The Shining, by Stephen King: A Very Late Review

“REDRUM is just MURDER backwards”

I recently finished reading my third Stephen King book the other day, and coincidentally it happened to be The Shining, which was his third published book and first super-success.  I’ve mentioned Stephen King once or twice before on here, not because I particularly respected his writing but rather because I respected his success.  I am delighted to say that my previous opinions were deeply unfounded.

Just so you know, this is a review of the 1977 novel.  You know, the one with words instead of Jack Nicholson.  I have to admit that I haven’t seen the 1980 Kubrick movie of the same name, a characteristic I am deeply ashamed of.  But I can still tell you quite a bit about the movie, even if I don’t have the full picture.  Because at the very least, I do have a full picture of the book.

There will be some spoilers, by the way, but considering that The Simpsons spoiled it for me in the first place, I’m hoping nobody is too surprised.

Let me start off by explaining what I meant when I said that my previous opinions about Stephen King were unfounded, so you have a general idea of what my mindset was when I began reading the 600+ pages that was my copy of the book.  So, prior to this the only works of Stephen King I’d read were his On Writing memoirs and The Girl who Loved Tom Gordon, a little-known piece of his that’s little-known for good reason.

While I liked On Writing, I couldn’t help but get the impression that King was a little obsessed with himself, though I guess you have to be in order to write a memoir/instruction manual for writing.  And when I read Tom Gordon, I didn’t feel like his esteem was well-deserved.  It was a fine book, better than some I’ve read, sure, but the story felt lack-luster, the narration seemed mediocre, and the story would continually bring up plot points about the main character’s family that had no bearing whatsoever on the conflict itself.  The book casually name-dropped Myst, the 90’s adventure game.  It did not age well, is what I’m saying.

While I appreciate the fact that the main character was a small child and it took place in the mountains of New England, and some of the imagery (especially with the God of the Lost, the primary antagonist) was impressive, the book overall didn’t strike me as something praise-worthy.  So I privately wondered what all the fuss was about, and discussed with my mom whether King was a good writer or just a good storyteller.  My expectations for The Shining were pretty low.

And then I was absolutely stunned by the book itself.

For the uninitiated, The Shining is about Jack Torrance, who takes up a position as the winter caretaker of The Overlook Hotel, a resort in the Rocky Mountains. He travels there with his wife, Wendy Torrance, and his son, Danny Torrance, who is also kind of psychic. There, Jack slowly goes mad as the hotel starts to come to life around them. The imagery is fantastic, the story is spellbinding, the narration is lyrical, and the characters are realistic.  It was everything I had hoped Tom Gordon would be, everything I thought King’s writing was supposed to be based on the praise he receives.  I read through almost 700 pages in some of the shortest length of time I’ve ever taken to finish a book.  It took me an entire summer to read Catch-22.  The Shining took me less than a month.

I realized that I could respect both King’s writing and his success.  He wasn’t just a good storyteller; he was a good writer, too.  The Shining is this eerie, creeping behemoth, much like The Overlook Hotel itself, but it’s built in such a way to be as beautiful and special as it is weird and unnerving.  Something worth making a movie out of.

Of course, it isn’t without flaws.  The book has some of the questionable moments that crop up in seemingly every King novel, like uncomfortable sexual encounters or an overabundance of nonsense background detail.  But unlike when I read Tom Gordon, the background detail here didn’t seem useless.  I can recognize that some of that detail is superfluous, sure, and that certain sections of the story could have been cut entirely, but it fits into the story.  It felt real.  It felt meaningful.

And I could go on and on about what I liked in the book, especially the scary stuff, since it was way scarier than I expected.  The spooky scene with the hedge animals, the bizarre, often unsettling use of parentheticals in the text itself, and that final encounter with the Hotel’s manager, it’s all done so well.  I’d recommend reading it, without a doubt.  But there are a few other issues I had with the book that I want to bring up, because everyone’s already sung their praises a million times.

First of all, I don’t know if King intended this or not, but I kind of hated Jack Torrance.  I consciously and subconsciously blamed him for everything that went wrong in The Overlook.  Jack’s alcoholism and his anger issues play a major role in the text, and maybe it’s supposed to make Jack realistic, but to me it made him completely unlikable, even if he is realistic.  He breaks his son’s own arm and punches a student, and he was only drunk for one of those events.

Of course, Jack was beaten as a kid, and his father was an alcoholic before him, and the cycle of abuse is very much a real thing, so he’s a complex character.  He isn’t supposed to be perfect.  But maybe it’s because of my own history of mental illness or the history of my own family tree or maybe how Jack’s interior dialogue was written, but Jack didn’t seem like a redeemable character.  It didn’t feel like he was trying to get better.  He just makes excuses for why he’s getting worse.  But that’s okay, I guess.  It made the book more emotionally compelling.  People don’t always get better.

Honestly, Dick Hallorann, the hotel’s chef, is easily the most likable character in the book, besides maybe Danny Torrance, the kid with psychic powers that rides around on a tricycle in the movie.  Wendy just seems kind of mopey in the beginning, though she gets her shit together at the end.  There aren’t a whole lot of other characters that have any real bearing on the book.

Speaking of Hallorann, though, I should mention that his character is black, and this is no secret.  The narrator uses the n-word a few times throughout the book, at least one being directed at Hallorann.  To be fair, it was the primary antagonist shouting it, but Jack Torrance also uses the n-word once or twice, in my memory.  Sure, the book was written in different times and all that, but it made me kind of uncomfortable to read it.  Another reason why I found Jack unlikable, I guess.

And another thing; Stephen King’s foreshadowing is incredibly unsubtle.  Maybe that’s because I already know what’s mostly going to happen, but in the book Danny has recurring nightmares that basically spell out how the ending goes.  The first hundred pages give away the fact that Jack’s going to lose it.  Which surprised me, honestly.  But it isn’t that big of a deal.

Those are really my only major gripes about the book, I guess.  Maybe that’s just a sign of the changing times, how things that were fine in the 70’s aren’t exactly okay now.  Back then I’m sure people didn’t really think too much about a white author using the n-word, even in dialogue.  But it’s just something I don’t think I, as a white writer, would feel comfortable doing.

But that’s a whole other story.  I’m not here today to talk race studies, I’m here to talk scary literature.  And I can point out to you a few parts of the novel that were surprisingly absent from the movie or vice-versa, based on the few disjointed scenes I’ve picked up on TV.

For one, the little girls that ask Danny to play with them are, in fact, in the book, but only mentioned in passing and never actually appear in any scene.  For a while, I didn’t think they were in the book at all until I realized that they were buried in the background detail.  And that scene where Wendy finds Jack’s typewriter and it’s covered with “All work and no play makes jack a dull boy”?  That’s not in the book at all.  Nor does Jack ever say “Here’s Johnny!”  In the book, he doesn’t even use an axe; he uses a roque mallet for everything.

Like I said, I’ve never seen the movie, so I don’t know how the movie ends, but I know how the book ends, and it doesn’t see Jack freezing to death outside; it’s actually the opposite.  Stephen King has talked before about how he doesn’t really like the movie very much and called the movie version of Wendy “one of the most misogynistic characters ever put on film.”  That’s really no surprise, since Kubrick was at the helm.

Something the book has that the movie doesn’t, though, is the spooky ghost manta ray that pops out of the window at the end of the book.  I knew that was coming because I’m an expert on the lore of Super Mario Sunshine, though really looking critically at the two, I think it’s just coincidence that The Shining mentions manta rays once and Super Mario Sunshine, a game which is about islands, features a manta ray on a haunted hotel level.  But who knows.

At any rate, I was quite surprised by how much I thoroughly enjoyed The Shining, and I was quite surprised by how much I appreciated the writing that makes it up.  As a creative writing major, I think that what tends to impress me the most about authors is how they can string words together, and Stephen King definitely does a top-notch job.  I’d recommend the book to anyone who’s a fan of horror or hotels.

Who knows, I might even read the book’s sequel, and then I’ll do a review on that.  Or maybe I’ll finally get around to watching the movie.  And then the next stop is to read the book that inspired by favorite comedy: It.