the shining book review new york times

The Shining

By stephen king.

'The Shining' is a must-read classic of the psychological horror genre. First published in 1977, the novel solidified Stephen King’s legacy as one of the most skilled authors of his generation.

About the Book

Article written by Emma Baldwin

B.A. in English, B.F.A. in Fine Art, and B.A. in Art Histories from East Carolina University.

The novel features many of the themes and images that readers have come to love in Stephen King’s 40+ year career. This includes alcoholism, battles against evil, disembodied villains, corruption, and insanity.

Character Development 

Stephen King’s use of character development throughout this novel is what makes the book so thrilling and moving. When the novel begins, the Torrance family is teetering on the edge. Danny, although only five years old, is well-aware of the troubles his parents are dealing with. He fears the possibility of divorce more than anything else. This is, despite the fact that his father, Jack, recently broke his arm in a drunken accident.

Wendy Torrance is driven by a desire to improve her marriage but, beyond all, protect her son from any injuries that might come his way. This includes those that might be handed out by his own father. Wendy is well aware of the danger that her husband poses when he’s drunk.

Flashbacks also reveal that she has seen a marriage dissolve firsthand (her parents’) and fears that what happened to them is going to happen to her. King provides readers with just enough detail to make Wendy a well-rounded and interesting character. But, not so much where her story takes away from the main issue at hand—battling the Overlook Hotel. Here is a quote from the novel in which King is relaying Wendy’s opinion of Jack’s mental strength: 

Once, during the drinking phase, Wendy had accused him of desiring his own destruction but not possessing the necessary moral fiber to support a full-blown deathwish. So he manufactured ways in which other people could do it, lopping a piece at a time off himself and their family.

When the reader is introduced to Jack Torrance, they learn about his alcoholic past and the reasons why he decided to quit drinking. His newfound sobriety is less firmly established than his wife would like it to be. It is put to the ultimate test when the family is caught up in the corrupting powers of the Overlook Hotel. Before long, Wendy is blaming Jack for the injuries that Danny sustains (despite it being the hotel’s fault). The family has progressively torn apart as the hotel works to corrupt Jack Torrance’s mind.  

Mini stories and flashbacks included throughout the novel help readers better understand who Jack is and why the hotel is able to take hold of his mind. Particularly effective are the flashbacks to his father’s cruelty in his parent’s marriage. Jack remembers his father beating his mother and dealing with his own addiction to alcohol. He’s ashamed of who his father was, that is until he is firmly in the grasp of the hotel and has turned against his own family. In a particularly chilling moment, Jack expresses sympathy for his father. He feels as though he finally understands why his father had to hit his mother. Now, in his mind, his mother deserved it just as Wendy and Danny deserve to be punished. 

The Theme of Family 

The theme of family bonds is one of the most important in the novel. When the book begins and readers are introduced to the various issues that the Torrance family is facing, it is hard not to root for Jack and Wendy’s marriage and their relationship with their young son, Danny. All three are incredibly sympathetic characters. 

Through King’s skill with language, Jack’s descent into madness and violence is almost painful to read. Because readers know how much he cares about his wife and son through flashbacks and King’s use of free indirect style, it is even more, moving to hear of his intense personality change and desire to inflict harm upon his family.

Towards the end of the novel, Jack’s genuine love for his son allows him to break through the hotel’s corrupting influence on his mind. He tells Danny that he loves him and should run for his life. But Danny, who has always loved his father indiscriminately, refuses to. Here is the quote: 

Doc,” Jack Torrance said. “Run away. Quick. And remember how much I love you.” “No,” Danny said. “Oh Danny, for God’s sake—” “No,” Danny said. He took one of his father’s bloody hands and kissed it. “It’s almost over.

Foreshadowing 

King’s use of foreshadowing is one of the more effective literary devices at work in ‘ The Shining ‘. From the first pages, before Danny even steps foot into the hotel, it’s clear that the building will present the family with an evil that none of them can imagine. He experiences visions, given to him by his “imaginary friend” Tony, of the word “Redrum” and of a shadow figure wielding a weapon. Images like these make the novel so thrilling to read. It’s unclear what exactly is going to happen to the family, but King ensures that readers continue through the story and find out. 

Another wonderful example of foreshadowing in the book also comes from Danny’s “shine,” or ability to read minds and see into the future. Tony tells Danny that he is going to remember something that Jack forgot. It’s not until the final pages of the novel that he knows what that is— that Jack forgot to check the hotel’s boiler. In the above quote in which Jack pleads with his son to run away, Danny says that it is “almost over.” He’s aware that the end is near and that soon the horrors will cease. The novel ends with an immense explosion that takes the Overlook and Jack Torrance with it.

Is The Shining worth reading? 

Yes! ‘ The Shining ‘ is one of Stephen King’s best novels and a classic of the horror and psychological thriller genres. If you enjoy the supernatural, haunted houses, battles with evil, and psychological torment, then this novel is for you. 

Is The Shining book scary?

‘ The Shining ‘ is filled with dark and terrifying images. But the book itself isn’t filled with jump scares or ghastly scenes of violence. Although there is darkness, readers aren’t likely to be haunted by King’s story. 

Is The Shining a true story?

No, ‘ The Shining ‘ is not a true story. But, it was inspired by Stephen King’s time at the Stanley Hotel in Colorado. This notoriously haunted hotel inspired the author to create fictional characters dealing with a similar environment. 

The Shining Book Review: Stephen King's Horror Classic

Book Title: The Shining

Book Description: 'The Shining' by Stephen King is a thrilling and psychologically frightening novel about the Torrance family. Their lives are changed forever when they move into the Overlook Hotel for the winter season.

Book Author: Stephen King

Book Edition: First Edition

Book Format: Hardcover

Publisher - Organization: Doubleday

Date published: January 28, 1977

ISBN: 978-0-385-27503-3

Number Of Pages: 447

• Writing Style
• Lasting Effect on Reader

The Shining Review

‘The Shining’  by Stephen King was his third novel and is still regarded as one of his best. It is a classic of the horror genre and has inspired numerous authors and filmmakers since it was written. 

• Deep character development 
• Psychologically thrilling 
• Keeps readers on their toes
• Unresolved plot points
• Limited characters
• Not super scary

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About Emma Baldwin

Emma Baldwin, a graduate of East Carolina University, has a deep-rooted passion for literature. She serves as a key contributor to the Book Analysis team with years of experience.

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Stephen King Pays His Dues in a ‘One Last Job’ Novel

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By James Lasdun

• Aug. 3, 2021

BILLY SUMMERS By Stephen King

The sole hint of supernatural activity in Stephen King’s new novel comes well over halfway through, when its protagonist, a hired killer and aspiring writer named Billy Summers, notices some weird goings-on in a painting of topiary animals. It doesn’t lead to anything: Shrugging off the pictorial shape-shifting, Billy turns the painting toward the wall of the cabin where he’s working on a memoir, and gets back to his blood-drenched memories of Falluja, where he served as a sniper in the Marines.

King’s fans will recognize the leafy animals from “The Shining,” and it turns out the cabin stands across the valley from the ruins of that novel’s infamous hotel, the Overlook, where, as the cabin’s owner tells Billy, “bad stuff happened.” It’s a nicely ironic piece of self-reference: Unlike that demon-haunted story about a writer-turned-killer, this tale of a killer-turned-writer is haunted only by books — King’s own, but a mass of others too. They aren’t necessarily the ones you would expect — no mention of Poe or Lovecraft or Shirley Jackson (acknowledged influences) — but at some level “Billy Summers” is clearly the work of a writer in retrospective mood: taking stock, paying his dues. Among the authors name-checked in its spacious narrative are Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dickens, Faulkner, Tim O’Brien, Cormac McCarthy and Robert Stone, along with Billy’s own favorites, Thomas Hardy and Émile Zola. For much of the book, when he isn’t shooting people or writing about them, Billy is immersed in “Thérèse Raquin.”

His tastes may be highbrow (and staunchly realist), but the story he finds himself caught up in is very much — and very explicitly — a genre piece. Lured from the brink of retirement by a hit job offering a half-million-dollar advance, with another million and a half on delivery, Billy enters familiar, ill-omened territory: “If noir is a genre,” he reflects ruefully, “then ‘one last job’ is a subgenre.”

Fittingly enough, the plan concocted by the mob boss who hires him calls for Billy to pose as a writer. This is in order to blend into the small-town community to which his target is due to be extradited at some point, to face murder charges. If all goes well, Billy will get a shot at him on the courthouse steps a few blocks from the rented corner office in which he is to bide his time, pretending to be at work on a book. The device allows King to have fun with the unflattering mutual mirrorings of literary and criminal enterprises, each with its apparatus of talent, middlemen, contracts and deadlines, and each entailing its own kind of risk, as Billy discovers when he steps into character: “Any writer who goes public with his work is courting danger.”

By “public,” he means his employers, who have almost certainly cloned the laptop they’ve provided him with, and whom he increasingly suspects of plotting to kill him as soon as he has served his purpose. To outwit them he feigns cluelessness, doing his best to stay in the “dumb self” persona he has perfected over the years. He pretends to read only Archie comics, and opens his memoir in the voice of Faulkner’s “idiot” child from “The Sound and the Fury,” Benjy Compson, confident that the mobsters keeping tabs on him will read it as precisely the subliterate ramblings they’d expect from a chump like him.

A lot of writerly angst seems encoded in all this; lingering pique, perhaps, from ancient debates about the literary merits of King’s hugely popular fiction. (Harold Bloom dismissed his 2003 National Book Award medal for distinguished contribution to American letters as “idiocy.”) It certainly makes for an interestingly complicated subtext, which is soon matched by the text itself as Billy starts planning his own counterscheme for getting out alive (and getting paid) — an elaborate ploy involving serial identities, multiple disguises, secret addresses and a daunting quantity of phones and computers.

King layers it all in patiently, detailing the little worlds of the downtown office and the residential suburb where Billy whiles away his days and nights, using the memoir to reveal Billy’s grim back story (suffice it to say he embarked on his shooting career at an exceptionally tender age), and staging small lapses of judgment on Billy’s part that come dangerously close to exposing him (there’s a funny moment when he can’t resist hitting all the targets in a carnival shooting game). By the time his mark arrives the sense of what’s at stake in the shot Billy will finally take has been cranked up to the max, and the first of several lavish action scenes erupts with a satisfying release of pent-up tension.

That’s about a third of the way through. The remaining two-thirds feature Billy tracking down, first, the mobster who has indeed been trying to double-cross him and, next, the Mr. Big (or Mr. Even Bigger), a jowly right-wing media mogul based on you-know-who, who got the mobster to hire him in the first place. For these missions, and for company at the cabin where Billy holes up for a spell, King supplies his middle-aged hero with a 21-year-old love interest, Alice, arranging for her to be dumped (literally) on his doorstep from a van by three men who have just raped her.

Here, it has to be said, the book stumbles. Aside from the creaky coincidence, there’s something at once prudish and prurient about the ensuing relationship that’s hard to take. Post #MeToo, the conventional sexual dynamics of the pairing obviously wouldn’t work, and King tries hard to square them with those of our own moment, keeping things chaste while also keeping sex very much to the fore. The result is a weird sort of latter-day Hays Code effect, all separate bedrooms and nobly resisted temptation, offset by graphic anatomy shots and regular moments of accidental intimacy: “Her butt is socked into his basket.” Alice herself seems a throwback to an old idea of womanhood. She’s happy to let Billy avenge her rape rather than do it herself (the passage, featuring Billy in a Melania mask with a hand mixer, might have made for a vintage King scene in another era but feels dated now), and she adapts herself to Billy’s plans with a gratingly chipper obligingness — “‘Roger that,’ Alice replies, smart as you please” — uncomfortably reminiscent of the “cool girl” male fantasy skewered by Gillian Flynn in “Gone Girl.”

That these significant flaws don’t totally derail the book is a testament to its author’s undimmed energy and confidence. His eye for detail, especially at the dreckier end of roadside culture, is sharp enough to keep the long car rides that crisscross the novel lively and vivid, and he remains in possession of a seemingly effortless verbal flow that surges on over bumps and banalities in the story line (must the bad guy always turn out to be a pedophile?) without letting up. But next to classics of the One Last Job novel and its close variants — including my own favorite, George V. Higgins’s “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” — it seems driven more by formula, in the end, than the real reckoning with fate and mortality that the genre, at its best, affords.

James Lasdun’s latest book is “Afternoon of a Faun,” a novel.

BILLY SUMMERS By Stephen King 517 pp. Scribner. $30.

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Brooklyn Crime Novel , by Jonathan Lethem (Ecco) . A half century of Brooklyn history and a bevy of crimes—currency defacement, petty theft, breaking and entering, drug use—feature in this series of loosely linked vignettes, which follow children living in and around the neighborhood of Boerum Hill, from the nineteen-seventies to the present. Though the book is tinted with nostalgia, it’s filled with characters suspicious of idealizing an earlier time. Boerum, the narrator observes, “is a slaveholder name,” and a Black boy called C. thinks that the area’s gentrifiers “want to live neither in the present, nor the future, but in a cleaned-up dream of the past.”

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THE SHINING

by Stephen King ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 28, 1976

A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all). The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere.... Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.

Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976

ISBN: 0385121679

Page Count: 453

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976

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A LITTLE LIFE

by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees , 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.  

Pub Date: March 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8

Page Count: 720

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

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by Elin Hilderbrand ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2015

Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.

Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.

Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”

Pub Date: June 16, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015

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The Shining: Review by Janet Maslin [The New York Times]

• January 2, 2017

by Janet Maslin

The Shining , Stanley Kubrick’s spellbinding foray into the realm of the horror film, is at its most gloriously diabolical as Jack and Wendy Torrance take the grand tour. They are being shown through the Overlook, the cavernous, isolated hotel where they and their young son Danny will be spending the winter as caretakers, supposedly without any company. Jack pronounces the place “Cozy!” But still everything in the Overlook signals trouble, trouble that unfolds at  a leisurely pace almost as playful as it is hair-raising. Meticulously detailed and never less than fascinating, The Shining may be the first movie that ever made its audience jump with a title that simply says “Tuesday.”

In the hotel, the Torrances find dozens of empty rooms, ominously huge windows, knives all over the kitchen, and a maze on the front lawn. As it later turns out, there are ghosts and more ghosts, and one of the elevators is full of blood. The Overlook would undoubtedly amount to one of the screen’s scarier haunted houses even without its special feature, a feature that gives The Shining its richness and its unexpected intimacy. The Overlook is something far more fearsome than a haunted house—it’s a home.

In The Shining , which opens today at the Sutton and other theaters, Mr. Kubrick tries simultaneously to unfold a story of the occult and a family drama. The domestic half of the tale is by far the more effective, partly because the supernatural story knows frustratingly little rhyme or reason, even by supernatural standards. Dead twins haunt Danny and then stop haunting him; a mirror reflects some things and not others; the ghosts aren’t quite subjective and they aren’t quite real. Even the film’s most startling horrific images seem overbearing and perhaps even irrelevant, like Mr. Kubrick’s celebrated monolith in 2001 .

Many of the film’s more bewildering nightmarish touches are ill-explained holdovers from Stephen King’s novel, upon which Mr. Kubrick and Diane Johnson base their shrewd and economical screenplay. Most of their alterations in the story, which has been changed and improved considerably, have the effect of letting it run deeper. Mr. King has an episode, for instance, in which Danny is terrorized by a specter in one of the deserted rooms. After this, his father, Jack, returns to the same room to investigate.

Mr. Kubrick, aside from changing the room number from 217 to 237 for mysterious reasons of his own, entirely transforms the scene. In the book, what Danny sees is explicitly described, and his father catches a glimpse of the same creature. The film’s Danny is silent after his encounter, which is not depicted. And his father, as the camera tracks slowly into the room in a frenzy of anticipation, is confronted by one of Mr. Kubrick’s most heart-stopping inventions, an image halfway between eroticism and terror.

The Shining stands on the brink of a physicality that has been very much absent from Mr. Kubrick’s other work, and that would surely have been welcome here. This is the story of a man gradually driven to destroy his wife and child, and it stops just short of pinpointing his rage. The marriage between Jack (Jack Nicholson) and Wendy (Shelly Duvall) is a listless one, and it is revealed obliquely: through the raggedness and dowdiness of Wendy’s wardrobe, through Jack’s constant irritation at her, through the immaculate cleanliness of the Overlook’s bathrooms and kitchen, through the eerie way they turn this enormous building into something cramped and claustrophobic. This is as close as Mr. Kubrick has come to dealing with both female and male characters or to grappling with domesticity. There are occasional moments in The Shining when their union alone seems enough to drive Jack mad.

The “Gold Room,” a clever amplification of the hotel ballroom in Mr. King’s novel, becomes the place where Jack’s rage about his fiscal and familial responsibilities is revealed. It’s also the place where the movie begins to go wrong, lapsing into bright, splashy effects reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange (though the Gold Room sequences produce the film’s closing shot, a startling photograph of Mr. Nicholson). The Shining begins, by this point, to show traces of sensationalism, and the effects don’t necessarily pay off. The film’s climactic chase virtually fizzles out before it reaches a resolution.

Mr. Nicholson’s Jack is one of his most vibrant characterizations, furiously alive in every frame and fueled by an explosive anger. Mr. Nicholson is also devilishly funny, from his sarcastic edge at the film’s beginning to his cry of “Heeere’s Johnny!” as he chops down a bathroom door to get to Miss Duvall. Though Miss Duvall’s Wendy at first seems a strange match for Mr. Nicholson, she eventually takes shape as an almost freakish cipher, her early banality making her terror all the more extreme. Danny Lloyd, as Danny, and Scatman Crothers, as the hotel chef who, like Danny, has psychic powers, both give keen, steady performances as the story’s relatively naturalistic figures. Barry Nelson is a model of false assurance as the hotel manager.

Mr. Kubrick, using the works of various composers, has assembled another stunningly effective score. John Alcott’s cinematography is lovely, although The Shining seems intentionally less glossy than Mr. Kubrick’s other films. Like the characters, it has a certain ironic homeliness—as when Wendy sits in the hotel’s elegant lobby, propped before a television screen during a blizzard. She’s watching Jennifer O’Neill play the ultimate in sweetly mindless femininity, in Summer of ’42 .

Published: The New York Times , May 23, 1980

• More: Janet Maslin , Movie reviews , Stanley Kubrick , The New York Times , The Shining (1980)

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Did Janet Maslin really review ‘The Shining’ twice for the New York Times in 1980? There are two different reviews here credited to her.

Yes, she did

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A Shining by Jon Fosse review – a spiritual journey

The new Nobel laureate’s latest novella is a shimmering fable about a man lost in a dark forest

O ne day in late autumn, a man goes for a drive so far into the countryside that he begins to pass no more dwellings of the living, only abandoned farmhouses and cabins. At last, he pulls into a forest and goes down a road so deeply rutted that the car finally becomes stuck. Night is falling. It has begun to snow. The man decides to leave his car and walk alone into the dark woods to try to find someone to help him.

This could be the beginning of a horror story; it is, instead, the opening of A Shining, a slim new novella by the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, our 2023 Nobel laureate in literature , whose fiction rather astonishingly dissolves the border between the material and the spiritual worlds. Readers of English who knew Fosse before his Nobel perhaps had seen one of his plays, which are among the most performed in Europe, or read his seven-book suite of novels called Septology , a three-volume single sentence monologue that is simultaneously a radiant liturgy, a doppelganger story, an ars poetica, and a profoundly moving meditation on love and ageing and death. After I finished the last book of Septology, I walked around in a haze for a long while, simply grateful to be alive. The work is so breathtakingly strange and unclassifiable that it seemed to me as though Fosse had created a new form of fiction, something that has a deep kinship to Samuel Beckett’s work, but is infinitely more gentle and God-soaked. And though a thick, monologuing, metaphysical novel may seem daunting to a casual reader, one of Fosse’s peculiarities is how accessible his work is to nearly anyone who’ll allow themselves to simply succumb and let the gentle waves of his prose break over them.

Some of this accessibility is surely due to Fosse’s translator into English, the great Damion Searls, whose intelligence, subtlety and attention to rhythm are again evident in A Shining. After the protagonist has walked for a while through the dark and snowy forest, reality begins to waver. He becomes aware of something walking toward him, human-shaped but not human, a presence “luminous in its whiteness, shining from within”. It touches him, warms him, speaks to him; he says, “I hear a voice say: I’m here, I’m here always, I’m always here – which startles me, because this time there was no doubt that I’d heard a voice and it was a thin and weak voice, and yet it’s like the voice had a kind of deep warm fullness in it, yes, it was almost, yes, as if there was something you might call love in the voice.”

After the presence leaves him, the man encounters his own parents in the woods; though he is always walking toward them, they never grow closer. When his parents leave him, he sees a man in a suit with his feet bare in the snow. The man leads him toward a great blooming of the radiant white presence he’d seen earlier. Though the novella begins in extremely short sentences and in the past tense, through the narrative it flowers into the present tense, and the end is a glory of an extremely long sentence, which gives to the prose itself a kind of gorgeous shimmer.

A Shining can be read in many ways: as a realistic monologue; as a fable; as a Christian-inflected allegory; as a nightmare painstakingly recounted the next morning, the horror of the experience still pulsing under the words, though somewhat mitigated by the small daily miracle of daylight. I think the great splendour of Fosse’s fiction is that it so deeply rejects any singular interpretation; as one reads, the story does not sound a clear singular note, but rather becomes a chord with all the many possible interpretations ringing out at once. This refusal to succumb to the solitary, the stark, the simple, the binary – to insist that complicated things like death and God retain their immense mysteries and contradictions – seems, in this increasingly partisan world of ours, a quietly powerful moral stance.

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The Shining

• 4.6 • 3.7K Ratings

Publisher Description

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE 'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME • Before Doctor Sleep, there was The Shining, a classic of modern American horror. Jack Torrance takes a job as the caretaker of the remote Overlook Hotel. As the brutal winter sets in, the hotel's dark secrets begin to unravel. “An undisputed master of suspense and terror.” — The Washington Post Jack Torrance’s new job at the Overlook Hotel is the perfect chance for a fresh start. As the off-season caretaker at the atmospheric old hotel, he’ll have plenty of time to spend reconnecting with his family and working on his writing. But as the harsh winter weather sets in, the idyllic location feels ever more remote . . . and more sinister. And the only one to notice the strange and terrible forces gathering around the Overlook is Danny Torrance, a uniquely gifted five-year-old.

APPLE BOOKS REVIEW

Essential reading for anyone who loves a scary story, The Shining is a key title in the history of gothic supernatural fiction. Yes, Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation is memorable, but Stephen King’s book is better. The novel perfectly exemplifies a key element of King’s appeal: his ability to unite heart-stopping terror with all-too-human characters slogging their way through a recognizably challenging world. It’s this quality that makes the story of recovering alcoholic Jack Torrance and his mysteriously gifted son, Danny, crazily emotionally gripping. Bonus: after you read The Shining , you’ll be primed to read another great King novel, Doctor Sleep .

Customer Reviews

This book was the definition of an emotional rollercoaster. You don't just witness the family spiral out of control, you feel it. You feel their relationships, you feel their fear, you feel their love. This book is perfect.

Wow! Absolutely riveting!

I can't sing enough praises for this book. Spellbinding from the first page and kept pulling me into the story with each page turn. The ending is spectacular along with a real lesson in the human condition. What an amazing book.

Amazing book. Much better than the movie for sure.

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