Perhaps the oddest thing about this book is this: you can read and enjoy it on its own. And yet it's impossible to talk about without referencing another book and a film, so I shan't even try.

As you may or may not be aware, this newest Stephen King novel is a sequel to one of his earliest bestsellers (in fact his first hardcover publication - the earlier novels, like his debut Carrie, having been paperback originals), The Shining, which still is thought as one of King's best novels. Which was then later turned into a movie by Stanley Kubrick, and became one of Kubrick's most famous works. Stephen King never made a secret of loathing the film. (This is worth mentioning because there is in fact no shortage of crappy or mediocre films based on works by Stephen King; the good ones are in the minority, and King himself hasn't been vocal about many of them but is more or less neutral about most. But not about The Shining.) He hated the casting - Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance especially, since, as he put it, one look at Nicholson and you know he's going to go crazy, whereas book!Jack Torrance has a fighting chance not to, but he also thought the way Kubrick directed Shelley Duvall made a caricature ouf of Wendy; and he acknowledged but resented that Kubrick shifted the emphasis to a "domestic tragedy with only very vague supernatural overtones". There is a lot to say about The Shining, the book (and indeed The Shining, the film), and the very many ways you can interpret it; I refer you to two quite different "Rereading Stephen King" articles about The Shining, one in the Guardian, and one one at Tor. Both are written with decades of hindsight, both value the book as one of his best, but they emphasize quite different aspects and come to different conclusions.

The Guardian one does the compare and contrast to Kubrick's film: But the most glaring shift, one that colours the book entirely, is tonal. In the book, King goes to great pains to stress that Jack Torrance is a good man. He was a teacher, and he developed a problem with drink just as his father had. When he accidentally breaks Danny's arm, Jack realises he has to change his ways. He's scared of the past and who he could become. He wants to make amends, and the hotel offers security and time with his family. King wants us to feel empathy for Jack. Everybody screws up, he wants us to say; everybody deserves a second chance.

In the movie, however, Jack Torrance is Jack Nicholson. He's crazy from the start, the man you saw in Easy Rider and One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. He's got that manic grin and unkempt hair, and you don't trust him. He has a swagger and a temper, and there's a constant feeling that Wendy (Shelley Duvall) – so much more timid and subservient in the film than the novel, reduced to little more than a long face and a shrill voice – hasn't left him because she's just too weak. In the novel, she wants her husband back.

The Tor article, by contrast, goes full throat for the autobiographical subtext: Few books cut as close to the bone as The Shining: an alcoholic schoolteacher with a family to support writes his way to financial security, then turns around and writes a book about an alcoholic schoolteacher with a family to support who fails to make good on his talent and tries to murder his family. “I was the guy who had written The Shining without even realizing that I was writing about myself,” he says in On Writing. King has talked before about the rage he felt in his years of struggle, commenting that there were times when he felt real anger towards his children. It all comes pouring out in Jack Torrance, a bad dad who breaks his son’s arm while drunk (a condition King was later to admit he was in most of the time). All those years of guilt, of fearing that he couldn’t support his family, of feeling like they were a millstone around his neck, he finally shakes it off thanks to his success, and then he puts on a fiction suit and dives right back in again. He even gives Torrance his own bad habits, like chewing aspirin when hung over. (...) Jack Torrance is every writer’s nightmare. Just gifted enough to get himself into trouble, he’s sold some stories to big outlets but has never been able to live up to his own promise. Instead, he pisses away his money on booze, gets sober after almost killing a kid while drunk driving, then he loses his temper and punches one of his students, gets fired from his teaching job, and is rescued from poverty by his last remaining friend who gets him a job as the caretaker of The Overlook Hotel out in Colorado. It’s a Bizarro World version of King, who did make good on his promise, but who wasn’t sober, and moved his family out to Colorado at their richest, not their poorest. (...) Jack Torrance is King’s deepest fears given life: an alcoholic hack writer who’s one binge away from destroying his family. But the difference between King and Torrance is clear in Chapter 32, the point at which Jack finally drives past the last mile-marker in the land of the sane. It’s the chapter in which he re-reads the play he’s been working on all season and realizes that he hates his characters, he despises them, he wants to make them suffer. If the reader had any doubts that Jack’s gone insane, King seems to be saying, here’s the clearest indication possible. To King, losing sympathy for his characters is the sign of a rotten imagination. It’s King’s biggest taboo, and one he never violates: no matter how bad his characters get, he always finds a way to like them. Even Jack Torrance.

This act of finding sympathy, even for the devil, might be King’s way of reassuring himself that he’s no Jack Torrance. For all of his own self-destructive impulses, for all the hate he sometimes felt towards his family, for all the povery, and suffering, and doubt, he never stopped loving the characters he wrote about, even the bad ones. And, in The Shining, he wrote about the worst one he could possible imagine: himself.


Now, analyzing a still living writer psychologically feels a bit disturbingly voyeuristic, but in this particular case it's hard not to. And I think both rereaders are correct, actually. Book!Jack embodies the road not taken, all things gone wrong as a writer and a man that could go wrong; at the same time, book!Jack is also not a monster and potentially redeemable. Even at the very last, when he's insane and completetly taken over by The Overlook, and hunting his family down, there is still a core in him that fights against that; the book gives him a moment of grace, when he's tracked his son down, a moment when the old Jack fights back to the surface to stop himself, telling Danny that he loves him and to run. In one of the interviews promoting Doctor Sleep, King names as one of the things that made him write the current book despite being very ware that sequels almost inevitably feel like let downs the question as to what would have happened to Jack Torrance if there had been an AA group around for him to join. (This is not a question you could ask about the Jack in Kubrick's film.) And the need to believe that you're redeemable, even at your lowest, is a key element to what drives Doctor Sleep.

( Spoilers for Doctor Sleep from this point onwards )