Stephen King’s novel Revival (2014) takes after Robertson Davies’s novel Fifth Business (1975), the first book of the Deptford trilogy, although the name of the Canadian writer is significantly missing from the list of King’s acknowledgements. The paper is focused on the comparative analysis of the two novels, the starting point being the category of “fi fth business” borrowed by S. King from R. Davis. A comparative analysis of the topos of a small town in the texts of both authors is undertaken to show that for both Davis and King the category of the “fi fth business” acquires a structure-generating function: the foregrounding of a walk-on, a “little man” as a semantic center correlates with the main topos of both novels. It is concluded that such sociological features of small-town life as cohesion of the community life, empathy towards neighbors, relative eventlessness and scarcity of social dynamics (according to R. Wuthnow) influence the plotline, temporal structure, narrative strategies and character interactions. Besides, the topos of a small town induces specific modes of psychological analysis: Stephen King explores town folk’s behavior in critical situations, while Robertson Davies traces the process of individuation of his personages. Small-town life as the central theme also leads to a remarkable synthesis of religious pursuits and the intermediary quality as the environment in which they are actualized