Stephen King has been discussed here many times before. Will he be discussed here again? I'm not sure, but after wading through The Shining I don't have much desire to read its sequel, Doctor Sleep.
And as I bring up Stephen King and The Shining, another figure looms his way into this one-sided conversation, this figure being none other than Stanley Kubrick, who directed the movie adaptation of Stephen King's novel.
But first, the book.
In The Shining down-on-his-luck writer Jack Torrance (who is in no way, shape or form a stand-in for Stephen King) gets a job as caretaker at an old Colorado hotel shutting down for the winter. Along for the ride are his wife, Wendy, and his psychic son Danny. Danny's presence in the old hotel piques the interest of the sinister powers inhabiting it, and this interest, coupled with Jack's troubled past, is the source of much distress between the three family members.
The Shining was an early work for King, and the third of his books to be published, following Carrie and Salem's Lot, both of which were also adapted into movies.* Carrie and The Shining were very much in line with the late 70s craze for psychic powers, a craze signified by everything from the In Search of... TV show to Project Stargate.
The Shining rode this telepathic wave to the bestseller lists, and its subsequent popularity led to a movie version which hit theaters in 1980. This film version, though greeted with some skepticism at the time, has since become a horror classic. It's also one of director Stanley Kubrick's best remembered films.
The problem being that Kubrick wasn't entirely happy with the story as laid out by its original author. He rejected King's initial draft of the script, and instead rewrote the story with the help of Diane Johnson. Kubrick, it should be said, wasn't a big believer in the supernatural, and he wasn't fond of King's ending. His and Johnson's script is more a mix of gothic horror and Freudian psychology, two elements that King was somewhat removed from when writing his novel.**
Kubrick was, moreover, very dismissive of King's book in the interviews which followed the movie's release, a development which rankles The Shining's author to this day. "Not part of great literature," said Kubrick, who went on to describe the novel as "a very bad book" and also "quite pretentious."
King returned the favor, dismissing the film in his own interviews. King's biggest issue with the movie is Kubrick's ending, which diverges sharply from what he'd written years before. I won't divulge either ending out of consideration for those who haven't yet seen the movie or read the novel, but I can tell you that the conclusions of the two narratives are very different. Kubrick's movie ends in a more nihilistic manner, while the ending of King's story is a confrontation with the unknown and unknowable. I think that both endings work, but I have to say that Kubrick's ending makes a more lasting impression.
As a novel I found The Shining rather hard to get through, and of the Stephen King books I've read I'd rank it near the bottom. Like many of King's books it's really too long, and as I was reading it I kept thinking about sentences, paragraphs and entire chapters I would have excised were I its editor. It's not bad so much as long-winded, and I think the tension it was trying to generate would have been more present if the author had skipped over certain parts and limited the amount of foreshadowing in earlier chapters.
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*Salem's Lot first appeared as a TV miniseries, but nowadays most people would be watching it in a single sitting.
**There is a section in the book where Jack and Wendy take Danny to a doctor. After a cursory examination this doctor offers a rational/scientific explanation for Danny's psychic powers. This explanation, however, is later dismissed by both parents.
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