For some reason I’ve been reading some of the old Stephen King threads on the SDMB, and I remembered a bit in The Shining - his best work, surely - that I never “got.”
The kid’s imaginary friend is named Tony. The Torrances take the kid to the doctor after a disturbing “visit” from Tony, and the doctor reassures them everything’s all right, and mentions almost in passing that the reason behind the name “Tony” should be obvious.
I’ve scratched my head a bit over this, and never figured it out. Anybody else find this not obvious? I’d actually quote the passage, but my books are all packed away in boxes. Sigh.
I seem to recall an interview with King where he said he thought of Tony as Danny’s mental projection (or precognition) of himself as an older boy; around 14 years old or so. Danny’s middle name is Anthony. I don’t recall if that is from the novel or the interview.
…And of course you must realize why Danny’s invisible friend is named Tony instead of Mike or Hal or Dutch."
“Yes,” Wendy said.
“Have you ever pointed it out to him?”
“No,” Jack said. “Should we?”
“Why bother? Let him realize it in his own time, by his own logic…”
-Stephen King, The Shining
Never knew Danny’s middle name was Anthony though. Would a five year old kid know Tony is the abbreviated form of Anthony?
It does say somewhere towards the end of the book that his middle name is Anthony. And at the beginning it mentions his favorite stuffed dog, also named Tony.
Near the end of the novel, Danny sees Tony as an older version of himself, and realizes that Tony is himself. This is right before Danny runs into (what’s left of) his father at the top floor of the Overlook. In that section, it is revealed that Danny’s middle name is Anthony.
I could swear that the advance publicity from Dreamcatcher stated that the story was a continuation of the King short story “The Body” which we later saw as the movie Stand By Me, but Dreamcatcher made absolutely no reference to the boys who were featured in the original short story. Somebody set me straight please.
I also have a question about The Shining. In the book is it often made reference to Jack’s experience with the Debate student who stuttered. The student says, “You don’t like me because you know!” What is it that Jack knows? Is the boy’s secret ever revealed?
neptune_1984, I don’t think there was any big secret there. The student (George Hatfield) probably meant “You know that I’m smarter, richer, better-looking than you.”
Somewhere in the beginning of “The Shining,” Jack refers to his son by his full name - I think it was when Danny was waiting on the curb for his father to come home.
I haven’t read it yet, but King doesn’t write in a vacuum. In a sense, he has created only a couple of universes, and every story is just a viewport into one or another. Needless things, The Body, Cujo, 'Salem’s Lot, etc are all parts of the same story-universe, all set in the Castle Rock area of Maine.
The Stand, The Dark Tower series (The Gunslinger, Little Sisters Of Eluria, The Drawing Of The Three, The Wastelands, Wizard and Glass, Low Men In Yellow Coats), Rose Madder, The Eyes Of The Dragon, Insomnia, etc are all set in the same universe as well. In fact, I think both of those might be one connected universe as well, because a lot of The Stand happened in Maine.
I didn’t mean to drag this so far off track, but my point is that most of his stories are set in the same continuity with a lot of the same characters. So all of them almost part of one big story. His more recent books have been focused on tying all the other ones together. Pretty cool, say I.
Danny’s middle name being Anthony is mentioned near the end. It comes at some turning point of the character. It’s explained like
“…and then Daniel Anthony Torrence realised…” I don’t have the book handy, but I remember it clearly. The book used to be in my bathroom, and I think I’ve read it about 30 times or something.
Joe_Cool is spot-on in his comments about Stephen King’s universes. I didn’t see any of the publicity for Dreamcatcher, but it seems to fit in with the general pattern of Different Seasons and The Shining. I thought he was just falling back on old patterns rather than continuing a specific story, but it’s certainly possible. I hadn’t thought of that before. It does seem to fit into the same scheme as Desperation and The Regulators – they coordinate and overlap in some places without wholly fitting on the same continuum.