The Shining

Haunted people, haunted places

A scene from the Kubrick film, found on iMdb

If you’re new here, welcome to Kindling! This is The Barrens, a Stephen King bookclub. This month we read one of King’s best known books, The Shining. If you’d like to join in, just read this intro here. Next Saturday kicks off a 20-week marathon, where we read one story a week from King’s first short story collection, Night Shift. This is meant to be a conversation, so please, join in! Write your own response reviews if you have a Substack. Reply to other people’s comments. And as always, happy reading!

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Origin Story

Stephen King was already a successful writer when he checked into the historic Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado with his wife Tabitha. They took their bags up to 217, the notoriously haunted hotel room. It was the end of the season. The Stanley was closing the next day before winter took hold, and the hotel was empty. King wandered the halls while Tabitha got settled into their room. They ate alone in the elegant dining room, and remarked on how strange it would be to stay there over the winter. And that night, King had a nightmare.

That night I dreamed of my three-year-old son running through the corridors. He was being chased by a fire-hose. I woke up with a tremendous jerk, sweating all over, within an inch of falling out of bed. I got up, lit a cigarette, sat in a chair looking out the window at the Rockies, and by the time the cigarette was done, I had the bones of the book firmly set in my mind.

- Stephen King, The Stephen King Companion

But it wasn’t just a dream that formed the skeleton of his book. Later, King went on to say that this book was part autobiographical, a confession of his darkest struggles. At the time he was a functioning alcoholic with two young children. The Excedrin popping habit of Jack Torrance was one that he himself had acquired as a result of chronic stress headaches and hangovers. Not only that, he felt real animosity towards his children at times.

Sometimes you confess. You always hide what you’re confessing to. That’s one of the reasons why you make up the story…as a young father with two children, I was horrified by my occasional feelings of real antagonism toward my children. Won’t you ever stop? Won’t you ever go to bed? And time has given me the idea that probably there are a lot of young fathers and young mothers both who feel very angry, who have angry feelings toward their children…I was really sort of sickened by my own feelings when I would think to myself, ‘Oh, if he doesn’t shut up, if he doesn’t shut up…’

- Stephen King, The Stephen King Companion

Knowing this, The Shining takes on a different feel entirely. King felt that it was possible his drinking could spiral out of control. That time in his life was a tightrope walk, and he flirted with disaster for years before finally getting sober. And he admits in interviews after, that the story was a confession, a psychoanalysis of the personal fear he had that his drinking was uncontrollable, and that he might actually hurt his children.

The Shine

The gift for which the book is named, the shining, was inspired by none other than John Lennon and his song, “Instant Karma.”

Well we all shine on

Like the moon and the stars and the sun

Well we all shine on

Ev’ryone come on

-John Lennon, “Instant Karma”

Danny Torrance has it, and Dick Hallorann, the cook who meets the Torrance family and gives them a brief tour before he leaves for the season, has it too.

“A lot of folks, they got a little bit of shine to them. They don't even know it. But they always seem to show up with flowers when their wives are feelin blue with the monthlies, they do good on school tests they don't even study for, they got a good idea how people are feelin as soon as they walk into a room.”

-Stephen King, The Shining

Only Danny’s gift is much stronger. He is telepathic, psychic, able to read people’s thoughts and see into the future as well as the past, can find lost things, all with the help of Tony, a voice his parents believe is an imaginary friend. 

Before he ever arrives at The Overlook, Tony shows him visions of a horrifying future.

"Danny... Dannee..."

He looked up and there was Tony, far up the street, standing by a stop sign and waving. Danny, as always, felt a warm burst of pleasure at seeing his old friend, but this time he seemed to feel a prick of fear, too, as if Tony had come with some darkness hidden behind his back. A jar-of wasps which when released would sting deeply.

Danny follows Tony, who shows him vivid scenes of violence. The word REDRUM written and flickering on a medicine cabinet, the word echoing amongst the sound of pounding and bangs. Swirling snow, signs that indicate Danger, No Trespassing, Keep Out!

(oh please, Tony, you're scaring me)

REDRUM REDRUM REDRUM

(stop it, Tony, stop it)

Fading.

In the darkness the booming noises grew louder, louder still, echoing, everywhere, all around.

Danny hasn’t learned to read and can’t understand what the signs mean.

Come on and take your medicine! Take it like a man!

The Shape advancing on him, reeking of that sweet-sour odor, gigantic, the mallet head cutting across the air with a wicked hissing whisper, then the great hollow boom as it crashed into the wall, sending the dust out in a puff you could smell, dry and itchy. Tiny red eyes glowed in the dark. The monster was upon him, it had discovered him, cowering here with a blank wall at his back. And the trapdoor in the ceiling was locked.

This premonition is broken by his father’s return from his interview. Danny returns to his present sunlit world, excited to see his father.

Beside his daddy, in the other front seat, was a short-handled mallet, its head clotted with blood and hair.

Then it was just a bag of groceries.

Danny knows he’s been shown something that could happen if they go to the hotel, but he also knows that not everything Tony shows him comes true. His inability to read means he is unable to decipher the word that Tony showed him: REDRUM. When he finally can read it, no adult understands it either.

The Bad Thing

Jack is a recovering alcoholic, one with the usual skeletons in his closet, but there’s one that hovers over every decision he makes. The core interpersonal conflict in the story hinges on this past event, one that threatened to topple Jack and Wendy’s marriage.

After a night of heavy drinking, Jack stumbled into his office only to find that his young son had torn up the play he was working on and spilled beer on the papers. Filled with rage, he grabs three-year old Danny’s arm and turns him around to spank him. The arm snaps and Danny screams. When Wendy appears at the door and realizes what he’s done, her eyes are filled with hate.

This wasn’t enough to make him quit drinking though. In fact, the intense resentment and hatred from Wendy and his own self loathing drove him further to the bottle. It isn’t until he and his old friend Al Shockley hit a deserted bicycle in the middle of the road that Jack decides to quit. The experience of searching for a body, Wendy and Danny asleep on the couch when he gets home, his son’s arm in a white cast, finally gives him the motivation he needs to get sober.

Twenty months have passed since Jack’s last drink when he takes the caretaking job, but even sober, Jack has demons to wrestle with. The entire reason for his being a caretaker at the Overlook is because he lost his job teaching after assaulting a student who mutilates his tires in an act of revenge after losing his spot on the debate team.

Shockley, a member on the board for the Overlook gets Jack the job, a favor to his old drinking buddy. And Jack struggles beneath the weight of his alcoholism as the Overlook pulls him in. He starts to resent Wendy checking his breath after a long day doing maintenance on the hotel. He begins to argue that he deserves a drink by god. He’s supporting this family after all. The Overlook is more than happy to oblige those urges, fracturing the family to isolate Jack and manipulate him into doing what he wants.

The Recovering Addict

He hadn't believed he was an alcoholic, Jack thought as Al's telephone began ringing in his ear. The classes he had missed or taught unshaven, still reeking of last night's martians. Not me, I can stop anytime. The nights he and Wendy had passed in separate beds. Listen, I'm fine. Mashed fenders. Sure I'm okay to drive. The tears she always shed in the bathroom. Cautious looks from his colleagues at any party where alcohol was served, even wine. The slowly dawning realization that he was being talked about. The knowledge that he was producing nothing at his Underwood but balls of mostly blank paper that ended up in the wastebasket.

-Stephen King, The Shining

This dark part of Jack’s mind, the alcoholic part, slowly returns as the Overlook begins to take over. Over months, we see his thoughts turning from the initial humility and love he feels for his family, to those darker urges and resentments that led him to drink in the first place. Wendy and Danny start to be his obstacle instead of his purpose.

He moves from realizing his caretaking job is a step down, a last ditch effort to support his family after he lost his job, into believing that Wendy is an ungrateful wife, and Danny a disobedient child. The hotel reinforces these feelings, eventually crescendoing into a full fledged murder plot by the end of the book. His entire attitude in those last scenes is a more exaggerated version of “I can have one. After all I deserve it.” A trick that has broken many a sobriety.

Danny Torrance

When the story starts, Danny is consumed by his parent’s thoughts of divorce. His visions of The Overlook, the bad feeling he has about what happened in the past and the terrifying visions Tony shows him of the future, are not enough for him to tell his parents what he sees. He knows that the caretaker job is Jack’s last chance at sobriety, and his only way of supporting his family.

The greatest terror of Danny's life was DIVORCE, a word that always appeared in his mind as a sign painted in red letters which were covered with hissing, poisonous snakes.

-Stephen King, The Shining

He sees into his parent’s thoughts, and understands that their relationship is fragile. Danny remembers his broken arm, the cast and the pain, but that doesn’t scare him as much as the idea of his family dissolving. That reality is one that many kids who have lived in an abusive home can relate to. Covering for the raging mother or father to prevent an even greater fear from taking shape: change, disintegration. Kids in this situation often put the abuser’s needs above their own. And small children love their parents deeply.

Little Danny bears a burden that no child should have to. He sees and feels his parent’s thoughts, even the ones he doesn’t understand, in vivid living color. His action or inaction is driven by that child mind, one that is common of children of alcoholics. He feels responsible to keep the family intact, to keep his mommy from being mad at his daddy. To keep his daddy’s temper at bay.

He keeps tabs on his father, looking into his mind to see if he is doing “the bad thing,” tuning into his own feelings of self hatred and anger. In the end, that super power saves he and his mother’s life.

When they move to The Overlook, Danny sees the hotel for what it is, and the hotel seems to see Danny as well. It wants him, his power, to fuel the hotel and make it even more powerful than it already is.

The Wasp’s Nest

This is the first scene where we can see The Overlook waking up, coming to life. Jack gives Danny an empty wasp nest, something that his own father gave him when he was a child, one of the only fond memories we get from Jack regarding his father. Only in the middle of the night something goes wrong.

Danny awakes to wasp stings, screaming for his parents. Wendy kills the wasps at Jack’s command, and the resentment between the two arises hot and sharp. Jack gave Danny something that will hurt him. In the end, even his gifts are dangerous to his son, and Wendy knows it. For Jack’s part, he feels that familiar animosity from his wife, and knows she will never be able to fully forgive him for what he did to Danny. She will always view him as dangerous.

Room 217

In the beginning of the book, we learn from Watson, the maintenance man who also happens to be a descendent of the man who built the Overlook, that a woman died in that very room by suicide.

Lorraine Massey was an older woman who took a liking to young men at the hotel. One particularly ardent lover abandoned her, and she killed herself in the bathtub. Hallorann warns Danny not to go into that room. He experienced a terrifying encounter with her ghost after a maid came to him terrified and asked for his help.

Danny does go into the room one day, wandering in out of curiosity. He finds the woman, Lorraine Massey, naked and purple in the bath. He tells himself what Dick Hallorann told him before leaving: even if he sees scary things in the hotel, they can’t hurt him. They’re just like pictures in a book.

But the woman does hurt him, strangling him so badly that she leaves marks on his neck. When Wendy sees him, she is convinced that Jack did it. Her distrust of him, her inability to forget what he did when Danny was only three, is fully intact here. Jack holds nothing but resentment for her in the moment, a divide that the hotel takes advantage of, convincing him that Danny and Wendy are teamed up against him.

The Overlook

This inhuman place makes human monsters.

-Stephen King, The Shining

From the moment Danny enters the hotel, he knows it’s a bad place. Beyond Tony’s early warning, he can see the spatters of blood in The Presidential Suite, brain matter on the walls. Before Dick Hallorann leaves for the season, he tells Danny not to go in Room 217, no matter what.

Jack knows the place has a sordid past immediately. Ullman knows about his history with alcohol and violence, and tells him frankly that he doesn’t think Jack has the mental fortitude to withstand an entire winter alone in the hotel, especially a man with a family. After all, the last caretaker with children didn’t work out so well.

“He killed them, Mr. Torrance, and then committed suicide. He murdered the little girls with a hatchet, his wife with a shotgun, and himself the same way. His leg was broken. Undoubtedly so drunk he fell downstairs.”

- Stephen King, The Shining

This only feeds Jack’s desire to prove Ullman wrong (the officious little prick), and as Bill Watson shows Jack the boiler room, he learns even more about the hotel’s past.

“Any big hotels have got scandals. Just like every big hotel has got a ghost. Why? Hell, people come and go. Sometimes one of ‘em will pop off in his room, heart attack or stroke or something like that. Hotels are superstitious places.”

-Stephen King, The Shining

This sets the scene for Jack’s curiosity. Papers litter the room, old newspaper clippings and a scrapbook, one that Jack suspects was put together by the old caretaker, gives grisly details behind Ullman’s shining review of the hotel. Yes, famous people stayed there, but what about the mob murders? The suicides? The affairs and psychotic breaks with reality?

Jack becomes obsessed with the scrapbook, spending most of his days in the musty boiler room, scouring over stories there. He thinks of dumping his play altogether and instead writing a book, a tell-all about the Overlook Hotel. As his insanity grows, so does his obsession with the hotel’s history.

By the end of the book, when he is hallucinating a New Year’s masquerade ball and drinking gin that comes out of thin air, Jack has forgotten his most important task—to check the boiler twice a day. The pressure is climbing just as Jack’s own rage and alcoholism are at a peak. Near the very end of the novel, we finally get a full look at what the Overlook is.

There was a little boy to terrorize, a man and his woman to set one against the other, and if it played its cards right they could end up flitting through the Overlook’s halls like insubstantial shades in a Shirley Jackson novel, whatever walked in Hill House walked alone, but you wouldn’t be alone in the Overlook, oh no, there would be plenty of company here.

It eats people up. Collects them like a spider weaving a web.

The whole place was empty.

But it wasn't really empty. Because here in the Overlook things just went on and on. Here in the Overlook all times were one.

The Overlook wants Danny Torrance. Jack is simply the tool to get him. It attempts to possess him, finally convincing him to destroy his only way off the mountain in the dead of winter. He breaks his two-way CB radio and disables the snow mobile, the only mode of travel for the season.

Jack makes his way into the ballroom on December 2nd, and finds a bartender there. The shelves, empty before, are stocked with liquor. Jack orders twenty martinis, one for every month of his sobriety. Behind him, a masquerade party from 1945 rages, the spirits of the Overlook all gathered to welcome their soon to be new inhabitants.

Delbert Grady, the previous caretaker who murdered his wife and twin daughters appears and strikes up a conversation with Jack. He commends him on his interest in the hotel, but cautions him that a man who doesn’t have control of his family will never be the manager of such a fine place.

“For instance, you show a great interest in learning more about the Overlook Hotel. Very wise of you, sir. Very noble. A certain scrapbook was left in the basement for you to find—”

Grady advises him to correct Wendy and Danny, and to correct them harshly, just as he did with his own family.

“Your son has a very great talent. I don't think you are aware how great it is. That he is attempting to use that very talent against your will.”

”He is a very willful boy.”

”Indeed he is, Mr. Torrance. A very willful boy. A rather naughty boy, if I may be so bold, sir.”

”It's his mother. She, uh, interferes.”

”Perhaps they need a good talking to, if you don't mind my saying so. Perhaps a bit more. My girls, sir, they didn't care for the Overlook at first. One of them actually stole a pack of matches, and tried to burn it down. But I 'corrected' them sir. And when my wife tried to prevent me from doing my duty, I ‘corrected’ her.”

-Stephen King, The Shining

From there, the Overlook’s possession is complete. Jack Torrance watches the giant clock in the ballroom as the spirits cry “Unmask!” His eyes are not on their faces, but on the figures inside that clock. A disturbing scene unfolds. A father is beating his son with a mallet. Blood splatters then fills the glass dome. Jack screams, and when he turns around, the ballroom is empty.

It Creeps

“It creeps,” Watson warns. The boiler is rated up to 250 pounds per square inch, “but she'd blow long before that now.”

- Stephen King, The Shining

When Jack awakes in the pantry, dragged there by Wendy and Danny after he attacks her and she knocks him out, the hotel opens the lock and lets him out. Waiting for him in the kitchen are all the makings for a martini. The Overlook is fully alive at this point, manifesting alcohol where there was none, and a mallet for Jack to use on his family.

When Danny sees him after Wendy escapes his violent attack with the mallet, he recognizes that it isn’t his father he’s looking at. It’s the hotel.

Danny stood with his back against the door, looking at the right angle where the hallways joined. The steady, irregular booming sound of the mallet against the walls grew louder. The thing that was after him screamed and howled and cursed. Dream and reality had joined together without a seam.

It came around the corner.

In a way, what Danny felt was relief. It was not his father. The mask of face and body had been ripped and shredded and made into a bad joke. It was not his daddy, not this Saturday Night Shock Show horror with its rolling eyes and hunched and hulking shoulders and blood-drenched shirt. It was not his daddy.

"Now, by God," it breathed. It wiped its lips with a shaking hand. "Now you'll find out who is the boss around here. You'll see. It's not you they want. It's me. Me. Me!"

It slashed out with the scarred hammer, its double head now shapeless and splintered with countless impacts. It struck the wall, cutting a circle in the silk paper. Plaster dust puffed out. It began to grin.

"Let's see you pull any of your fancy tricks now," it muttered. "I wasn't born yesterday, you know. Didn't just fall off the hay truck, by God. I'm going to do my fatherly duty by you, boy."

Danny said: "You're not my daddy."

It stopped. For a moment it actually looked uncertain, as if not sure who or what it was. Then it began to walk again. The hammer whistled out, struck a door panel and made it boom hollowly.

"You're a liar," it said. "Who else would I be? I have the two birthmarks, I have the cupped navel, even the pecker, my boy. Ask your mother."

"You're a mask," Danny said. "Just a false face. The only reason the hotel needs to use you is that you aren't as dead as the others. But when it's done with you, you won't be anything at all. You don't scare me."

"I'll scare you!" it howled. The mallet whistled fiercely down, smashing into the rug between Danny's feet. Danny didn't flinch. "You lied about me! You connived with her! You plotted against me! And you cheated! You copied that final exam!" The eyes glared out at him from beneath the furred brows. There was an expression of lunatic cunning in them. "I'll find it, too. It's down in the basement somewhere. I'll find it. They promised me I could look all I want." It raised the mallet again.

"Yes, they promise," Danny said, "but they lie." The mallet hesitated at the top of its swing.

-Stephen King, The Shining

Kubrik vs. King

I would be remiss if I didn’t address the elephant in the room, namely that Stanley Kubrik’s film The Shining, while one of the best known film adaptations of a King novel, is the one that King himself has most vocally hated. Personally I love the film, but on this second read-through, I understand where King is coming from. 

The film is, at its core, an entirely different story than King’s book. As soon as Jack Nicholson is on the screen, we think that Jack Torrance is a fucking loon, and we’d be right to think so. The film is said to be about a father’s hatred of his son, a husband’s hatred of his wife. The Overlook in the film simply allows Jack to become what he always was.

In the book, Jack Torrance is a man struggling to overcome his alcoholism, nearly two years sober and now jobless after a violent altercation with one of his students on his debate team. A job as a caretaker at The Overlook is rock bottom for him, the culmination of his addiction and violent temper. 

Be that as it may, he wants to be a good man, a good husband, a good father. He wants to provide for his family, to be sober, to be better. He fights the evil pull of The Overlook until the very end, and when he realizes in his dying moments what has happened, he tells Danny that he loves him. 

But suddenly his daddy was there, looking at him in mortal agony, and a sorrow so great that Danny’s heart flamed within his chest. The mouth drew down in a quivering bow. “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.”

-Stephen King, The Shining

Wendy Torrance in Kubrik’s film is a weeping mess, a weak woman who seems powerless against her psychotic, abusive husband. This is a far cry from Wendy in King’s book, the woman who sneaks a knife out of the kitchen when she sees that Jack is succumbing to the evil of The Overlook, who drives that knife into his back and fights to keep Danny safe. In the book she has ingenuity, strength, and a real love for Jack. She knows that what is happening to him is a result of hotel. 

And that brings us to the difference in the hotel itself. Because of the change in Jack and Wendy’s characters, The Overlook is changed too. It is no longer the powerful evil of that place that possessed Jack to murder his family. He wanted to be a crazy asshole all along. In King’s book, The Overlook has done this time and time again. It consumes ghosts, traps people there with it forever. The hotel is alive, a living evil thing with power.  Something that King said Kubrik did not capture in his story.

Haunted People, Haunted Places

Jack is a man tormented by his own past. He was raised by an abusive alcoholic. In turn, he becomes an alcoholic, and hurts his son, something he feels immense shame about. I can’t help but feel sympathy for him, this man who loves his family but is plagued first by his own inner demons, and then the spirits of the Overlook.

To punctuate the fact that the events that unfold are not because Jack is a bad person, we see that Dick Hallorann struggles with thoughts of picking up a roque mallet and killing Wendy and Danny only a few hours after arriving at the hotel. Jack has taken months to get to the point of psychosis, and only after the hotel is at its strongest.

What could have been a redemption period in Jack’s life, another “rock bottom” in AA speak, turns into the total dissolution of his family and mind. The only victory is that the hotel is destroyed in the process, distracted by its mission to get the Torrances forever.

Danny is left fatherless, his mother recovering from a broken spine. The only friend they have is Dick Hallorann, who echoes his initial promise to Danny at the end of the book, that he will be there whenever Danny needs him.

“The world's a hard place, Danny. It don't care. It don't hate you and me, but it don't love us, either. Terrible things happen in the world, and they're things no one can explain. Good people die in bad, painful ways and leave the folks that love them all alone. Sometimes it seems like it's only the bad people who stay healthy and prosper. The world don't love you, but your momma does and so do I.”

-Stephen King, The Shining

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I could go on and on, but at some point this has to end. So I turn it to you, dear readers, with a few questions in mind.

For those of you who read the book before you saw the movie, was the REDRUM revelation a surprise? Did you not realize it spelled murder?

What do you think of Jack Torrance’s character? Do you sympathize with him? Hate him?

Do you think Kubrik did justice to King’s story? Why or why not?