Brutal

cold-bloodedly bloody, brutal, breathless: that's this book for you. King packs enough scares, screams, and scars to keep you sweating and thirsting for more. Electrifying!

The Shining (1977)

"Sitting at the table with her big pottery cup in front of her, she looked out the window at him, still sitting on the curb in his bluejeans and his oversized dark green Stovington Prep sweatshirt, the glider now lying beside him. The tears which had threatened all day now came in a cloudburst and she leaned into the fragrant, curling steam of the tea and wept. In grief and loss for the past, and terror of the future."

We cannot know how it will be. We dream our dreams, summon up photo shop images cut and pasted from ideals and movie-like scenes of happiness and contentment; we paint these images over top of what's real, what's right in front of us, what we can choose not to see. It's all in the wrist, in the flick of some enormous, ephemeral dice on which our fragile, fleeting hopes ride. One misstep and the floor collapses. One twist of fate turned against us and the monster in the closet becomes real. But it's all we have, so we saddle up and play the game, back what we hope's the winning horse--or at least an acceptable, competitive, long-term horse--and hitch our wagon to a shooting star. And sometimes, at first, we really soar. But things have a way of changing, of slipping, of shifting like sand under your feet. Everything is transient. Things fall apart. The center weakens and falters, flawed in concept and design. The star changes, and it changes you. The star burns out. The star loses interest. The star becomes the monster. Did the little girl ask for this? When her dreaming head bobbed and lolled in the clouds of childhood wistfulness--when all was perfect in her world and it seemed it would always be so--did she wish upon the vault of stars staring impassively down at her for what she gets in early adulthood? Nothing is fair. You do nothing to get what they give you: pain, hurt, psychological rape, damning with confusion and regret and duty and obligation, mingled emotions so tangled they negate the very air, wrecking every moment of existence--caught in time, stuck in a web. The tide has turned, turned against you, turned hard. The smile that once shamed the sun gets kicked in the teeth, kicked every day, every night, week after week, month after month, year after year; the smile gets kicked until it's bent, broken, bleeding, a thing made ugly and naïve and pathetic. What did the girl do to deserve this? Nothing. Just backed the wrong horse; hitched her wagon full of hopes and dreams to the wrong star. Happens all the time. The world revels in killing happiness.

Wendy Torrance didn't ask for this. In college, she'd found her star, one Jack Torrance. Things had begun to shine; the dream images had begun to form solid, tangible shapes in the real world. Daddy's little girl was living the dream. College passed, marriage transpired, a baby boy came, her star had a solid, respectable job and had sold multiple short stories, was working on longer works which would surely make him rich and famous; the future loomed like a gilded path full of upward locomotion, an effortless ascent under beams of warming sunlight. But then...the star inexplicably began to turn to the bottle for celebration of their good fortunes, and then began to celebrate said good fortunes outside of the home, with others, away from her and their son Danny. The star was changing, turning away. Heeding advice from the star, the girl becomes estranged from her mother. Her father dies of a heart attack. One night the star comes home at 4AM, drunk, and drops their baby boy on the floor. For the first time, a division that cannot ever be fully healed is formed between Wendy and Jack: her smile is getting bent, twisted. Then one day Jack comes home to find that the three-year-old son has, by the mischance of infancy, scattered and mangled the writing he's been long laboring over. A life's work possibly laid to waste. In a drunken, staggering rage, he grasps and breaks the boy's tiny arm. Snap. The division between man and wife is solidified with beams of pure hatred. But the girl still believes that this is the dream, and in time Jack is able to push away the bottle and Wendy is able to go on with him. Yet even after an uneasy truce with alcoholism has been breached, the man has continuing issues with anger; he's dismissed from his job over an ugly loss of temper. His reputation is muddied and he is unable to find work of the same caliber. His big writing projects, dreams once so grand, have all run aground. So here they are. They've moved across the country, from Vermont to Colorado, running or chasing? They're destitute, struggling, gasping for breath, balancing on a shoestring budget, and the star has little or no light. But she has her son, five-year-old Danny Torrance--a child of amazing depth and perceptions--and yet she worries endlessly about how their deteriorating lifestyle and distancing relationship will effect him. Nothing has turned out like she thought. The dream was shattered, stepped on and left broken in the gutter. She has picked up what fragments she could find and soldiered on, but broken is broken and there's no glue in the world that can pull the pieces back into one.

But then, The Job. Jack Torrance--the star--has landed a job as winter caretaker at a lavish, renowned resort secluded deep in the Rocky Mountains called the Overlook Hotel. Jack seems to think it's just the thing to turn them around: a winter of complete isolation with just the three of them to emulsify into a secure, close-knit family: a time of bonding and repair, a time for perspective and, maybe, a chance to realize his stagnating aspirations to finish his big writing project, The Play. The job will be a cure-all, he thinks. And Wendy, because she wants to believe, ultimately does. But Danny...Danny doesn't like it. Danny has perceptions, insights, visions of a sort--a kind of precognition some call "shining" that his parents are only dimly aware of--and he has seen horrifying visions of their future if his father takes the winter caretaker job. There are things in that hotel, things that can harm them and can change them. Danny has seen visions of his father ruthlessly stalking him in a homicidal rage, bellowing like a madman. He has seen blood. He has seen nightmarish visages of icy, spectral figures. He has seen one incomprehensible word repeated over and over again, deep within a mirror glass: REDRUM. He is scared. The Overlook hotel is haunted, haunted and dangerous. But even at five, he knows he cannot say these things to his parents. The Job is making them happy, full of feelings of love and joy and optimism for the first time in a long time. And, after all, not all the visions he has come true. Maybe everything will be okay in the end, and The Job will really make them all happy again. Dick Hallorann, cook at the Overlook during the operating season, recognizes the shine in Danny, for he also shines, albeit to a far lesser extent. Hallorann warns Danny of the strange and unusual things he may see at the Overlook, and cautions him to call him--call him with the shine--if he needs help during the long, isolated months he will be enduring.

The character of Jack Torrance is a Stephen King masterpiece: a man of dark, brooding emotion and unfocused talent, with deep undercurrents lapping in eddies and whorls, a man spawned from a troubled childhood awash in parental abuse and neglect, a man who loves his wife and son in extreme measures until alcoholism tears him away from them. At once, the reader is filled with revulsion and sympathy for him, as well as a kind of shared misery and identification. Anyone who has ever felt the strings of any kind of addiction or obsession pull at them--or anyone who has ever fought to break the cycle--will identify with the struggles he endures: a guy just trying to step delicately through the weave of life, day after day, just trying to do his best for his family and survive. But when the bottle gets its unrelenting, unforgiving claws into the meat of him, it's just game over. Still, Torrance is eventually able to climb onto the wagon, to keep the bottle at bay in a daily struggle for self dominance, and the reward for this has been a second chance-a second chance with Wendy, a second chance with Danny...and a second chance with himself.

"He walked over to the telephone booth by the keymaking machine and slipped inside. From here he could see Danny in the VW bug through three sets of glass. The boy's head was bent studiously over his maps. Jack felt a wave of nearly desperate love for the boy. The emotion showed on his face as a stony grimness."

Yet in Jack Torrance King paints a portrait of the slow descent towards madness, ever-increasing in velocity, ultimately spiraling into true insanity. Torrence becomes close to the Overlook Hotel, close in ways he cannot even begin to comprehend. He learns the sordid and dark history of the place, and it begins to obsess him. He begins to feel that his wife and his son are trying to pull him away from the hotel, to possibly harm the hotel, and it begins to unravel him. Repairing part of the hotel roof, he finds a papery, buzzing nest teeming with wasps. He kills all the wasps and gives it to Danny, who promptly and proudly displays it in his room like a trophy. But in the night, countless wasps emerge from the empty nest, stinging his son, stinging him. The wasps were gone, yet they somehow came back. Where did they come from? And he begins to feel sudden, overwhelming fury at Wendy boil over in him over nothing, rage enough to inflict serious physical violence. In the topiary on the Overlook's grounds, Jack begins talking wildly to himself, staring into nothingness, gears in neutral, churning. He imagines the topiary hedge animals are stalking him--but were they, were they really? He calls his employers and threatens them with an expose on the history of the hotel, nearly losing his job, the Torrance family's last hope (or so he thinks), in the process. Sleepwalking, in a waking dream, he smashes the CB radio, the only link the Overlook has with the outside world once they're snowed in for the winter. He imagines a conversation with a bartender and imagines drinking alcohol from him: diving off the wagon with reckless abandon. He dreams he bashes the face of his son in with a mallet until the face is unrecognizable. He sees the embodied ghost of a dead woman in room 217, a ghost who has been given substance by the power of shining his son Danny has: a beacon of energy to draw upon for the shades and shadows who live between worlds, a foothold to gain substance and directly affect and inflict their will upon the real world. He hears voices, sees unreal images, begins losing himself to some other force, the force of the Overlook. Finally, he sabotages their last resort for escape from the isolated mountains, the snowmobile. They're trapped. By the sheer force of willpower, Jack is still holding on, barely. But he's slipping...slipping...slipping away.

Danny is also slipping. The hotel wants him, wants his power to shine, to absorb it and to evolve. Inexplicably compelled to enter room 217, he is mauled and nearly killed by the dead woman there; a dead woman risen from the tub in strips of decaying flesh, shambling after him in horrific, dreamlike slowness. Danny is also seeing images from the Overlook's past, hearing voices echoing down the long corridors of time, and now wants more than anything to leave the Overlook any way they can, regardless if they're snowed in or not. And Wendy eventually agrees, considering that even a frozen, painful death stranded out in the mountains in hostile weather would be better than what the Overlook has in store for them. They begin to face the reality that Jack may be lost to them, that nothing good will come from the Overlook, that their family will be destroyed rather than saved by the place. The hotel responds with taunts and further transgressions, each more sinister and threatening than the last. In the hallway outside of room 217 there is an old-fashioned fire hose rolled up in a case on the wall:

"Don't worry. I'm just a hose, that's all. And even if that isn't all, what I do to you won't be much worse than a bee sting. Or a wasp sting. What would I want to do to a nice boy like you...except bite...and bite...and bite?"

Lines of demarcation begin to form, with mother and son on one side and the father on the other. Danny faces his own bizarre, frantic bout with terror in the topiary. Jack turns cold and strikes him. The hotel comes to life around Jack, rising up, emerging into being; a century's malignant ghosts come out to mock and leer, to manipulate and deceive, and to absorb the Torrance family. Unmask! Unmask! Let the party begin! Wendy and Danny begin to adopt a siege mentality regarding their apartment within the Overlook and the rest of the building, the realm where the cavorting ghosts of the Overlook's past and the increasingly demented Jack Torrance hold court. The siege soon succumbs to the inevitable as the last tattered fragments of Jack's sanity disintegrate, succumbs to all out war, to the father--the star of old, the shooting star of Wendy's youth, fallen dark for the last time--trying to outright murder his son and wife. The unexplained word plaguing Danny's precognitions--REDRUM--is revealed in a dark, absorbing mirror glass as MURDER. The hotel has taken control, events begin to spiral out of hand, and we follow the three main characters and Dick Hallorann down the dark rabbit hole to the grim conclusion: a desperate struggle for survival.

The Shining is a novel I liked somewhat less than Salem's Lot, yet it's nonetheless a memorable, compelling story: a study in addiction and alcoholism, of dealing with one's own childhood problems in adulthood (breaking the cycle), of the obligations, emotions and terrors of marriage and parenthood, of isolation both physiological and psychological, and of hauntings--of the ghosts of the past we keep bringing back again and again, that never seem to rest easy because we cannot let them. It's all that, and it's a tale of the supernatural, of precognition--the "shining"--and of a hotel haunted by a century of malice, indignity and murder, a hotel that has teeth, that bites, and can swallow a human whole, mind and body.

Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film adaptation of The Shining is--let's pull no punches here--the single most unsettling horror movie I've ever seen. I held this opinion two decades ago, and I still do. Kubrick created such a sense of impending doom, of tension building scene-by-scene, of hopeless, desolate isolation, and of sheer haunting terror, that it has become the quintessential horror movie to me. And Jack Nicholson's portrayal of Jack Torrance was nothing less than riveting, a role with lines made to quote for ages, the centerpiece that held it all together. Kubrick took some liberties with and made some additions to the original King story, and they all seem to have been inspired choices, becoming staples of the film (see partial list below). There was also a miniseries remake of The Shining made in 1997, made by Stephen King himself, and it was quite good: extremely faithful to the original novel, yet not quite as scary as the 1980 Kubrick film. Both are worth the price of admission and more, as the saying goes.

Items in the 1980 Stanley Kubrick film version of The Shining that were not written in the original novel by Stephen King:

*In the movie, quiet, creepy scenes are repeatedly shown of Danny riding a Big Wheel though the Overlook hallways, on carpet and across hard floors, and the changing sound of the surfaces created a unique kind of tension. In the book, Danny simply walks through the hallways.

*Jack Nicholson's Jack Torrance wields an axe to menace his family and Dick Halloran; in the novel he uses a mallet.

*In the movie, there is no topiary and therefore no topiary hedge animals coming to life. Instead, Kubrick replaced it with the sprawling hedge maze that worked so effectively. In 1980, without CG animation, creating a malevolent, living topiary hedge animals would have probably been ineffective.

*The writing project Jack Torrance labors over in the movie is eventually revealed to have been nothing all along, just a madman's mantra typed infinitely, again and again: "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." In the novel, Jack has actually been working on a real writing project the whole time, the long-gestating would-be Broadway play that's been in the works for so long.

*Perhaps the most famous Jack Nicholson line from the movie was, "Heeeeere's, Johnnny!" That line does not appear in the novel. Instead, when Jack frames his face in the gap of the broken bathroom door, he says the less-than-charming line to Wendy: "Nowhere left to run, you ****."

*In the movie, Dick Hallorann is killed by an axe blow to the chest from Jack Torrance. In the book, Hallorann is pummeled by a mallet from Torrance, yet survives and is alive at the end of the story.

An epic tale of horror featured in a giant landscape...

..This was the second King novel I ever read, the first being "The dead zone" The story takes place pretty much at a gigantic hotel in the Rockies during wintertime. King has the ability to create a horrible scary feeling of this world within a world...a hotel that is somewhat posessed, and a region of rocky terrain that is virtually inaccesible by anyone in the winter, barring they own a helicoptor or Snow-Removal machine!

This thing has mystery, intrigue, and fear galore. It is still midunderstood in this respect: Most people think King writes about HORROR...but that is second...he writes extraordinary tales about PEOPLE and SITATIONS and PLACES that we can all relate to, then puts them against something that we ourselves would not be sure of the outcome.The Shining is a story that deals with madness and control, and gives new meaning to the word INSANITY!

Terrible events occur at the isolated Overlook Hotel. It's a place where the guests are deceased but not necessarily departed, high in the wintry Rocky Mountains in the off season. A family checks in so the father can write, and terror lurks behind every door. Their son, who has psychic powers but does not know he has them and does not know how to use them, struggles to hold his own against the forces of evil that are driving his father insane.