Since I indicated Major Spoilers in the Subject Title, I won’t use the spoiler tags in the thread itself. If you haven’t read the novel or seen the movie and don’t want to read major plot twists or endings, DO NOT READ THIS THREAD.
I’ve never read King’s The Shining, though I have seen the Kubrick version and this weekend I watched the miniseries remake on DVD. I don’t intend to read the novel anytime soon and I had some questions for those who have:
1- Does it ever explain WHY all the “party guests” are still at the hotel? I can understand the woman who committed suicide and the mob boss who was brutally murdered, but did all of the others die there as well?
2- Does the book provide any information about Harry Derwent, such as who he was (the mini-series implies he was a mobster who was also into the occult) and how he died?
3- In the miniseries, the actor who plays Tony, Danny’s- uh— “spirit guide”, for lack of a better word- also plays Danny in the “10 Years Later” sequence. Is this from the book (i.e. was Danny seeing a future version of himself)?
Also, what was the significance (if any) of the “REDRUM” / “MURDER” messages? (I get that redrum is murder spelled backwards, but I kept thinking they’d explain what it meant.)
The party guests are still at the Hotel because the Hotel itself, not the people, is the ghost for all practical purposes. All of its various pasts, and the possible murderous present, are preserved. The main time slices that are relevant to the Hotel are those in which greed, malice, deception, the desire to humiliate or coerce, and other violent emotions (as well as violent acts of course) held sway.
Yeah, practically an autobio of Derwent.
Yeah, what Gravity said.
As you read the book, you can read it as if all the hauntings and supernatural stuff are only taking place in the deteriorating head of Jack and the increasingly terrified imagination of 5-year-old Danny as he starts to pick up on his Dad turning into a monster. Or you can take it at face value as a story about a haunted Hotel out to destroy the family. The cool thing is that it works so well on both levels, and it’s very self-consciously doing so with the characters asking themselves that very question.
The book sucks you into seeing the environment from behind the eyes of each of the major characters. Motivation and all that stuff. The play that Jack is writing becomes a metaphor for issues that he himself is turning over in his head, eventually including his relationship with his own son and his attitude towards his own violent destructive Dad. That makes it sound much duller and denser than it is. It isn’t – it’s riveting.
IN FACT, it’s the best thing he ever wrote. It’s better than the Stand. It’s better than IT. Read the book, why deprive yourself of something so accessible and so totally excellent?
Of those I’ve read, the King novel that scared me the most was PET SEMETARY. THE SHINING is better?
On the DVD commentary he was mentioning his inspiration for the book. He and his wife, having money for the first time in their marriage due to the success of CARRIE and the advance for SALEM’S LOT, set out on a cross country no-itinerary trip with the kids. In CO he began seeing the “This road is closed after the first snowfall” signs and signs for the Stanley Hotel. When they arrived, the dining tables were covered and the place was vacant, but the skeleton crew remaining allowed them to stay because he could pay cash and it was only for one night. The hotel staff told him about the caretaker who stayed for the winter.
At the time, King was beginning to hit the bottle very badly and knew that he was a problem drinker. He also said that he had never expected the levels of rage and frustration that came with being a father (and since he never had a father himself he had no role model or mentor) and this was scaring him, along with fear of failure as an author (was he a one hit wonder?). All of it together converged into THE SHINING. (He wasn’t killed by a boiler, but he only stopped drinking when he turned to coke and he wouldn’t be clean of that until the late '80s).
I’d agree that The Shining is the best stand-alone story that he’s written (I am a Dark Tower fan), so yes, it’s better than Pet Semetary.
Pet Semetary is much more visceral, and I found it a bit manipulative (Gage’s shoe filled with blood by the side of the road, that sort of thing-- meant to hit you in the gut). The Shining is horror of a more indirect sort. It’s intensely psychological and emotional – these people are stuck with each other, bound by love but trapped for all of that. Their failings, particularly Jack’s, are thrown into high relief because there’s nothing to soften or distract from them. Jack has anger issues, Danny is overly imaginative as well as psychic – which makes him a plaything for the hotel, and Wendy is too weak to protect Danny or herself from Jack, let alone the hotel. Moreover, Danny’s relationship with his father is the one that counts the most, especially when the chips are down. That’s what makes it so chilling.
I don’t mean to sound bitchy, but would it really be that godawful for you to read the book yourself? All of these questions would be answered and you’d get to enjoy the read as well. I just have very little patience with people who watch a movie made from a book, then either come around talking about how much better Kubrick’s version was than the miniseries (it was a nice movie, had very little to do with the book though), or with a bunch of questions about stuff that didn’t make sense. I’ve never read Dune, and I would never try to watch the movie until I had because man, there’s a lot of things I’m probably not going to get!
It’s obvious you’re not one of those loathesome people who just “don’t like books” since you said you read Pet Sematary, so just get out there, take a day, have a few shots of Redrum (yes, you can really buy alcohol called Redrum!) and READ THE BOOK, MAN!
Sampiro Don’t get me wrong…Pet Semetary was pretty good too…good idea for a book and plenty of scary images
But The Shining had so many ideas in it that were so well done that IMO it could of spawned a sequel without using any new material and I would still feel they BOTH would of been worth the money to buy the books
I wish King would write a PREquel to the Shining…I think there’s more than enough things I’d still like to know about that hotel
BTW I think the movie of Pet Semetary was almost as good as the book and that’s something awfully rare
I quit reading him after Pet Semetary. I thought he wrote himself into a corner that he never really got out of. The Stand is wonderful and Firestarter was really good but the best is The Shining.
It occurs to me, having seen the Kubrick version and the miniseries (made b/c King had serious issues with Kubrick’s rendition) that The Shining cannot be made into a good movie that also captures the spirit of the book. This is certainly not true with all good books, nor even with King’s books; I loved Stand by Me and Shawshank Redemption.
The problem, I think, is that the whole story is an allegory about repressed rage. A good bit of the book is told in flashbacks: to Jack’s childhood, which is crucial to any understand of the theme and which is absent from Kubrick’s version, to Jack’s lashing out at the student, to the hotel’s sinister past. That stuff just doesn’t play well, and I find that allegory comes off as too preachy and heavy-handed when put to film (the movie of The Stand has the same problem).
I fully intend to, but I have a long list of pleasure reading already and I’m about to start back to grad school, so it’ll be a while. Knowing the plot twists in advance has never really hindered enjoyment for me (though generally I prefer not to) and I was curious as to some of the things in the miniseries which you assumed would be cleared up but weren’t.
Incidentally, Scatman Crothers rode over Melvin Van Peebles like a Maserati over a goat cart. I guess James Earl Jones just wasn’t available for either go round.
Haven’t seen the mini series, so could you explain how it portrayed Tony (I can’t imagine how an actor played him)?
Also, while I read (and thoroughly enjoyed) the book, I can’t remember WHY Danny’s friend is named Tony- can someone fill me in?
In the mini-series, Tony is a teenaged boy with glasses who looks normal save for the fact he levitates a few feet off the ground. (Reminded me of the levitating vampire-child from the miniseries SALEM’S LOT; that image terrified me when I was a kid.)
I don’t know what combination of booze, NyQuil and pure Peruvian cocaine King was ingesting when he wrote Cujo, but thank Christ he got clean afterwards (though not soon enough to spare us from The Tommyknockers). King loves to pad out his books by hundreds of pages by going into all sorts of backstory about the characters. It’s entertaining stuff, often, but as far as narrative goes, most of his books could be trimmed by half.
In The Shining, there’s no padding; it all adds to the overall story. Twenty years ago I stayed up an entire night reading that book, and I think it’s still one of the strongest things he ever wrote. In his book about writing as he knows it (On Writing) King says that at the time, it really didn’t click with him how close to home his character of Jack was; like a lot of addicts, King couldn’t see what he was doing to himself.
When King’s bad, his stuff is almost unreadable. When he’s on his game, I really envy his raw storytelling ability.
So, anyway, please do read the book. In fact, if somebody was only going to read one King book, I’d recommend that one.
I always wondered if during that time(Cujo-wise) he was supposed to be writing another book and just couldn’t um…for whatever reason so he dug out Cujo from before he hit it big with Carrie and passed that off as a new work
It would explain alot wouldn’t it? Jeez even his Bachman books were not as bad as Cujo
And his other books while I’d agree many are padded still they are filled with interesting characters and he has a oddly comforting “writers’ voice”(considering the genre he writes) so while reading them you are glad they are so long because you want to know more about those people and don’t want the book to end
Sure AFTERWARDS you think man he could of knocked off 300 hundred pages and still had hell of a story
Regarding The Stand like probably most fans of his I read the first version then read HIS preferred version with all the added pages…the publisher made the right decision cutting them in the first place but they were nonetheless entertaining and I liked the story enough I wasn’t bored
As much as I like the characters in his books and in idle times wonder what they could be up to now…I’m relieved he hasn’t even in troubled times taken the easy way out and did sequel after sequel of his best works
