Some thoughts on reading The Shining at long last

By Dr. Albert Sears, Professor of English at Silver Lake College of the Holy Family

Although I have been a long-time devotee of Stanley Kubrick’s famous film The Shining (1980), I have only just read Stephen King’s cornerstone novel (1977), on which the film is based.  I have wanted to read it for a long time, because of my admiration for the film.  When I recently read a number of praiseworthy reviews of King’s newly-published sequel, Doctor Sleep (2013), which focuses on the adult Dan Torrance (the boy in the novel who possesses some psychic ability), I realized that it was time to read the 1977 book, so I could better appreciate the sequel, yet unread (number 23 in the library queue).  I should say that I have never been a reader of King’s work, not believing I cared for his style, but I have been told by serious King-readers that I really needed to check out The Shining because of its “taut” style and form.  I would agree with this characterization of the work, and I would add that King’s writing in this novel is masterful; the depth of characterization struck me right away.  There is something else in the novel, though, that is remarkable:   King’s ability to generate dread.

One of the problems with reading The Shining after all of these years is the film, which I have now seen countless times.  I should disclose, however, that I have never seen the 1997 television miniseries, having a deep-rooted prejudice against TV-miniseries.  Kubrick’s film is one of the very best of the haunted-house genre of horror films.  It’s genuinely chilling, even after numerous viewings, and if I’ve watched it at night, I am uneasy about walking up our creaky stairs to go to bed, especially if the closet door is slightly ajar when I get to the bedroom.  The film follows the novel’s general plot outline, until the very end, but, as film must do when it adapts a novel, much is simplified, eliminated, and revised. While I read the novel, about mid-way through, I realized that King’s narrative was doing something rather different from the film, and by the end King very much moves beyond “haunted-house” narrative to something else.  Perhaps I would call it fantasy, horror-laden, yet also flexible in its approach to narrative.  The result is potent; indeed, more so than the film, which considerably confines King’s fantasy elements.  There is some entity in control of the Overlook Hotel, likely supernatural, but far more complex and insidious than resident ghosts.  What initially appear to be ghosts in the novel finally are manipulative masks for something else very sinister.   

Which brings me back to the inducement of dread.  I didn’t find myself particularly frightened (maybe startled) while reading the novel; the exception would be a specific moment in the Room 217 scene, which the film captures fairly well.  I gasped a little bit when reading that chapter.  Other segments of the novel instill dread, perhaps even more effectively. The fire hose, which seems to morph into a snake in Danny’s imagination; the hedge animals, which, at least at first, only move when one isn’t looking; the wasps’ nest that swarms to life in Danny’s room, after Jack exterminates all the wasps; the leaf-crunching thing that seems to grab Danny’s legs when he is scrambling out of the playground cement ring.  These well-crafted episodes deserve study for King’s ability to generate a slow accumulation of dread in the reader, an anticipation of something utterly awful, which doesn’t fully manifest itself in these instances.  Certainly, the plot’s continued postponement of a terrible outcome – say, Danny’s death from being mauled by a hedge lion – is part of the dread, of something always lurking, never quite succeeding in its desire.  Part of the power of these moments, which Kubrick’s film in 1980 couldn’t realize, is also King’s imagination, the novel’s realm of fantasy – we’re talking about living and evil hedge animals here!  None of these elements survive in the film.

Yet, to be fair, some of the most iconic and frightening scenes in the film are unique to it.  Think of Wendy’s finding pages and pages of Jack’s manuscript, line after line of “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”; the technically innovative shots of Danny’s riding his Big Wheel around and around the halls of the Overlook, meeting the twin girls in the hallway; Jack’s “Here’s Johnny”; Danny’s finger, standing in evidently for Tony, speaking in that all-too-memorable voice, “Redrum, redrum”; or even the terrifying image of Jack frozen to death in the maze.  Indeed, the overall style of the film, from editing to the sound track, contributes to an extremely well-made horror film, even if Kubrick mainly used King’s text as an imaginative springboard. 

King’s hatred of Kubrick’s adaptation is well known, and it’s not surprising, given the differences.  A Google search reveals bloggers who enumerate the extensive changes Kubrick made to King’s narrative, far more than briefly outlined here.  Such wide scale narrative revision ultimately reveals that these are finally different works with different ends.  Despite that, they both possess considerable merit, each distinctively unnerving.  It’s just hard to get Jack Nicholson out of your head if you watch the film first.

King, Stephen. The Shining. NY: Doubleday, 1977. Book.

Kubrick, Stanley, dir. The Shining. Warner Bros., 1980. Film.






Dr. Albert Sears is Professor of English at Silver Lake College of the Holy Family.  His scholarly interests include the Victorian novel, popular genres of literature, the films of Alfred Hitchcock, the novels of Virginia Woolf, and French language and literature.  His blog on teaching and doing research in British literature can be found at http://oldbookmeanderings.blogspot.com/.