I haven’t actually seen Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of The Shining, but it’s a testament to that film’s iconic status that even I couldn’t help but notice how different the original novel is from the movie. Without trying to spoil anything, there’s no cascade of blood coming out of an elevator and no creepy set of ghost twins either.
There is, however, one hell of a dynamite premise, for either a book or a movie. For the few of you who might need an introduction: Jack Torrance is a fired teacher and a formerly promising writer who, in desperation, accepts an offer to be the winter caretaker for a luxury hotel in the mountains of Colorado. His wife Wendy and preternaturally gifted five-year-old son Danny are coming along for the duration, even though the remoteness of the hotel and the treacherousness of the winter weather mean that they will spend a long time cut off from contact with the outside world. Before the seasonal staff depart for warmer climes, head cook Dick Hallorann befriends Danny, with whom he shares the psychic connection that lends its name to the novel.
King very deliberately sets the stage for the catastrophe that seems destined to happen from the novel’s first pages. He introduces tons of backstory for both Jack and Wendy without it feeling superfluous. These details inform their characters and allow the reader to invest in them and care about what happens to them.
Perhaps because of the movie’s reputation as a fright fest, I found myself a little surprised at how little I was creeped out while reading The Shining. To be sure, there plenty of eeriness to go around, but there wasn’t much suspense. Even when I wasn’t sure what was going to happen I didn’t feel much tension. As a comparison, late last year I read King’s vampire novel Salem’s Lot and found that book to be much scarier and more perturbing. The Shining felt more like a character-driven story with supernatural elements.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a DVD to track down.