Synopsis:
Jack Torrance’s new job at the Overlook Hotel is the perfect chance for a fresh start. As the off-season caretaker at the atmospheric old hotel, he’ll have plenty of time to spend reconnecting with his family and working on his writing. But as the harsh winter weather sets in, the idyllic location feels ever more remote . . . and more sinister. And the only one to notice the strange and terrible forces gathering around the Overlook is Danny Torrance, a uniquely gifted five-year-old.
Review:
I live under a pop-culture rock, okay. So understand that I went into The Shining without knowing much about the story (as blind as you can considering cultural osmosis). I never saw the movie. Didn’t read the book. Didn’t read any reviews. And I had no idea what REDRUM was. Pretty much all I knew was that The Shining was about a crazy guy in a spooky hotel. Yes, I saw the Simpsons Halloween special episode from 30 years ago, but let’s just say that I’ve slept a few times since then.
King’s prose is masterful in its simplicity. The Shining was extremely easy to read and the action and characters screamed off the page. Jack’s characterization as a recovering alcoholic with anger issues but has turned a new leaf because he truly loves his family was compelling and lent itself to a wonderfully complex dynamic between the Torrance family. And his poor life choices forcing them to isolate themselves together in The Outlook Hotel all winter is honestly the perfect setup for an iconic story.
King does a wonderful job at building tension and suspense, turning the isolation of The Outlook into a pressure cooker of family drama (pun intended). And most of all, the Torrance family, with all their problems, felt real.
But all that being said, I had some issues with The Shining. Mostly stemming from incomplete or sloppy character arcs. For the sake of brevity, I’ll limit myself to two examples. Beware spoilers ahead.
1. The ghost martini problem: There is a pivotal character moment about halfway through the book, where Jack Torrance succumbs to his alcoholism, breaks his sobriety and drinks a dozen martinis. But he doesn’t really, the martinis are just a hallucination/manifestation of the Outlook. They aren’t real alcohol. And therein lies the problem. It would have been so much more compelling for his character if he consciously makes the choice to drink again despite the harm he knows it causes himself and his family, but instead the story presents it as if he’s under the spell of the Outlook and it is controlling his thoughts and actions. This takes away Jack’s agency and, in my opinion, ruins his tragic downfall character arc. Would it have been so hard to have the Outlook tempt Jack with real alcohol and have him make the choice to drink it himself? With the prohibition gangster back story, an unexpected stash of moonshine in a storage room would fit right into the story and been so much more compelling.
2. Wendy Torrance: Wendy was such a compelling character up to the halfway point of the story and then the reader is robbed of her Point Of View (POV) at the most crucial part of her character arc and she becomes a non-character for months up to the book’s climax where she actually takes action. The scene where she finds marks on Danny’s neck and accuses Jack of hurting him might be one of the best scene I’ve ever read… up to the point where Danny tells his side of the story and there appears to be someone or something else in the hotel so Jack and Wendy decide it is the perfect time to have sex. And then instead of the reader getting a scene from Wendy’s POV to see if she was just placating Jack and find out her real thoughts on her husband’s mental state, we skip her POV for almost 20 chapters and instead focus on side-character Dick Hallorann’s journey to the hotel, a POV that could’ve been significantly reduced with no impact to the overall story.
The crux of Wendy’s character arc centers around her passivity in her relationship with Jack and her finally standing up for what is right for herself and Danny. And she does start to show an assertiveness and proactiveness when she begins to question Jack’s sanity. But what kind of mother who fears for the safety of her five-year-old wouldn’t have come up with a plan in the two months between accusing your husband of strangling your son and the day he finally goes off the deep end. In two months, she came up with hiding a knife, that’s it.
I would have liked her perspective to explore how much she really believed Jack’s lies and deceit, contemplating how she would take care of the hotel in his absence, perhaps stashing food in one of the many rooms of the hotel in case she needed to take Danny and hide for a while, or even checking the radio and snowmobile to find out that Jack sabotaged them. I give her credit for quick thinking of knocking Jack out and stuffing him in the pantry, but by that point we hadn’t see her do anything in so long that her change in personality was jarring.
A few other minor gripes: Danny felt older than five-year-old to me. King repeated some descriptions, dialogue, concepts too frequently which sometimes dragged the pace down. There were a couple of plot threads that I was extremely invested in such as Jack’s play that kinda got dropped and never addressed again. Even though each chapter is dedicated to a specific character’s Point Of View, there were numerous instances where King slides into another character’s POV (called head-hopping). This drove me nuts.
Altogether The Shining is a good read and I enjoyed the story of Jack Torrance’s descent into madness in the Outlook Hotel. While Stephen King is a master in some aspects of writing such as prose and characterization, some of his weaker qualities are glaringly obvious in The Shining.
If you’ve read The Shining, do you agree?
Bonus Review: Kubrick’s The Shining
I watched the Kubrick Shining movie days after finishing the book, so here are some thoughts about The Shining movie:
There is a night and day difference in the characterization of pretty much every character between the book and the movie. Book Jack is a tragically flawed father who loves his family, whereas movie Jack is a just a self-important jerk who feels trapped by his family. Book Wendy is a passive wife who is afraid of the truth about their family, whereas movie Wendy is a passive non-character just there to get scared. And book Danny is a curious boy who is trying to help his family, but in over his head, but movie Danny is nothing more than a plot device.
I do think that Kubrick did improve on the book in a few ways. The movie leans much more into the horror aspects. Many of the iconic scene are not in the book at all (such as the bloody elevator) and adding them does a wonderful job at visualizing the growing dread of the Outlook. Kubrick also fixes a few of the shortcomings of the book. Most crucially, he does a beautiful job of showing Jack’s descent into madness and concludes a plot thread of the book related to Jack’s play. Wendy stumbling upon the play and paging through only to find nonsense was a perfect addition (in the book I would have preferred her reading the actual play and being horrified about the content and who the hero and villain were, but for the visual format of movies, this was perfect).
But there were several over-the-top moments that completely pulled me out of the movie and make me question how this movie got so popular in the first place. “Here’s Johnny” and the goofy special effects for the ending scene of Jack in the snow are laughably absurd, which detracted from the tone of the movie.
All in all, I fully understand why King didn’t like this adaptation because it is missing the best parts of the book. It was a good movie, but just copying a plot and setting does not make an adaptation. First and foremost to make a good adaptation, one must be true to the characters, which this movie doesn’t accomplish.
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