The Shining
6/10. Okay la. Because W suggested it, and it was due time to get off my pretentious pony.
King’s The Shining is a horror novel featuring a family with an abusive father and a haunted hotel. It is one of King’s best-known books, further immortalized by Kubrick’s film adaptation. The characters are largely sympathetic, the writing style quite interesting, and the plot leaves room for analysis. In effect, The Shining succeeds as a novel. But it wasn’t scary. It was suspenseful, and I felt a chill or two at times, but I wasn’t scared, despite the vivid imagery and the great writing. I really wanted to give it a 7/10. But since The Shining didn’t make me lose any sleep, I’m not going to lose any sleep over its rating.
This was the first work of the great King that I’ve read. For all my bragging about being a prolific reader, this might come as a surprise. This is principally because of three reasons. Firstly, horror horrifies me. It affected me more than the average person when I was young, and consequently, I stayed away from King. When I had finally worked up the courage to read horror, King was selected against because of my preference towards ‘literature’. A few years after that, I started college, and started shrugging off these pretentions, but selected against King again, because I decided that I needed to have a diversity of voices in what I read. Of course, I understood that this diversity should extend to genres and backgrounds, but the broadest array of voices could be heard by selecting for gender and race. Amidst the multitude of novels written by white men, King simply didn’t make the quota.
The Shining starts with Jack Torrance journeying to the Overlook Hotel with his wife Wendy, and his son Danny, for his job as winter caretaker. Over the first third of the novel, it is revealed that Jack had a drinking and anger management problem that led to his dismissal from his old job as a teacher, as well as the breaking of his son’s arm. That’s all behind him now though, because he’s sober, and looking forward to a nice winter of writing and spending time with his family. Wendy has considered leaving Jack many times in the past, but their relationship is nearing an all time high, and she too, is happy with the turn that things have taken. Danny is a five-year-old with the abilities of precognition and telepathy, but, being five years of age, is unable to convince adults of his powers. If he was female, he would be named Cassandra. Unfortunately, this hotel is haunted, and Danny’s psychic abilities seem to power it. There are a series of unnerving events, culminating in the hotel effectively possessing Jack, or at least encouraging him to relapse and convincing him to kill his family.
Likable characters that change throughout the course of a novel are hard to write. When the story begins, the reader spends the most time with Jack, learning about his struggle to get over alcoholism and repair relations with his family. He’s made a genuine effort and is well on the road to recovery. It’s quite easy to side with Jack, and he’s almost a tragic hero of sorts when the poopy poop hits the fan. Jack is already a reformed man at the outset of the novel, and his development is mostly of the downhill sort from that point.
However, Wendy and Danny change for the better. Although there is no specific mention of wife beating, the marriage was evidently in shambles at the beginning of the novel, though starting to improve. Danny’s telepathy has picked up on the idea of divorce, and Wendy has to cope with Jack’s increasingly erratic behaviour, never saying anything. When Jack’s condition worsens as the haunting takes hold, Wendy begins to assert herself against Jack to protect Danny. This starts through verbally telling him to stay away, followed by keeping a knife by her side for self defense, and peaks in locking him in a pantry, before their final confrontation. Through this sequence, Wendy stops behaving as a “obedient wife”, and finds herself. Meanwhile, Jack’s thoughts are increasingly old-fashioned and misogynistic; his final decision to go kill them was justified by “He had been too easy on them. Husbands and fathers had certain responsibilities…he did believe in punishment.”
Danny also starts speaking up. He begins by confiding in his mother and the doctor about the visions he’s been having, then continues by talking back to his father, asserting that Jack feared the topiary animals. The climax of the story is a frenzied/possessed Jack/thing cornering Danny, about to kill him, when Danny speaks out against Jack’s literal and figurative demons, but also through to Jack. He has a moment of clarity before he is repossessed, and Danny reminds ‘it’ that the boiler is about to explode, which causes ‘it’ to rush to the basement. I’m conflicted about the epilogue. On one hand, it’s obviously more realistic that Danny and Wendy are both shell shocked and it provides the reader some closure. On the other, it almost regresses them a bit from the confident characters they’ve become to an earlier form. Or maybe trauma doesn’t weaken people, and they’ll become stronger once they’ve overcome it.
One thing that surprised me was syntax of the passages regarding Danny or Jack’s visions. Instead of describing what they think, King tries to show up what they thought. This conveyed the paranormal events excellently, and had a modernist, stream of consciousness feel to them. The following passage is one of Danny exploring the hotel directly quoted (“//”represents a paragraph break)
“There was nothing, really nothing, in this hotel that could hurt him, and if he had to prove that to himself by going into this room, shouldn’t he do so? //‘Lou, Lou, skip to m’ Lou…’//(Curiosity killed the cat my dear redrum, redrum my dear, satisfaction brought him back safe and sound from toes to crown; from head to ground, he was safe and sound. He knew that those things)//(are like scary pictures, they can’t hurt you, but oh my god)//(what big teeth you have Grandma and is that a wolf in a BLUEBEARD suit or a BLUEBEARD in a wolf suit and i’m so)//(glad you asked because curiosity killed that cat and it was the HOPE of satisfaction that brought him)//up the hall, treading softly over the blue and twisting jungle carpet.”
Also, a creepy feel to them. Definitely a creepy feel to them.
This look into the minds of Danny and Jack also complimented the unreliable narration that they provided. Danny is too young to understand much of what he sees, which is not aided by the vagueness of his visions. Furthermore, he’s at that age when children have a hard time differentiating between fantasy and reality, so his narration is hard to take at face value. Jack is simultaneously fighting the ghosts of the hotel and his own demons, his observations of dubious merit as well. Without the haunting, The Shining becomes a prototypical redemption gone wrong story, with the protagonist Jack trying nobly, but ultimately failing to conquer his alcohol problems. But what if he wasn’t fighting the hotel’s ghosts? What if Danny simply had an overactive imagination?
Jack was experiencing significant stress caused by cabin fever, coupled with consuming his first drops of alcohol in months. Danny imagined the ghouls he saw and the voices he heard. The spectral attack on Danny was, as feared by Wendy, caused by Jack. This theory is further complimented by the fact that Wendy doesn’t experience any ‘hauntings’. The hotel might be a little creepy to her, but the only abnormalities she witnesses are second-hand from Danny and Jack, and the moving topiary animals during the final escape. This brings up Mr. Hallorann, the hotel cook who hears Danny’s distress cry and comes to the hotel from Florida during the final stretch. Granted, this puts a tiny hole in my little theory, but I think Hallorann’s experience can be chalked up to tricks of the light under pressure. After all, I’m a perfectly rational human who is capable of finding a perfectly rational explanation for everything. Even that mysterious creaking noise in the basement. I will rationalize it away from the comfort of my bedsheets.
But the rationalization in this case wasn’t because I found the novel scary. Far from it. I felt a slight chill during the first half of the novel, especially when Jack was learning more about the history of the Overlook, and Danny was the only one having visions. Like the passage quoted above. After that, it was suspenseful. Not scary. I felt the same way I feel when reading popular fiction, such as that featuring famous Harvard professor and symbologist Robert Langdon. And I’m an extremely easily frightened person. I don’t watch horror movies. I jump when someone appears unexpectedly in real life. And I’ve been scared by books before. I can list them. The first one was a picture book that I read in early primary school. There was a girl who always wore a ribbon around her neck, and only let her husband take it off on her deathbed. When he did, her head rolled off. You wouldn’t believe it, but I lost sleep for months after that. There was one I read in second grade about someone finding a plane that had crash landed, and everyone on it had disappeared. And of course, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. Wow, what a masterpiece. It didn’t affect me the same way the others did, as I was much older, but it was very unnerving. The Shining didn’t even have that effect on me. And even though it was otherwise very well written, I was disappointed.
When W suggested the book, I was quite hesitant, because it had such a reputation for being frightening. One of King’s greatest. Between Spielberg’s Ready Player One film adaptation and popular image macros, I knew of all the scenes that pertained to the movie. Here’s Johnny. Which didn’t happen in the book. The twins. Which didn’t happen in the book. The wraithlike woman holding a knife. Which was Wendy, though King described her as beautiful and blonde. The film made the book popular beyond belief, so I expected a terrifying read. Instead, it was a somewhat suspenseful, slightly chilling, quite cliché, but interesting read.
To end off, I would like to say that the Outlook Hotel was described very similarly to the Fairmont Lake Louise in Banff. I was there not three months ago. Nothing but blinding whiteness during the day and suffocating darkness during the night. I’d recommend fans of either the Fairmont Lake Louise or The Shining to try the other if they haven’t already.
