamie reluctantly agrees, and Astrid is cured. Jamie helps Jacobs prepare for his final experiment: Jacobs has discovered something he calls "secret electricity", an all-powerful energy source that he has been using to achieve his healings over the years. He now intends to harness a massive surge of this energy from a
lightning rod and channel it into a terminally ill woman named Mary Fay, whom he has relocated to his lab. Jacobs' plan is to revive Mary Fay after her deathnot in the conventional manner, but in the sense that she will be clinically dead and yet able to communicate with Jacobs and tell him of the
afterlife. The experiment works, but not in the way Jacobs intends. The revived Mary Fay becomes a doorway to the afterlife, but to the horror of both Jacobs and Jamie, there is no
Heaven and no reward for
piety. Instead, the afterlife is revealed to be "The Null", a hellish dimension of chaos, where souls of the deceased are tormented by ant-like creatures that serve insane,
Lovecraftian beings, the most powerful of which is known as "Mother". Mother inhabits the body of Mary Fay, transforming her into a grotesque monster, and attempts to kill Jacobs. Jamie shoots Mother with Jacobs' gun, and she leaves Mary's body. A horrified Jacobs has a fatal stroke, and Jamie arranges his body to make it look like he shot Mary. Jamie flees the scene and relocates to
Hawaii. Eventually, many of the people cured by Jacobs go insane and kill themselves and others, including Yates and Astrid. Jamie, one of the few survivors of Jacobs' treatments, is left relying heavily on
antidepressants. He recounts his vision of The Null to a psychiatrist, who does not believe him. He takes some small comfort in the possibility that the visions were "lies". However, the novel ends with Jamie going to visit Con, who has spent the last two years in a psychiatric hospital after attacking his partner, likely a result of Jacobs' treatment of him years ago; as Jamie goes to leave, he sees a door calling his name and realises that one day, like Jacobs and everyone else who died before Jamie, he will suffer the same violent fate and have to face being trapped in The Null under the yoke of Mother. ==Reception==