The Shining (novel)

The Shining

File:Shiningnovel.jpg First edition cover
Author	Stephen King
Cover artist	Dave Christensen
Language	English
Genre	Horror
Publisher	Doubleday
Publication date	January 1977
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (Hardcover)
Pages	447
ISBN	0743424425
Preceded by	'Salem's Lot
Followed by	Cycle:The Stand Series:Doctor Sleep

The Shining is a 1977 horror novel by American author Stephen King. The title was inspired by the John Lennon song "Instant Karma!", which contained the line "We all shine on…". It was King's third published novel, and first hardback bestseller, and the success of the book firmly established King as a preeminent author in the horror 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 in 1997.

The book is dedicated to King's son, Joseph: "This is for Joe Hill King, who shines on."

Plot summary

Jack Torrance, a loving father when sober, is a temperamental alcoholic and aspiring writer. He is trying to rebuild his life after previously breaking his son Danny's arm and assaulting a pupil at a Vermont prep school where he was a teacher. After losing his teaching position and giving up drinking, Jack accepts a job as a winter caretaker at the large, isolated Overlook Hotel in Colorado to prove that he has recovered from alcoholism and is now a responsible person. Jack, his wife Wendy, and the clairvoyant Danny move into the Overlook.

Danny's clairvoyance makes him sensitive to supernatural forces. Shortly after the family's initial arrival at the hotel, Danny and the hotel chef, Dick Hallorann, talk privately to discuss Danny's talent and the hotel's sinister nature. Dick informs Danny that he shares Danny's abilities (though to a lesser degree), as did Dick's grandmother, who called it "shining". Dick warns Danny to avoid Room 217, and reassures him that the things he may see are merely pictures which cannot harm him. The conversation ends with Dick saying to Danny, "If there is trouble...you give a shout."

The hotel has a personality in its own right, and acts as a psychic lens: it manipulates the living and the dead for its own purposes; and it magnifies the psychic powers of any living people who reside there and makes them more sensitive to its urgings. Danny has premonitions of the hotel's danger to his family and begins seeing ghosts and frightening visions from the hotel's past, but puts up with them in the hope that they are not dangerous in the present. Although Danny is close to his father, he does not tell either of his parents about his visions because he senses that the caretaking job is important to his father and his family's future. However, Danny realizes that his presence in the hotel makes it more powerful, and enables it to make objects and situations dangerous that would normally not be dangerous, like topiary animals that come to life.

The hotel has difficulty possessing Danny, so it begins to possess Jack, frustrating his need and desire to work. Jack becomes increasingly unstable, and the sinister ghosts of the hotel gradually begin to overtake him. One day he goes to the bar of the hotel, previously empty of alcohol, and finds it fully stocked. He quickly gets drunk, which allows the hotel to possess him more fully. The hotel attempts to use Jack to kill Wendy and Danny in order to absorb Danny's psychic abilities. Wendy and Danny manage to get the better of Jack, locking him into the walk-in pantry, but the ghost of Delbert Grady, a former caretaker who murdered his family and then committed suicide, releases him. Wendy discovers that they are completely isolated at the Overlook, as Jack has sabotaged the hotel's snowmobile and smashed the CB radio in the office. She and Jack battle. Jack strikes Wendy with one of the hotel's roque mallets, breaking three ribs, a leg, and one vertebra in her back. Wendy stabs Jack in the small of his back with a large butcher knife, then crawls away to the caretaker's suite and locks herself in the bathroom, with Jack in pursuit.

Hallorann, working at a winter resort in Florida, hears Danny's psychic call for help and rushes back to the Overlook. Jack leaves Wendy in the bathroom and ambushes Hallorann, shattering his jaw and giving him a concussion with the mallet, before setting off after Danny. Danny distracts Jack by saying "You're not my daddy," having realized that the Overlook had completely taken over Jack by playing on his alcoholism. Jack temporarily regains control of himself and tells Danny, "Run away. Quick. And remember how much I love you," before the hotel causes Jack to kill himself with the roque mallet. Danny tells the thing Jack has become that the unstable boiler is going to explode, and it rushes to the basement as Danny, Wendy, and Hallorann flee. Though the Jack-thing tries to relieve the pressure, the boiler explodes, destroying the Overlook. The building's spirit makes one last desperate attempt to possess Hallorann and make him kill Danny and Wendy, but he shakes it off and brings them to safety.

The novel ends with Danny and Wendy summering at a resort in Maine where Hallorann, the head chef, is comforting Danny over the loss of his father.

Characters

Danny Torrance

Daniel Anthony "Danny" Torrance is the five-year-old son of Jack and Wendy. He has the "Shining," which allows him to detect spirits and thus makes him a target of the Hotel. It also allows him to see past, present, and future events through his 'guide', Tony. Tony (his name taken from Danny's middle name, Anthony), is at first to Danny an imaginary playmate, then a source of fear, and finally a source of strength. Towards the end of the novel Tony reveals himself to Danny: "'Danny ... you're in a place deep down in your own mind. The place where I am. I'm a part of you, Danny.'" More specifically, Tony is Danny from the future: "Tony was like looking into a magic mirror and seeing himself in ten years"; "Tony ... the Daniel Anthony Torrance that would someday be."

Jack Torrance

John Daniel "Jack" Torrance is a recovering alcoholic who lost his teaching job due to beating a student for slashing his car's tires. Jack has a certain arrogance and stubbornness about him, he does not like being under authority and often compromises himself or his job by retaliating to it. He takes his family to the hotel, but is driven by the hotel and its spirits to drink. Jack goes mad and attempts to kill Wendy, Danny and Dick Hallorann with a roque mallet. At the end of the novel, Jack's love for his son allows him to redeem himself, and his body is incinerated in the Overlook Hotel's explosion.

Wendy Torrance

Winnifred "Wendy" Torrance is Jack's wife and Danny's mother. A strong woman, she remains at Jack's side in his alcoholism and struggle at the hotel but is forced to fight for her and her son's life when Jack is driven to drink and is possessed by the hotel. Wendy, Danny, and Dick Hallorann escape after Jack redeems himself and the hotel is destroyed.

Dick Hallorann

Dick Hallorann is the chef of the Overlook Hotel and shares the "shining" ability with Danny. Dick is telepathically called by Danny to the hotel, and is almost killed by Jack with a roque mallet. At the end of the novel, Dick helps Danny and Wendy escape.

Hallorann additionally appears in Stephen King's It as a 19-year-old Private First Class "mess-cook." Hallorann helped create "The Black Spot," a club for black enlisted men, which was burned down in a racially motivated attack in 1930. During the fire, Hallorann used his "shine" to determine the safest exit from the burning building which had become a deathtrap, saving many lives in the process, including Will Hanlon, Mike Hanlon's father.

Horace Derwent

Horace "Harry" Derwent was a self-made millionaire and former owner of the Overlook Hotel. He is responsible for much of the Overlook's notorious history. Derwent purchased the Overlook sometime in the early 1940s and invested over one million dollars into its renovation before the grand opening on August 29, 1945, which Derwent celebrated by hosting a lavish masked ball. He appears to Jack in the Colorado Lounge as one of the apparitions at the ball. However, unlike Lloyd the bartender, and Grady the caretaker, Derwent does not actually interact with Jack.

Stuart Ullman

Stuart Ullman is the manager of the Overlook Hotel, and is hated by the entire staff. Although they hate him, they respect him, and understand that he is a good manager. He does not believe Jack is suited for the caretaker job, but gives it to him because an old friend of Jack's sits on the board of directors. Ullman screams at Jack when he learns of Jack's idea of writing a book about the dark history of the Hotel.

Editions

There are at least three special collector's editions, aside from the original and trade copies.

• The first is a blue cover, with a faceless Danny in the middle. It includes a color photograph of the original hardcover and an introduction by Ken Follett.
• The second is a comic-book style front, in which Danny has a thought bubble containing the Overlook, with a new introduction by Stephen King.
• Another edition is a white cover with comic writing: "Stephen King" "The Shining" with a wasp in the lower-right corner.

Background

After writing Carrie and Salem's Lot, both of which are set in small towns in King's home state of Maine, King was looking for a change of pace for the next book. "I wanted to spend a year away from Maine so that my next novel would have a different sort of background." King opened an atlas of the US on the kitchen table and randomly pointed to a location, which turned out to be Boulder, Colorado. So in early 1974, King packed up his wife, Tabitha, and their two children, Naomi and Joe, and moved across the country to Colorado.

Around Halloween, Tabitha decided that the adult Kings needed a mini-vacation and, on the advice of locals, they decided to try out a resort hotel adjacent to Estes Park, Colorado (nestled at the foot of the Rocky Mountain National Park) called the Stanley Hotel. On October 30, 1974, Stephen and Tabitha checked into the Stanley. They almost weren't able to check in as the hotel was closing for the off season the next day and the credit card slips had already been packed away.

Stephen and Tabitha were the only two guests in the hotel that night. "When we arrived, they were just getting ready to close for the season, and we found ourselves the only guests in the place — with all those long, empty corridors . . ."

They checked into room 217 which they found out was said to be haunted. This is where room 217 comes from in the book.

Ten years prior, King had read Ray Bradbury's The Veldt and was inspired to someday write a story about a person whose dreams would become real. In 1972 King started a novel entitled Darkshine, which was to be about a psychic boy in a psychic amusement park, but the idea never came to fruition and King abandoned the book. During the night at the Stanley, this story came back to him.

Tabitha and Stephen had dinner that evening in the grand dining room, totally alone. They were offered one choice for dinner, the only meal still available. Taped orchestral music played in the room and theirs was the only table set for dining. "Except for our table all the chairs were up on the tables. So the music is echoing down the hall, and, I mean, it was like God had put me there to hear that and see those things. And by the time I went to bed that night, I had the whole book in my mind".

After dinner, Tabitha decided to turn in, but Stephen took a walk around the empty hotel. He ended up in the bar and was served drinks by a bartender named Grady.

"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. I got up, lit a cigarette, sat in a chair looking out the window at the Rockies, and by the time the cigarette was done, I had the bones of the book firmly set in my mind."

Originally conceived as a five-act tragedy play, the story evolved into a five-act novel that also included a lot of King's own personal demons.

"I was able to invest a lot of my unhappy aggressive impulses in Jack Torrance, and it was safe."

"Sometimes you confess. You always hide what you're confessing to. That's one of the reasons why you make up the story. When I wrote The Shining, for instance, the protagonist of The Shining is a man who has broken his son's arms, who has a history of child beating, who is beaten himself. And as a young father with two children, I was horrified by my occasional feelings of real antagonism toward my children. Won't you ever stop? Won't you ever go to bed? And time has given me the idea that probably there are a lot of young fathers and young mothers both who feel very angry, who have angry feelings toward their children. But as somebody who has been raised with the idea that father knows best and Ward Cleaver on 'Leave It To Beaver,' and all this stuff, I would think to myself, Oh, if he doesn't shut up, if he doesn't shut up. . . . So when I wrote this book I wrote a lot of that down and tried to get it out of my system, but it was also a confession. Yes, there are times when I felt very angry toward my children and have even felt as though I could hurt them. Well, my kids are older now. Naomi is fifteen and Joey is thirteen and Owen is eight, and they're all super kids, and I don't think I've laid a hand on one of my kids in probably seven years, but there was a time . . . ,"

According to "Guests and Ghosts," an Internet article, the Stanley, which was built by Freelan Oscar ("F.O.") Stanley, based on the designs of his wife, Flora, opened in 1903 and was "once a luxury hotel for the well-heeled Edwardian-era tourist." The hotel boasts having had such guests as not only King but also Theodore Roosevelt, Bob Dylan, Cary Grant, Doris Day, Billy Graham, Japan’s Emperor Hirohito, and John Philip Sousa.

The Shining was also heavily influenced by Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, Edgar Allan Poe's The Masque of the Red Death and The Fall of the House of Usher, Robert Marasco's Burnt Offerings, and Guy de Maupassant's short story The Hostelry (1886).

Prior to writing The Shining, King had written Roadwork and The Body which were both published later. The first draft of The Shining took less than four months to complete and he was able to publish it before the others.

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.

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, in an abridged version, to promote King's new miniseries adaptation of the novel). There also was an epilogue titled "After the Play", but it appears to no longer exist, as it was never published, and King maintains he does not have a copy of it any longer.

Links to King's other works

• 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 5, "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 King's 2007 novel Lisey's Story. (Jack Torrance ponders who wrote it: "Some undergraduate poet who was now selling washers in Wausau or insurance in Indianapolis?")
• Dick Hallorann makes a brief appearance in King's later novel It, as a young corporal who saves main character Michael Hanlon's father from being burned alive at an African-American nightclub called The Black Spot.
• A reference to the Overlook is made in King's later novel Misery, where Annie Wilkes speaks of an artist named Andrew Pomeroy, her ex-lover, who was sent by a magazine to sketch the ruins of the hotel (which blew up and burned down at the end of The Shining), but Annie considered his drawings "terrible" and, believing he had cheated on her, killed him shortly thereafter.
• A character in King's novel The Stand, Mother Abagail, has clairvoyant and telepathic abilities; at one point she tells another character that this talent runs in her family, adding, "My own grandmother used to call it the shining lamp of God, sometimes just the shine."
• The main character in King's novel The Dead Zone, Johnny Smith, has the power of psychometry; at one point, the lyrics "this little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine" gets stuck in his head.
• Eddie Dean in King's The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three mentions having watched the film adaptation of The Shining.
• In The Shining, Danny calls Jack's heavy drinking "The Bad Thing." In King's later novel, Firestarter, The Bad Thing references Charlie's ability.
• In The Regulators, which King wrote under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman, Pat Allen says in a letter to her friend Kathi, "You're the only person I know who's read not just one copy of The Shining to tatters, but two!"
• In The Dark Tower, the number 19 comes up several times throughout the later books. The number of the room Danny is told to avoid is 217. 2+17=19
• In Cell the character Denise says a chant "Tony, Tony, come around, something's lost and can't be found" after Clay loses the number to the cell phone, as in the shining Danny also talks to Tony during his psychic trips.
• In one of King's earlier novels, Carrie, a minor character, Georgette Shyres, lives at 217 Willow Street. In The Shining, Danny is told to avoid room 217.

Possible sequel

During the promotional tour for Under the Dome in November 2009, King has said that he has wanted to write a sequel to The Shining with a working title Doctor Sleep. It would concern itself with Danny Torrance, now in his forties, working as an orderly at a hospice.

External links

• The Shining title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Bookpoi - How to identify first edition copies of The Shining by Stephen King.