The Shining

The Shining, gothic horror novel by Stephen King, first published in 1977. Eclipsed perhaps only by its 1980 film adaptation, the novel is one of the most popular and enduring horror stories of all time. A sequel, titled Doctor Sleep, was published in 2013.

Summary

The Shining is set in Colorado in the 1970s. It centres on the Torrance family: husband Jack, wife Wendy, and their five-year-old son, Danny. At the beginning of the novel, Jack is hired as the caretaker of the remote Overlook Hotel for the winter offseason. He is informed by the hotel manager that the previous caretaker, Delbert Grady, killed his entire family inside the hotel. Specifically, Grady “murdered the little girls with a hatchet, his wife with a shotgun, and himself the same way.” As Jack later learns, the Overlook has a long and ghastly history. Over the years, it has housed illicit affairs, horrible murders, and mob-style executions; perhaps by consequence, its ownership has changed hands several times.

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Jack is nonetheless determined to be the caretaker. In the past, Jack—an aspirant writer and former prep-school teacher—struggled with alcoholism and anger issues; once, he accidentally broke his son’s arm while trying to discipline him. More recently, Jack assaulted a teenage student who let the air out of his tires. The incident cost Jack his teaching job and compelled his wife, Wendy, to strongly consider a divorce. Now Jack is a recovering alcoholic. His ties to his family are weak, and his play—a long-stalled work-in-progress—remains largely unfinished. Jack hopes that the seclusion of the Overlook will help him finish the play and reconnect with his wife and son.

On the day of their arrival, the Torrances are given a tour of the Overlook by the hotel manager. They are introduced to Dick Hallorann, the hotel cook, who takes a special interest in Danny. Unlike his parents, Danny is remarkably perceptive and supernaturally gifted; he has extrasensory abilities that allow him to read minds, communicate telepathically, and see past and possible future events. As he tells Hallorann, he is sometimes visited by a shadowy, ethereal figure whom he calls “Tony.” Hallorann explains that he has powers similar to Danny’s; he calls them “the shining.” Hallorann not only helps Danny understand his powers but also tells him, “If there is trouble…you give a call.” Hallorann then leaves for St. Petersburg, Florida, where he spends his winters. Shortly thereafter, the remaining staff and guests depart, leaving the Torrance family alone in the Overlook.

The longer the Torrances stay at the Overlook, the more haunting and powerful it becomes. While inside the hotel, Danny is plagued by disturbing visions and apparitions: “REDRUM” (“MURDER” spelled backward) appears in several contexts, gruesome figures materialize in strange places, a fire hose chases him down a hallway, and so on. For a long time, Danny refuses to tell either parent about what he has seen. Still, Wendy perceives that something is wrong with Danny. She thinks about removing herself and her son from the hotel, leaving Jack to finish the job alone, but ultimately decides against it. Not long after, a heavy snowfall all but cuts the Torrances off from the outside world.

During this time, the Overlook begins trying to possess Jack. It entices him with historical records and a mysterious scrapbook documenting the exploits of its guests. Eventually, it convinces Jack to destroy his two-way CB radio and disable the hotel snowmobile. The Overlook thereby eliminates the family’s only remaining links to the outside world. Although unaware of the hotel’s power over her husband, Wendy grows increasingly distrustful of Jack. After a corpse tries to strangle Danny in the infamous room 217 and Wendy and Jack see the resulting bruise on their son’s neck, Wendy accuses Jack of abusing Danny.

On the morning of December 2, Jack wanders into the hotel ballroom. To his surprise, he finds the bar stocked with liquor and tended by a bartender named Lloyd. While Lloyd pours Jack martini after martini, a ghostly party—a 1945 masquerade ball—rages on in the ballroom. After several drinks, Jack is confronted by the ghost of Delbert Grady, the caretaker who murdered his family. Grady urges Jack to “correct” his wife and son. In his drunken, enraged state, Jack agrees. That afternoon he attempts to strangle Wendy in the barroom. Wendy’s fingertips graze a glass bottle, which she uses to hit Jack over the head and escape his grip. Together, she and Danny drag Jack’s unconscious body to a walk-in pantry and lock him inside.

A few hours later, Grady confronts Jack in the pantry. After making him promise to kill Wendy and bring his son to “us,” presumably the evil spirits of the Overlook, Grady unlocks the pantry, releasing Jack. Again, Jack attacks Wendy, this time with one of the hotel’s roque mallets, savagely injuring her. Although she stabs him in the lower back with a kitchen knife, Jack’s attacks do not cease. Unable to walk, Wendy drags herself up the grand stairs and locks herself in her bathroom. Jack follows closely behind and, upon finding the bathroom door locked, attempts to break the door down with the mallet. When he thrusts his hand through the resulting hole in the door, Wendy slashes it with a razor blade.

Meanwhile, Hallorann receives a psychic call for help from Danny. He rushes back to the Overlook, where he is attacked by its hedge animals, which, like the rest of the hotel, have come to life. Hallorann manages to make it inside the Overlook only to be gravely injured by Jack, who apparently overheard the approach of his snowmobile. With both Wendy and her would-be rescuer out of the way, Jack pursues Danny. Unbeknownst to Jack, Danny is wandering the hallways of the hotel, following Tony’s voice. Tony appears to Danny and tells him, “Danny…you’re in a place deep down in your own mind. The place where I am. I’m a part of you, Danny.” As it turns out, Tony is an older version of Danny; he comes to warn his younger self about forthcoming events. At last, Danny understands:

A long and nightmarish masquerade party went on here, and had gone on for years. Little by little a force had accrued, as secret and silent as interest in a bank account. Force, presence, shape, they were all only words and none of them mattered. It wore many masks, but it was all one. Now, somewhere, it was coming for him. It was hiding behind Daddy’s face, it was imitating Daddy’s voice, it was wearing Daddy’s clothes.

Before disappearing, Tony prophesizes that Danny “will remember what [his] father forgot.”

After some searching, Jack corners Danny on the third floor. Danny observes the creature that his father has become. He reminds himself “it was not his daddy, not this Saturday Night Shock Show horror with its rolling eyes and hunched and hulking shoulders and blood-drenched shirt.” Despite Jack’s menacing threats, Danny stands his ground. He denounces Jack as a “mask”—a “false face” worn by the hotel. For a moment, Jack recovers control of his body, and he tells his son that he must run. The hotel then takes full control of Jack:

It bent over, exposing the knife handle in its back. Its hands closed around the mallet again, but instead of aiming at Danny, it reversed the handle, aiming the hard side of the roque mallet at its own face….Then the mallet began to rise and descend, destroying the last of Jack Torrance’s image.

Suddenly, Danny remembers what his father forgot: the Overlook’s old, unstable boiler has not been checked for days. He announces his discovery to the hotel-creature, causing it to panic and take off for the basement. In its absence, Danny finds Wendy and Hallorann, and, together, they flee the hotel. Seconds after they make their exit, the boiler explodes. The hotel-creature is instantly killed, and the Overlook gradually succumbs to the fire. The surviving party—Hallorann, Wendy, and Danny—ride away on a snowmobile.

A short epilogue (set in the summer) follows. Hallorann has taken a job in Maine, where Wendy is recovering from her injuries and Danny fishes. Although he misses Jack, Danny accepts Hallorann as a father figure. Hallorann, in turn, assures Danny that he and his mother will be okay. Together with Wendy, Hallorann watches as Danny reels in a rainbow-coloured fish.

Origins

King was inspired to write The Shining after staying a night at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado. In late September 1974, King and his wife, Tabitha, checked into what King described as a “grand old hotel.” Notably, the Kings stayed in room 217. King recalled that he and his wife were the only guests staying at the hotel; it was set to close for the winter season the next day. While exploring its hallways, King thought to himself:

[The hotel] seemed the perfect—maybe the archetypical—setting for a ghost story. That night I dreamed of my three-year-old son running through the corridors, looking back over his shoulder, eyes wide, screaming. He was being chased by a fire-hose. I woke up with a tremendous jerk, sweating all over, within an inch of falling out of bed.

That night, King solidified the “bones of the book.” According to King, The Shining has strong autobiographical undertones. Two of the novel’s central themes—namely, the dangers of alcoholism and the disintegration of the family—are extracts of the author’s personal fears. King struggled with alcoholism in the early stages of his career. In the late 1970s, King claimed he was “drinking, like, a case of beer a night.” He worried that he would lose control of his addiction and in some way hurt his family. The Shining voices this concern. Although he did not realize it at the time, King later claimed that “I had written The Shining…about myself.” King described the act of writing the novel as “a kind of self-psychoanalysis.” It was also a form of catharsis: writing the novel helped King keep his more violent urges at bay.

King’s drinking problem worsened in the 1980s. He wrote novels that, he later explained, he barely remembered writing, including Cujo (1981) and The Tommyknockers (1987). In the late 1980s, Tabitha King staged an intervention, and King became sober.

Symbolism

King is not known for subtlety in his novels. Yet three of the most important details in The Shining appear before the novel even begins. These details—found in the novel’s three epigraphs—are essential for understanding King’s literary aspirations. The first epigraph is perhaps the most important. It is an excerpt taken from Edgar Allan Poe’s tale “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842). In the tale, a fictional medieval prince gives a masquerade ball at his castle. At midnight, the Red Death—a plague that causes swift, agonizing death—reveals itself among the revelers and kills them all. The story concludes with the words King quotes: “And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”

Allusions to “The Masque of the Red Death” abound in The Shining. Certain images and motifs from the tale are replicated. The colour red, for example, figures prominently in both stories. An essential ingredient in Poe’s tale, “Blood” is the Red Death’s “Avatar and its seal.” The Red Death leaves “scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim.” When the Red Death appears at the ball, it appears in a “vesture…dabbled in blood.” Likewise, the castle room in which the Red Death ultimately kills the revelers is lined with “blood-colored panes.” Blood plays a similarly important role in The Shining. Danny is haunted by images of blood and brain matter throughout the novel. In the climax, Jack sees “red liquid…spraying up like an obscene rain shower, striking the glass sides of the [clock] dome and running,” and thinks to himself, “clockwork can’t bleed clockwork can’t bleed.” The colour red appears in other contexts, too. When Jack is extremely angry, he sees “red.” Some readers have even suggested that “REDRUM,” which is phonetically similar to “red room,” is an allusion to Poe’s tale.

There are other similarities between the stories. King’s description of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining parallels Poe’s description of the castle in “The Masque of the Red Death.” Like Poe, King focuses on the grandiosity and remoteness of his chosen setting. King’s setting—again, like Poe’s—hosts a masquerade ball governed by a clock with seemingly supernatural powers. Here it is worth noting that masks (and, especially, unmasking) play a particularly important role in both stories. In “The Masque of the Red Death,” all the characters (including the Red Death) hide behind literal masks. In The Shining, the main characters conceal their true identities behind metaphorical masks. In the climax of the novel, the ghosts of the Overlook Hotel, led by former hotel owner Horace Derwent, chant “Unmask! Unmask!” at Jack. After the final cry of “UNMASK!,” King paraphrases the end of Poe’s tale. He announces “…the Red Death held sway over all!”

The second epigraph is shorter than the first but no less important. It states that “the sleep of reason breeds monsters.” This is the English translation of the Spanish phrase used in an 18th-century etching by Francisco Goya, a Spanish artist known for his grotesque imagery. The etching is part of a series of etchings collectively titled Los caprichos (published 1799; “Caprices,” or “Follies”). In this particular etching, an artist sleeps at his desk while various flying animals—including owls and bats—lurk behind him. In sleep, the artist’s rational faculties give way to the irrational “monsters” of his imagination. Goya’s etching plays on the boundaries between waking and sleeping, rationality and irrationality, the natural and the supernatural. King’s novel plays on the same boundaries. Inside the Overlook Hotel, all three Torrances struggle to distinguish between reality and illusion. In the novel, King crafts his own version of Goya’s expression. Both Jack and Danny observe that “this inhuman place makes human monsters.”

The third and final epigraph is a proverb: “It’ll shine when it shines,” traditionally used to refer to the weather. However, it takes on a different meaning in the context of the novel, where “shining” denotes a psychic ability. The epigraph’s casting of “shining” as an uncontrollable natural phenomenon also seems to suggest the reality and validity of second sight—of premonitions and visions and prophecies. Perhaps, it argues, if Jack and Wendy had trusted Danny’s “shine,” the tragedy of the Overlook could have been avoided.

Adaptations

Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film, starring Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance and Shelley Duvall as Wendy, is the most famous adaptation of King’s novel. It was one of Kubrick’s many film adaptations of books. Kubrick’s vision for the film differed significantly from King’s; in fact, Kubrick rejected the screenplay King wrote for the film, opting instead to write his own screenplay with the help of American novelist Diane Johnson. Most of the film was shot on a specially constructed set in Hertfordshire, England, in 1978. Kubrick reportedly exposed 1.3 million feet (396,240 metres) of film while shooting. (A typical shooting ratio—comparing the total hours of footage shot with the eventual running time of the film—is 5:1 or 10:1. Kubrick’s shooting ratio was over 100:1.) The completed film premiered on May 23, 1980.

King was vocal about his dissatisfaction with Kubrick’s adaptation. Although he admitted he had “admired Kubrick for a long time and had great expectations for the project,” King was “deeply disappointed in the end result.” The author accused the filmmaker of mischaracterizing Jack and Wendy Torrance, thereby dramatically changing the nature of their relationship (and their relationship to the audience). King took issue with Nicholson’s character’s lack of interiority. In King’s mind, “Jack Torrance, in the movie, seems crazy from the jump.” As he told Playboy magazine in 1983, “If the guy is nuts to begin with, then the entire tragedy of his downfall is wasted.”

Kubrick also made important changes to Wendy’s character. He transformed the bold, resilient Wendy of the novel into a timid, emotionally fragile character. King disliked the casting of Duvall as Wendy. In a 2013 interview with the BBC, King said, “Shelley Duvall as Wendy is really one of the most misogynistic characters ever put on film. She’s basically just there to scream and be stupid, and that’s not the woman that I wrote about.” King once colourfully described Duvall’s character as a “screaming dishrag.” (Duvall suffered from nervous exhaustion throughout filming and for years after the production wrapped.)

There are other differences between Kubrick’s adaptation and the novel. In the film, Kubrick replaces King’s hedge animals with a hedge maze. At the end of the film, Jack and the Overlook freeze; in the novel, the hotel burns in a fiery explosion. King’s dissatisfaction with Kubrick’s The Shining eventually resulted in a 1997 television miniseries. The TV adaptation, starring Steven Weber as Jack Torrance and Rebecca De Mornay as Wendy Torrance, used King’s original screenplay.

Despite King’s disapproval and mixed critical reviews, Kubrick’s The Shining performed relatively well at the box office, grossing about $44 million in the United States. Today, Kubrick’s film is considered a cinematic classic. It is widely regarded as one of the scariest and most influential horror movies ever made, alongside Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), and Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). A documentary about Kubrick’s adaptation appeared in theatres in the U.S. in 2013. Titled Room 237, it delved into the symbolism and possible interpretations of Kubrick’s film.

Sequel

In September 2013, King published Doctor Sleep, a follow-up to The Shining set over 30 years after the events of the first novel. In the follow-up, 40-year-old Danny (now “Dan”) Torrance moves to the small town of Frazier, New Hampshire. His mother, Wendy, is dead. She died of lung cancer—possibly caused by ingesting smoke from the explosion of the Overlook—in 1999. Like his father did, Dan struggles with alcoholism and anger issues. In an effort to curb his drinking, Dan attends a few Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. After several days of sobriety, he begins to regain his psychic abilities, which had long been suppressed by drinking. He finds work as a night porter at a local hospice, where he uses his “shine” to comfort dying patients. He becomes known to them as “Doctor Sleep.” Dan’s peaceful existence in Frazier is disrupted by a psychic call for help from Abra Stone, a telepathic preteen with abilities that outshine his own.

The much-anticipated sequel reportedly sold 134,000 copies in its first week. The novel received generally positive reviews. The New York Times called it “a very good specimen of the quintessential King blend.” A reviewer at The Guardian complimented King’s “brilliantly simulated normality.” In the author’s note for Doctor Sleep, King noted, “The man who wrote Doctor Sleep is very different from the well-meaning alcoholic who wrote The Shining, but both remain interested in the same thing: telling a kickass story.”