20250617 Tuesday

Book log: The Shining (1977)

After having seen Stanley Kubrick's movie adaptation at least three 
times over the last 30 years, it was difficult to read this book for 
the first time and try to block out the visuals, the faces, the 
stunning location and the strong vibe of the movie. A hundred or so 
pages into the book, the differences become clear, and fortunately 
the narrative differs more and more as the story progresses. In 
addition, Stephen King focuses much more on the internal lives of the
characters. Long passages describe memories, internal discussions, 
fears, feelings. 

A central motif in the book is the wasp's nest, and to my memory it's
completely left out of the movie. It serves many functions, first of 
all it is a metaphor for the Outlook Hotel itself. Having killed off 
the wasp colony while doing maintenance work on the hotel's roof, 
Jack Torrance gives the nest to his son as a present. During the 
following night, some wasps reawaken and sting the little boy -- a 
premonition to the ghosts that are about to reawaken in the hotel, 
and want to hurt Danny. The episode also shows us how Wendy Torrance 
is still scarred by her husband's earlier violent outburst towards 
the boy, she has doubts that he's able to provide enough safety. In 
another section, a memory from Jack's childhood about a wasp's nest 
leads us up to the ending of the book.

A main theme of the book is isolation. The premise of the book is 
that of a family spending a winter completely cut off from the 
world in a hotel in the Rocky Mountains. They are physically isolated
-- first the roads are snowed over, then the phone lines break due to
storms, then the radio is destroyed, and finally the snowmobile is 
sabotaged. Stephen King also describes a more philosophical kind of 
isolation, that humans are fundamentally alone in their minds. The 
chapters are mostly named after one of the characters, and in each 
one we go into their heads and follow their thoughts, their fears, 
their mental instabilities. And this gets us to another important 
aspect of the wasp's nest -- that of the hive mind. Danny Torrance 
has a telepathic ability, which Dick Hallorann calls "The Shining", 
and he is able to read the mind of his parents. Since Dick Hallorann 
also has this ability, they are able to have conversations without 
talking. And Danny's ability is so strong that he can call on 
Hallorann over a distance of thousands of miles.

For a good portion of the book, King leaves it open whether the Hotel
is the site of supernatural phenomenons, or whether its ghosts and 
horrors are a collective invention rising from Jack's escalating 
insanity and Danny's imagination. The ambiguity is eventually 
dispersed towards the climax of the book.

The book is very strong, and remarkably different from King's two 
first books. There are a handful of sections, however, where I think 
the editing could have been stricter. There's one particular chapter,
where King shows how Danny struggles with adult concepts that he 
picks up telepathically. King does this very elegantly by typing 
these concepts in all caps, like LOSING YOUR MARBLES. The concept 
becomes just a word, or a poster, which the boy doesn't fully grasp. 
And then in the next paragraph, King writes from a perspective that 
obviously is adult, which seems like a slip-up. In another section, 
where we are also very much in the head of one of the characters, we 
get a radio weather forecast, which seems very jarring. There are 
also a couple of places where a word is repeated unintentionally at 
the next page; "the hotel was circled with the double track of 
Danny's Flexible Flyer" into "Danny would be skipping circles around 
both of them", and "Nothing in the Overlook frightened him. He felt 
that he and it were simpatico" into "he felt only sympathy for his 
son". Just a few point where I felt the strong style and illusion of 
the book was broken for a second.