The Shining (1977)

Now, by Christ.

It’s sometimes hard to remember that at one time, Stephen King was an untested commodity. Back in 1977, he was still building his reputation, not just as a horror writer, but as an author in general.

The Shining is one of the books that made his name. It wraps up King’s opening trilogy of novels under his own name, again putting his spin on a horror trope: it was vampires last time out, and a haunted hotel this time. Three years later, Stanley Kubrick would put his own stamp on The Shining, casting Jack Nicholson and getting an iconic performance out of him. It was so iconic – you can all see Nicholson shouting, “Here’s Johnny!” as he bursts through the hotel room door, right? – that people seem to have forgotten the book.

I say this because it’s very, very different. The Shining, the movie, is about a haunted hotel. The Shining, the book, takes place in a haunted hotel, but it’s not about a haunted hotel. It’s much more interesting than that. And though it seems like a smaller, more intimate work than Salem’s Lot, it’s actually considerably more ambitious.

Does it all work? Not entirely. But it’s obvious, reading this, why it helped to make King a literary superstar, not just among fans of creepy-crawly flesh-tinglers, but among critics and lovers of pure story.

In contrast to the sprawling narrative of Salem’s Lot, The Shining has only three main characters, and for the majority of the book, they’re alone. Jack Torrance is King’s most complex creation yet, a recovering alcoholic writer near the end of his rope. Jack is, without a doubt, a good man – a loving husband to Wendy, a doting father to five-year-old Danny. But he is also weighed down by incidents of violence in his past, and unresolved feelings toward his abusive father. He’s a flip side of Ben Mears, the (ahem) dark half of the writer archetype King will use again and again.

Jack and Wendy have discussed divorce, particularly after Jack breaks Danny’s arm in a fit of rage, and loses his teaching job after striking a student. Jack knows he has one last chance to make something of himself, and keep his family together, and he takes it – a winter caretaking job at the Overlook Hotel in Colorado. Where the three of them will be stuck, snowed in, for months.

You can probably guess how well that turns out.

But what King does remarkably well here is to take a boilerplate plot – people stranded in a hotel full of ghosts, with no way out – and ratchet up the tension, not through incident, but through character. Young Danny may appear to be the focal point – he has the titular skill, sort of a cross between telepathy and precognition – but this is Jack Torrance’s story. Specifically, it is the story of how Jack Torrance, a man perched on the edge, falls apart.

The Shining is about alcoholism – King was suffering from it when writing this book, and some of its passages just leap off the page, pulsing with raw, ripped-from-life feeling. He details the dissolution of Torrance’s sanity and marriage in a way that could only come from imagining his own downward spiral.

The Shining is about all the things that keep us from being our best selves, all the insecurities and addictions and faults. And while there are, no question, malevolent spirits at work at the Overlook, Jack Torrance’s real, complex life gives them the tools they need to send him reeling. And King makes you feel every step down the road to Jack’s personal hell.

But there’s a wide, yawning chasm between what works and what doesn’t in The Shining. And what doesn’t has to do with plot mechanics. While King was concentrating on making his characters live and breathe, he didn’t lavish that attention on the story itself, which is painfully predictable.

From the first time we are told the Overlook’s boiler pressure creeps up, we know it will eventually explode. From the moment the kindly cook (and fellow Shiner) Hallorann tells Danny to shout for him if he needs help, we know he will, and we know Hallorann will come to save the day. From Danny’s first premonition about the roque mallet, we know Jack will lose it and wield that mallet against his son.

And was anyone anywhere actually fooled by Redrum?

The upside of all this is, we’re free to ignore the clockwork plot and concentrate on what the book does well, which is detail the disintegration of Jack and the Torrance family. On that score, The Shining is a disturbing, frightening success. No supernatural evil can compete with the scene in which Jack’s father smashes his mother’s head in with a cane, for no reason.

And there isn’t a more sickening moment in the novel than the one in which Wendy blames Jack for the bruises on Danny’s neck, bruises we know were caused by the ghost in Room 217. It is here that things fall apart, though they don’t come crashing down until much later.

King would get better at the big-picture plotting. (Pretty much right away – The Stand is a bit of a masterpiece.) But The Shining shows that even from his early days, he knew what was truly scary: the dark recesses of the human heart, and our frustrating inability to change what we are. That’s what makes The Shining a powerful little book. Its scariest moments are its most real.

Next: Night Shift

Time is slipping away...

Well, I certainly won't get through this project in a year at this rate.

I'd like to say I'm sorry for the delay in updating this blog, but that seems woefully inadequate. Over the past... good lord, nine months... I have left one job, taken another, found out that it's several metric tons more work than I expected, and picked up and moved to a new town. It's been an eventful year, and that's taken its toll on my reading and reviewing. Hell, I read The Shining twice - I finished it late last year, but never got around to critiquing it, and found I had to read it again, to make sure I had all the details right.

I won't make any promises. But I do feel like I'm back on track. My review of The Shining is about to be posted. I've started reading Night Shift, taking notes on each story. Best of all, I'm having fun doing it. My hope is this was the last delay, and this train now barrels along until it reaches its last station. Thanks for your patience and understanding.

And now, onward.