The Shining – Stephen King, 1977 ★★★★

Not Better than the Film, Just Different

Some novels launch careers; others do more: They give birth to legends. There is no better example of this in my lifetime than The Shining.

Stephen King was already a successful novelist in 1977 when he took his first detour from eerie goings-on in Maine to introduce a spooky hotel in Colorado. Its success resounded first as a book, then as a movie, and finally as an urban legend. Everyone knows what goes on in The Shining – including things that don’t happen in the novel at all.

In it, we meet Jack Torrance, out-of-work writer and recovering alcoholic, who takes his wife and son to stay at a mountaintop resort, The Overlook, where he will be its caretaker in winter. Jack sees enforced solitude as a golden opportunity to restart his writing career.

But the Overlook contains some dark secrets, as well as an animal cunning that lights upon Jack’s psychically-endowed five-year-old son, Danny. Right away Danny picks up clues of supernatural malevolence in the empty rooms and gardens. A friendly hotel cook named Hallorann shares some of Danny’s power and warns him to be careful:

“I’ve had some bad dreams here, and I’ve had some bad feelins. I’ve worked here two seasons now and maybe a dozen times I’ve had…well, nightmares. And maybe half a dozen times I’ve thought I’ve seen things. No, I won’t say what. It ain’t for a little boy like you. Just nasty things.”

The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado served as real-life inspiration for the Overlook after King and his wife Tabitha spent a few nights there in 1974. In 2015 the Stanley introduced a new feature to the grounds: a hedge maze. (There is no maze in the book.) Photo by Carol M. Highsmith from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stanley_Hotel.

Of course, being this is a Stephen King novel, Danny’s ability to follow Hallorann’s wise counsel is nil. The result is one of King’s best-constructed, hardest-charging works of fiction, a masterpiece of dread and an immersive, emotionally-involving read.

King has actually written better books, in my opinion. Different Seasons showcases his versatility and craft, while my favorite novel of his, The Dead Zone, maximizes both suspense and emotional uplift. But The Shining has its own dark pull, as an alcoholic’s cry for help and an examination of the darkness permeating the American Dream.

“I think this place forms an index of the whole post-World War II American character,” Jack tells a friend.

The novel also has its own ghost, of course: A guy named Stanley.

When people think The Shining, they think not the novel by King but the movie by Kubrick. I do enjoy the film more, but agree this is not fair. Stephen King not only came up with the story; his treatment remains definitive if you want the chills served up with real human interest.

King complains Stanley Kubrick’s film short-changed the characters in pursuit of pure adrenaline. He’s right about that.

Danny Lloyd as Danny in the 1980 film. Book Danny is younger, and his bond with his father stronger: "Jack felt a wave of nearly desperate love for the boy. The emotion showed on his face as a stony grimness." Image from https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/movies/aide-to-kubrick-on-shining-scoffs-at-room-237-theories.html 

What I notice re-reading the novel was how carefully King sets up the central conflict between Jack Torrance and his demons, both those he brings with him in the form of alcoholism and anger, and those who lie in wait at the hotel. King has described The Shining as a personal account of his own then-spiraling addiction issues, and you see there why he might view Jack and not Danny as its most important character.

Jack’s ultimate struggle involves his sanity: “In the very center of him a cold certainty was forming and the certainty was that he was losing his mind.” In the novel, this is quite gradual, and forms much of the early pull. He is a hothead, but also intelligent, caring, and sensitive to the needs of his wife and son. As Jack begins going off the deep end, King shows us how he rationalizes his worst decisions as acts of love. He understandably fears the repercussions of failing as hotel caretaker.

In the 1980 movie, Jack’s menace is as blinding as a lighthouse beam from the opening scene. Also, the movie is rooting for the Overlook. We see it there as a wild, wacky kind of place, very creepy but also kind of funny with its men in dog costumes and flappers and even somewhat genuine in its perverse regard for Jack. We kind of get why Movie Jack wants to live there forever and ever and ever.

In the book, the Overlook is unmitigated evil, its spirits out not for mere tricks, but blood. It doesn’t want Jack at all. It wants Danny. Through Danny’s eyes we see it not as all-night party but diabolical machine:

The hotel was running things now. Maybe at first the things he had seen really were like scary pictures that couldn’t hurt him. But now the hotel was controlling those things and they could hurt.

Near the end, Danny puts the Overlook in perspective: “Everything is a lie and a cheat.”

A first-edition dust jacket for The Shining. The book was inspired by classic horror writers Edgar Allan Poe and Shirley Jackson; the title by the John Lennon song "Instant Karma!" "...we all shine on." Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shining_(novel).

Danny being only five in this novel makes King’s use of him as a wise child problematic. The emphasis on the feelings of the Torrance family is necessary to set up Jack’s fall, but gets underlined way too much, as if King is afraid we will miss the personal dimension in his story.

He also uses hedge animals as animated guardians of the Overlook, a conceit which doesn’t work. I think King wanted them for monster value, but they wind up being not only unnecessary to the story but artificially presented. One attacks Hallorann by scratching him up with its branches, which when you think about it is about all a bush can do.

At times King strains for effect. Other times he can be too perfunctory. “He held on – no exaggeration – for dear life,” he writes of one battle. But throughout his set-up and denouement, King gives the Overlook a detailed, lived-in feeling and establishes in Jack and Wendy Torrance a realistic portrait of two good people stuck in a lousy marriage.

If it’s true as King claims in his later memoir On Writing that he doesn’t outline his novels, he must have Lego blocks for brain synapses. The Shining’s structural soundness is perfect, like a diabolical cuckoo clock. You can see how the malefic hotel methodically steps up its assault at the conclusion of each section. Danny even encounters a monster living in the bathtub of Room 217 – kicking off the straight-horror part of this horror novel – on page 217 of my Signet paperback.

Author Stephen King around the time of The Shining's publication. The 1970s were already good to him by 1977, and he still had Night Shift, The Stand, and The Dead Zone ahead of him before the decade came to an end. Even bigger decades lay ahead. Image by https://lithub.com/stephen-king-master-of-almost-all-the-genres-except-literary/.

King also does this narrative trick early on, as Wendy and Danny enter the Overlook for the first time, of shifting the narrative stream-of-consciousness from character to character. At first I actually thought this was lazy of King, then I realized it was his subtle way of suggesting Danny’s telepathic powers, and perhaps those of the hotel, too.

Danny does seem way too mature for five, but King makes the most of both his sensibility and sensitivity in filling out his tale:

But grownups were always in a turmoil, every possible action muddied over by thoughts of the consequences, by self-doubt, by selfimage, by feelings of love and responsibility. Every possible choice seemed to have drawbacks, and sometimes he didn’t understand why the drawbacks were drawbacks. It was very hard.

King is also focused on issues of American identity. Later, people would analyze Kubrick’s film adaptation and read in it clues for everything crooked in our nation’s past, from the purging of Native Americans to the exploitation of minorities to fake Moon landings. It’s all a bit mad, and yet King is working along those very lines in the novel.

Over time we learn how the Overlook’s history is intimately connected with bad stuff having to do with capitalism and crime. Once a Howard Hughes-like tycoon named Horace Derwent owned the hotel, later on the Mob took over. Reading a scrapbook he finds in the basement, Jack imagines the hotel as it was in August, 1945, the same month the United States dropped A-bombs on Japan:

Tuxedos and glimmering starched shirts; evening gowns, the band playing; gleaming high-heeled pumps. The clink of glasses, the jocund pop of champagne corks. The war was over, or almost over. The future lay ahead, clean and shining. America was the colossus of the world and at last she knew it and accepted it.

Like Howard Hughes, Horace Derwent in The Shining has numerous real-estate holdings, lives part-time in Las Vegas, and has long fingers in everything financial. Derwent is also bisexual, which Hughes was said to have been as well. Image from https://calisphere.org/item/8977e9b46c0d2896ed4c6f9643ab00fb/ 

But King doesn’t push these points; his aim here is not proclaiming a manifesto but establishing a mood of unease. Like Faulkner, he sees the present as being locked in an uncomfortable embrace with the past, and in The Shining, works this sensibility into an involving ghost story.

I understand King’s resentment of Kubrick’s movie. Not only does the film play with the narrative; it introduces elements to our understanding of The Shining that would in time become iconic: Elevators of blood, creepy-eyed twins, “Heeere’s Johnny!” and the rest. It’s not that King is above similar Gothic devices – his version does feature a possessed fire extinguisher – but his overall approach is more cerebral.

I don’t think it’s better, but it is different, entertaining and engaging in its own special way. I definitely prefer this version of Jack, but his self-doubts and family attachments would be lost in the 1980 film, as would his need to be taken seriously as an artist. Says a voice in his head:

“You have to kill him, Jacky, and her, too. Because a real artist must suffer. Because each man kills the thing he loves. Because they’ll always be conspiring against you, trying to hold you back and drag you down.”

Any novel’s connection to a reader depends in part on the unique circumstances when it is read. Maybe it’s just my luck that I picked up The Shining, a novel which is ostensibly about the world’s worst case of cabin fever, at a time when a global pandemic has people like me self-isolating and wondering if there is to be any future at all. Thus I find Jack’s situation all-too-relevant.

Regardless of externals, whether they be pandemics or Kubrick, The Shining is a beautifully self-contained mind trap that tells a great story in its own way, and showcases the perverse power that is Stephen King.