THE SHINING (NOVEL)

'''The Shining''' (1977) is a horror novel by American author Stephen King. The title came from the John Lennon song "Instant Karma!", which contained the line "We all shine on…". King had originally wanted to call the book "The Shine" but changed it when he realized that "shine" was derogatory slang for black people. It was King's third published novel, and first hardback bestseller, and the success of the book firmly established King as a pre-eminent 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.

Contents

Plot summary

Background

Critical examination

Relationship to the films and to King's other works

Footnotes

External links

Plot summary

Jack Torrance is a temperamental writer who is trying to rebuild his life (and his family's) 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 resort hotel with a gory history. He hopes that this will reestablish him as a responsible person, enable him to finish a long-worked-on play, and resume his teaching 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 either possessed by a life force or is itself sentient, and seeks people with psychic powers for its own use. 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 the sinister ghost of the hotel begins to take him over.

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.""The Stephen King Companion" Beahm, George Andrews McMeel press 1989 King opened an atlas of the US on the kitchen table and randomly pointed to a location, which turned out to be Boulder, Colorado.^[1] 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,^[2] 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 in to room 217.
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.^[3]
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".^[4]
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.²
"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 firehose. 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."¹
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."¹
"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, Billy Graham, Japan’s Emperor Hirohito, and John Philip Sousa.⁴
''The Shining'' was also heavily influenced by Shirley Jackson's ''The Haunting of Hill House'',^[5] Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death"³ and Robert Marasco's ''Burnt Offerings''.¹

Critical examination

The story is an entry in the gothic horror genre drawing on the concept of a building having a conscious will, an idea previously explored by Edgar Allan Poe in "The Fall of the House of Usher" and Shirley Jackson in ''The Haunting of Hill House''.
King himself has said that ''The Shining'' includes an exploration of alcohol dependence and relationships with parents and children in the life of an individual.

Relationship to the films and to King's other works

★ The story was originally going to be set in an amusement park, but while on vacation, King and his wife Tabitha stayed at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado while the staff was preparing for the winter off. King has also said that he based Jack Torrance on himself.

★ 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 ABC television mini-series, used the actual Stanley Hotel as the Overlook.

★ Prior to writing ''The Shining'', King had written ''Road Work'' 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. "Stephen King: America's Best Loved Boogeyman" Beahm, George Andrews McMeel Press 1998

★ 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).

★ 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 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 book ''It''.

★ A reference to the Overlook is made in King's later novel ''Misery'', where Annie 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 ''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 nature of the Overlook Hotel is very close to that of the fictional room 1408 in New York's Dolphin Hotel, discussed in King's short story 1408. Both room 1408 and the Overlook are not "haunted", per se, but possess an inhuman intelligence that appears to "feed" on the guests.

Footnotes

1. "Stephen King: America's Best Loved Boogeyman" Beahm, George Andrews McMeel Press 1998
2. "Stephen King Country" Beahm, George Running Press 1999
3. "Stephen King: The Art of Darkness" Winter, Douglas E. Plume 1984
4. http://www.vvdailypress.com/2001-2003/103985280065691.html (captured 6/15/06)
5. "The Annotated Guide to Stephen King" Collings, Michael R. Starmount House 1986

External links

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