The Shining by Stephen King Sunday Book Circle - Part I
Do I even need to summarize this book? Well, I guess I will anyway. This is King’s third novel and has four major characters: Jack Torrance, a recovering alcoholic on his last chance for a job, his wife Wendy, a stay at home mom considering divorce, their preschool age son, Danny, who has the shining, which is telepathy, clairvoyance, and sensitivity to the supernatural, some of which appears much like a seizure, and Dick Hallorann, a hotel cook who also has the shining, but to a much lesser degree than Danny. Actually, I was wrong: there are five major characters. The firth is the Colorado Rockies located Overlook Hotel, where Hallorann works and where the Torrance family is staying during the winter off season to make sure the pipes don’t freeze and the old, faulty boiler doesn’t blow. But the Overlook Hotel is haunted and evil and it has an appetite for people.
Now that that is out of the way, let me just say, I love The Shining. It is multifaceted in a way many novels aren’t. There is the literal level of the haunting and supernatural elements, and then there is the subtextual level which is about abusive people. I saw the Kubrick film before I ever read this novel, and while I like that movie, including the prevailing Wendy theory, it is a very different story than this novel by subtextually putting Jack as the victim of his wife’s insanity. It’s good. It’s a good movie, but it isn’t even as deep as the novel with its themes. Though it is hard for a movie to be as deep as a novel this long. Kubrick didn’t treat the supernatural elements as real, which really bothered King. I get that, but adaptations are not what they are adapting. The close adaptation is rare and honestly, superfluous. I don’t need to watch a live action version of the same story, but I do prefer that tone and themes stay the same in adaptations. The problem with wanting that from Kubric is that is impossible with his work. He was an artiste of a director. There was no way he wasn’t going to run away with his own vision and he adapted a lot of novels over his career. And, no, I haven’t seen the Steven Weber starring adaptation, but since it was made for ABC I seriously doubt that it has any of the sexual elements that the novel so frequently portrays.
But enough about adaptations. Let’s talk about the actual novel. The actual supernatural elements of The Shining are pretty amazing. Everything but the kitchen sink is in this novel when it comes to ghosts, from bloody echos of a murder, a promiscuous female suicide, a whole party from a masked new year’s eve, a child in the playground, and my favorite, a menagerie of living hedge animals. Besides the woman who committed suicide, a lot of the ghostly stuff is sexual, including the clock figures that Danny sees and the man in the dog mask. King’s horror often has a lot of sexual elements to it, and I think that’s one reason he puts some people off. Ghosts and ghoulies trying to murder people are fine, but someone says cunt and it’s all gone too far! Insert eyeroll. I like the sexual nature of a lot of his horror, because rape, sexual assault, sexual arousal in the face of fear are all horrifying. If we can handle a bloated corpse trying to strangle a child, we should also be able to handle that bloated corpse’s naked breasts. Sex is a sure fire way to make characters and readers uncomfortable and that’s kind of the point of horror fiction, being uncomfortable, off-kilter, shaken, unsure of yourself, what other synonyms can I come up with? Hmm. Ah! Disjointed.
While I liked the normal ghosts of The Shining, I felt like the real star of freakdom in the book was the menagerie of hedge animals. They are only in four scenes, but the stakes are ramped up beautifully in those four scenes. First we have Jack thinking he’s hallucinating as the hedge animals slightly move and become more defined. Then we have them chasing Danny across the snow. We have them guarding the Overlook from Hallorann, wherein an actual fight happens. Finally, we have their resolution. When it comes to creep factor and developing an encroaching threat, this is the best writing in the novel. This is the horror element that is unique to The Shining. Because the Overlook’s ghosts don’t really exist without The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, and there are plenty of novels about ghosts. The hedge animals are special and I love them. But let me know what your favorite creep of the Overlook is?
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