The Shining (novel)
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| Author | Stephen King |
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| Country | USA |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Horror |
| Publisher | Signet |
| Released | 1977 |
| Pages | 447 (Original Hardcover) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-7434-2442-5 |
The Shining (1977) is a horror novel by American author Stephen King. King's third published novel, the success of the book firmly established King as a pre-eminent author in the genre. A film based upon the book, The Shining directed by Stanley Kubrick, was released in 1980. The book was later adapted into a television mini-series.
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[edit] Plot summary
Jack Torrance is a tempermental writer who is trying to rebuild his and his family's life after his alcoholism and volatile temper cause him to lose his teaching position at a prestigious New England preparatory school. Having given up drinking, he accepts a job as a winter caretaker at a large, isolated, Colorado hotel. He hopes that this will reestablish him as a responsible person, enable him to finish a promising play, and resume his career. He moves into the Overlook Hotel with his wife, Wendy, and young son, Danny, who is telepathic (the "shining" of the title) and sensitive to supernatural forces. The hotel is possessed by a life force or is itself sentient and especially uses people with psychic powers. Danny, who has had premonitions of the hotel's danger to his family, begins seeing ghosts and frightening visions from the hotel's past, but tolerates them in the hope that they are not dangerous in the present. He doesn't tell his parents because he senses how important the job of caretaker is to his father's and his family's future. Having difficulty possessing Danny, the hotel begins to possess Jack, frustrating his need and desire to work as he becomes increasingly unstable, and gradually turns him to its purposes.
The Overlook hotel does not seem to be inhabited by ghosts of the former inhabitants, but rather a collaboration of the immoral, and somewhat sinister personalities of the hotel's former occupants. None of the inhabitants seem outright "deranged", but instead are much more sinister and plotting than anything else.
Although the hotel has enough power to 'influence' people, it is still only a psychological and spiritual force, and cannot bring itself into "existence" other than in the minds of the hotel's real life occupants. The goal of the Overlook Hotel is to obtain someone with significant psychic power (Danny) who will be able to make the Overlook's more sinister side a physical force rather than just a psychological one.
[edit] Critical examination
The story is an entry in the gothic horror genre that effectively uses the concept of a building having a conscious will (or a soul, as it were), an idea explored also by Edgar Allan Poe in The Fall of the House of Usher and Shirley Jackson in The Haunting of Hill House.
King has said that The Shining includes an exploration of alcohol dependence and relationships with parents and children in one's life.
[edit] Trivia
- The story was originally going to be set in an amusement park. But while on vacation, King and his wife Tabitha were staying at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado while the staff was preparing for the winter off. The Stanley Hotel was used in the ABC mini-series. King has also said that he based Jack Torrance on himself. (see Stephen King's inspiration).
- The title came from the John Lennon song "Instant Karma!". In the song is the line "We all shine on..." King wanted to call the book "The Shine" but changed it when he realized that "shine" was derogatory slang for black people.
- King's third published book, but his first hardback bestseller.
- Prior to writing The Shining King had written Road Work and "The Body" which were both published later.
- The first draft took less than four months to complete. [1]
- Ironically, Bill Thompson, King's editor at Doubleday, tried to talk King out of The Shining as he felt after Carrie and 'Salem's Lot, King would get 'typed' as a horror writer. King considered that a compliment. [1]
- Originally there was a prologue titled "Before the Play" that chronicled earlier events in the Overlook's nightmarish history and a disturbing interlude in which a young Jack Torrance is abused and has his arm broken by his alcoholic father, while a voice tells him that "what you see is what you'll be". It was removed from the finished manuscript, although it was later published in the magazines Whisper and TV Guide (the latter to promote King's new miniseries adaptation of the novel).
- Stanley Kubrick, who directed the movie version of the story, used the Timberline Lodge in Mount Hood, Oregon as a stand-in for the Overlook Hotel, but Mick Garris, who directed the television mini-series, used the actual Stanley Hotel as the Overlook.
- The protagonist of the play Jack is writing is named Denker, the surname assumed by the fugitive Nazi war criminal Dussander in King's later novella Apt Pupil.
- At the beginning of Chapter 44 in Part 3, "Conversations at the Party," a line of poetry is quoted--"The arguments against insanity fall through with a soft shurring sound..." This line of poetry, from a poem King wrote in college, also appears in a dominant role in Lisey's Story. (Jack Torrance ponders who wrote it--"Some undergraduate poet who was now selling washers in Wausau or insurance in Indianapolis?" He didn't seem to include "bonechillers in Bangor.")
- Dick Hallorann makes a brief appearance in King's later book It.
- The secret of room 217 is revealed appropriately enough on page 217 on some editions. King has stated that this was a coincidence, but nonetheless creeped him out.[citation needed]
- During the time King wrote this book, he admitted he was under the influence of several prescription, and illegal drugs, in addition to alcohol.
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- The Shining publication history at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
