Spoiler warning.
I finally got around to reading Stephen King’s iconic take on the haunted location horror subgenre. I am shocked that many readers rank The Shining very highly on the list of Stephen King’s scariest novels. I personally found ‘Salem’s Lot scarier, but there is no question that The Shining is truly thrilling, disturbing, and intense. This is not simply about the ghosts within a haunted hotel. This is the story of a man driven to madness by a noxious combination of addiction, stress, and the paranormal. This is also the story of an incredible young boy, Danny, whose gift of clairvoyance allows him to witness his father’s decent into insanity, his parents’ trials and anxieties, and the horrors that have imprinted upon The Overlook Hotel over its decades of history.
As usual, King does a fantastic job creating a setting and characters that are easy to envision and fall in love with. Jack and Danny are particularly great characters, and being read into their backstories was great. The paranormal encounters in The Overlook Hotel were also quite creepy. The bathtub in room 217 and the playground were particularly creepy, and I am very thankful that I don’t have a bathtub with a shower curtain in my home, and that I did not read this while staying in a hotel.
As much as I enjoyed The Shining, I did have some minor quibbles. After reading King’s first three novels back-to-back, I noticed a few key weaknesses here. First, I think a strong case can be made that The Shining was King’s first book that was longer than it needed to be. There are a lot of tangents and restatements of plot in this book, and while some of it was intentional to show Jack’s growing instability, that definitely was not the case for all of it. Side plots like Halloran’s journey back to The Overlook were also unnecessarily detailed without being particularly interesting. Second, coming off of Carrie and ‘Salem’s Lot I would agree with the argument that King (at least in his early career) sometimes struggled to write compelling female characters, and that his descriptions of women can be incredibly awkward and cringeworthy. Wendy definitely falls victim to that in The Shining.
Reading King’s early works knowing the massive body of work to come, it’s a lot of fun to pick up on references to what will eventually become his broader shared universe. The references to the dark shape-shifting force in the Overlook Hotel as “it” seem, with hindsight, to be an early iteration of the concepts in It, and I couldn’t help but wonder if Carrie White’s telepathy was a version of “the shine.”
Once again, King’s writing left me thoroughly entertained. I’ll be checking back in (but not at The Overlook).
The Once and Future Lit 