Review: The Shining

KING, Stephen, The Shining, New English Library, London, 1978.

Octavo; paperback; 416pp. Moderate wear; rolled; covers rubbed, creased and edgeworn; spine creased; text block and page edges toned; previous owner’s ink inscription to the first page; some internal spots. Good.

Long-time readers will notice that the things I review at this blog are serendipitous: I read and review things I stumble across, usually at work. Working at a bookshop, I see a lot of books come and go – those we don’t actively buy to put into stock either get shuffled to the “specials” table where they can be had for less than $10; others get tossed, because they’re just too badly beaten up to sell on. One of the perks of my job is that I get to snaffle anything in this range that catches my eye. The Universe provides!

The other day this rolled across my desk. It’s too broken to take up space on the store shelves, so I took it home and put it aside to deal with later. Stephen King isn’t my “go to” guy for horror writing; for me, he’s definitely the white bread option when it comes to scares. That being said, finding his stuff is quite hard. You can buy most of his books new – for the most part they’re all still in print in some form or another – but I can’t even remember the last time I shelled out for a new book. Second-hand copies are few and far between: people like them so they hang onto them and when you do see them, they’re like this copy – banged-up to Hell and back. And forget about first editions: you need some serious cash to become a Stephen King collector these days.

I’ve read few of King’s books. I think the first one I picked up was Thinner which, it has to be said, goes off the rails about two-thirds in and needs a good, hard edit. I’ve read ‘Salem’s Lot which is dated and too clever by half (also needing an edit). I started It on several different occasions but quit only a short way in - all I could get out of it was that it needed a good pruning and that it was soppy and sentimental. I’ve read excerpts from Pet Sematary but the politics of that novel offend me so I didn’t go back to finish it (King’s tendency to ‘blame it on the indigenes’ is reprehensible – see It as well for details).Conversely, I’ve read a bunch of his short stories and these are great – he should do more of this stuff.

So, what was my interest in The Shining? Well, there was the Kubrick film which was great, and I was curious as to how King could have inspired such a success. And there was another reason: just because someone tells me something is crap, it doesn’t mean I just go along with it, even if that person is me. I read every single book written by Stephenie Meyers just so I could work out what other people were seeing in it (‘never found out; ‘still don’t understand the attraction) and to make sure that they really were all as bad as people were saying they are (they are). In fact, if someone tells me that I will “absolutely love” a particular book, it’s a sure-fire way to ensure that I will never pick it up. Call me perverse, that’s how I’m wired. After some time thinking of King as the low man on the horror totem pole, I still felt I owed him some time and an opportunity for vindication. I’m glad I did.

This is really good. I’m still kind of processing it, so bear with me, but it’s a terrific read. The narrowed setting; the small cast; the psychological dissections; the premise: they all work in ways that other books by King don’t. My first impulse in reviewing it is that focus has been brought to bear upon the narrative in ways that King normally doesn’t pursue: this is the writer working with a microscope (rather than a telescope, or a kaleidoscope at his most extreme) and, given the subject matter, it works a treat. This is “horses for courses” and I wish he’d do it more often.

King is largely a scaffolder in terms of his writing, meaning that he creates complex rationales for what happens in his books, pinning down all of the motives and other explanations for what takes place. This is fine. However, scaffolding is a two-part process: once you assemble all of that structure, you need to take it away – leaving it in place means that you bother your reader with all that extraneous information. If you’ve written the story well enough, most of that material should just be “understood” as part of the narrative – you don’t have to mention it anymore. The two reasons that are usually cited for leaving the scaffolding in place are 1) the author is not confident in their ability to assume this information as part of their story; or 2) that they like showing off how much research they’ve done. I leave it to you to decide on your own into which of these camps King falls.

In many of his books, King takes his time outlining his locations, usually bucolic New England townships, and how they work. In ‘Salem’s Lot for example, we become intimately aware of the geography and the history of the place and the people who live there – much of this is beside the point. In The Shining, on the other hand, this isn’t such a problem: there is really only the one location – the Overlook Hotel – and the narrative demands that we become intimate with its particulars. This is one of those horror vehicles (“Alien”; The Amityville Horror; “Deep Blue Sea”) where the location is actually a ‘+1’ character – along with Jack, Wendy and Danny Torrance, the Overlook is the fourth ‘person’ rounding out the story. In this sense, we need to know something about the place, as much as we do about each of the human players in the drama. And King certainly delivers.

With only four characters to work with, King takes his time getting into the heads of all of them. This is a very claustrophobic novel – inevitably – and King gives us three human beings with brains working overtime, like hamsters spinning in wheels, and we feel intimately their fears, preoccupations and manias. The metaphor of the overworked boiler in the basement here is a deliberate one. King gives us a nice technique, a subtle insertion of a comment, usually italicized and in parentheses, forming a subconscious intrusive thought within the text, welling up within a character’s sub-vocalised musing, and revealing hidden motivations and urges. It’s a clever way of rendering each character as a mentally-rounded individual. The Hotel does this too, although its irruptions are often of a more confronting and vivid nature.

The “gun character” of the piece is obviously Jack Torrance, who is such a broken and self-deluded individual that watching him crash and burn is like tuning in to a spectacular car wreck. Wendy, on the other hand, is given little agency within the narrative, and is frustratingly unclear and ineffective for most of the tale. It would be easy to blame this on the zeitgeist when this was written, but that’s an easy cop-out. In the text she’s supposed to be some kind of low-key trophy wife for Jack; it’s obvious that Kubrick cast Shelley Duval in this role as a personified exemplar of her inner self as written. She vacillates between shielding Danny and supporting Jack, and never really seems to do anything of value of her own. After she decides that Danny’s psychic abilities are, prima facie, real, she seems to just sail along in his wake without any effect, other than to act as a judgmental qualifier of Jack’s activities. Danny himself is a little problematic: I don’t like kids; I’ve never had any of my own or been involved too much with them. If this is a bull’s eye depiction of a five-year-old person, then okay, I’ll take it – King is a parent multiple times over, so of course he knows whereof he speaks. It seems alright to me, although Danny’s levels of literacy seem to wobble a bit here and there – his quoting of Alice in Wonderland at length is a case in point. Otherwise, it’s fine and his growing anxiety and fear in the face of the Hotel’s swelling violence is palpably elicited.

As to the Overlook Hotel itself, we get a lavish overview of everything about it, and – while this may seem like some unwanted scaffolding left hanging about – it actually rounds out and grounds the entire plot. The evil with which the place is imbued comes bubbling out from below, sketching the vile rationale for the location’s hideous behaviour. Towards the end, I felt that it was a little too overplayed, that too much was being shoved in my face rather than being suggested; it could have been dialed back a notch, but it was alright.

King was apparently upset by Kubrick’s take on the book and I have to say that his anger is really misplaced (Jeez! Who wouldn’t have loved to have had Kubrick make a film of their writing?). Yes, there are some alterations, but that was bound to happen. In the novel there are a roque court and topiary animals rather than a hedge maze but finding a shooting location that exactly fitted the bill would have been nigh impossible – the compromise is an ideal one. For some reason, King wants to be the champion of the ‘roque revival’ and educate us in the ways of an outmoded form of croquet (scaffolding again). He’s also said that he felt the violence of the film was toned down far too much; for my money, I thought it was fine, and the suggested nature of the cinematic version works far better than any explicit orgy of destruction would have been. King has backed a televisual remake of the book which he prefers; reviews at several websites demonstrate that his opinion is the minority one. And yes, the ending’s different but – it has to be said – it’s better.

In the final analysis, I was quite pleased with this. It fell – almost inevitably – into a flailing mess in the third act (something which many genre writers seem to have a problem with), but not as badly as some of King’s other books (that I’ve read). I suspect that, because King chose to write about things that were fairly straightforward with this book – ghosts; ESP – it required little extra time spent upon the whys and wherefores of the scary elements and he could just focus upon the characters and get on with stuff. This issue plagues the King household it seems – NOS4R2 by Joe Hill is similarly cursed by a character’s ‘superpower’ that requires far too much explanation (scaffolding again), to the detriment of the work overall.

Since starting this review I have purchased a collector’s entire set of Stephen King novels and am getting them all prepped, ready for sale – the Universe provides again! It seems that I’ll be able to expand my knowledge of King’s oeuvre even further – although, to be frank, I’ll probably just stick with the short stories. In the meantime, I’m giving this three-and-a-half Tentacled Horrors.

(Red rum!)