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.
