Laura Leaney's Reviews > The Shining

A few students - seniors - told me they were reading this novel, so I re-read it over the weekend, having high hopes that it would be as frightening as I remembered. Like so many books I read when I was young, this one did not hold up the second time round. The "horror" of the evil Colorado hotel was far too cheesy for my taste: blackened corpses coming to life, vicious murderous shrubbery, and the clink of glasses from long ago parties. I laughed or groaned every other page.

What I did like - and give full appreciation to King for - was the depiction of an alcoholic with anger issues. Jack Torrance is a frightening guy, even before he gets the job at the haunted Overlook Hotel. His relationship with his wife reminded me slightly of my own parents (sorry, Mom!). In Torrance's mind, Wendy is the nag of the century, and in the reader's mind Wendy is something along the lines of a door mat. Before he takes the job as the winter caretaker for the Overlook, Jack drinks nightly martinis while bar-hopping with his friend Al, breaks his son's arm in anger, loses his job as an English teacher, and chews Excedrin feverishly while scaring the shit out of his wife. She tiptoes around looking lost a lot. An old story. But King depicts it with a wonderful tension.

The rest is barely tolerable. Jack and Wendy's son is born with a caul and as a consequence has "the shining." So does the hotel's black cook, Hallorann. (Am I nuts or is it always the black character that has the second sight?) We've got little Danny's invisible friend Tony, a situation that creeps out his parents, and well-meaning doctors who tell the Torrance's that their weird kid is simply highly intuitive. Jack and Wendy know better, because when the evil really starts to hit the fan, Danny's always the kid with the answers.