The Shining

Modern Fantasy: The Hundred Best Novels in English Language Selection: 1946-1987 #64

My first time reading Stephen King; somehow I’d made it this far through life without getting to any of his work. I also haven’t seen the Stanley Kubrick film adaptation of this novel, so this is about a pure experience of the story as one can possibly have.

The first issue I had to overcome was The Shining primarily being considered a horror novel, as 500 pages for a horror novel is bonkers to me, and it started to test my patience. The very best horror that I’ve read - (The Shrinking Man, The Island of Doctor Moreau) - has all been short, sharp, lean and economical. King, however, expends a lot of page count to portraying the backstory of the family and the hotel with what I found to be frustratingly pedantic detail and littered with obscure references to brands, music and television shows that I think not only just Americans would know, but perhaps only Stephen King does. As such, many of them were lost on me. King’s philosophy on horror, from what I understand, is that in order for us to be truly scared, the characters and setting must feel as real as possible. While this explains the maximalist detail and tedious worldbuilding, 'worldbuilding' in my view creates immersion, which creates familiarity – and familiarity, to me, is antithetical to horror. In Rosemary’s Baby, for example, - a horror novel set in a similarly domestic setting - no description is given needlessly; every mention of how a room is laid out has payoff later and thus is why that novel is such a tightly constructed plot. We are told about the grim history of the apartment building Rosemary and Guy move into, but Levin does it so economically in little more than a passing reference.

The Shining, by contrast, feels much more like a neo-Gothic tale: the old, imposing setting of the Overlook Hotel, the internal turmoil of the characters, the madness, the supernatural element, and perhaps even some of the overwritten descriptions and period detail. Like Gothic fiction, however, The Shining is less frightening than it is cosy. Given that many reviews I’ve seen of King’s ostensibly ‘horror’ novels also characterise his work as having a distinctly ‘cosy’ feel – as though the reviewer, like Jack Torrance, wants to curl up in a warm, old house perusing old manuscripts whilst a blizzard rages outside – I think King’s technique evidently fails as often, if not more, than it succeeds. Additionally, where traditional Gothic fiction can often have lush, sensual prose, King’s is rather utilitarian and this made the 500 pages really feel like 500 pages.

King gives a lot of time characterisation, and what I at least did find interesting in this regard is how each of the Torrance family has their own internal struggles – Jack, the father, who is a recovering alcoholic who struggles to contain his anger and violent outbursts; Wendy, the mother, who remains affected by a childhood bereavement and as a result is even more fiercely protective of her son Danny; and their aforementioned, reserved 5-year-old son who embodies the classic ‘creepy kid’ template and who experiences precognitive abilities and a form of telepathy from which the novel gets its title. What was also interesting to some extent was the hotel being a metaphor for Jack’s alcoholism - this insidious force that makes him violent and bellicose towards other people and even his loved ones. King’s foreshadowing throughout this novel is rather heavy-handed. I personally prefer to be made to work more in order to spot it, with the climax of the novel basically told to the reader through Danny’s visions as well as hinted at through a telephone call made by Jack.

There were some scenes I did think were effectively creepy and unsettling, namely the scenes involving room 217 when Danny has his experience in its bathroom (which David Pringle also happens to distinguish as the novel’s horror ‘high point’, on which I agree with him), and also when Jack goes to investigate it. I liked how each of the Torrance’s internal struggles complemented (or compounded) the others’, but while King’s attention to detail and ‘worldbuilding’ might be immersive to some, immersion is not generally why I read – particularly with a genre as visceral as horror - and I often found the novel laborious, lumbering, overwritten and undisciplined, with none of the economy or tautness of Matheson or the other, better horror that I’ve read. While this may ordinarily be explained by it being an early effort by the author (which The Shining is), I see no evidence that this is a style of storytelling that King departed from, given the page counts of his other novels before and after – including Salem’s Lot which I note with trepidation is also on David Pringle’s list.