King gets back to his best form

What happened to little Danny Torrance, the five-year-old boy in The Shining, when he grew up — and did he become an alcoholic like his father? It’s a question that King has been asked by his fans over the years and he answers it in this brilliant sequel, Doctor Sleep - a tremendous return to form after a string of disappointments, says Katie Law
26 September 2013

Doctor Sleep by Stephen King (Hodder, £19.99)

Stephen King wrote his terrifying novel The Shining in 1977. The story of Jack Torrance, an author with writer’s block, who, employed to caretake the huge and haunted Overlook Hotel in the Colorado Mountains for the winter, descended into alcoholic madness and tried to kill his wife Wendy and five-year-old son Danny, is probably the book that has defined King’s career more than any other — not only because it’s one of his best but also because of Jack Nicholson’s famous performance as the deranged Torrance in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film version, although King himself hated Kubrick’s adaption.

But what happened to little Danny Torrance when he grew up — and did he become an alcoholic like his father? It’s a question that King has been asked by his fans over the years and he answers it in this brilliant sequel, Doctor Sleep. At first we meet Danny drinking heavily, then struggling to give it up and eventually going into AA, while working in a hospice in New Hampshire, where he uses his “shining” gift, a form of telepathy, to ease the suffering of the dying.

Over the next few years Danny gets intermittent but powerful flashes of “shining” — telepathic messages — from a little girl he’s never met called Abra, who lives 20 miles away. But it’s not until she is 13 and asks him to help her that they eventually meet. Her “shining” is so strong that a band of evil, vampire-like creatures calling themselves the True Knot are searching for her.

King, a genius at transforming the ordinary into the utterly horrific, whether it’s a car that comes to life (Christine), an obsessive fan who becomes a murderer (Misery) or a painting that absorbs people (Rose Madder).Here he portrays members of the True Knot as regular, middle-aged American folk travelling around in motorhomes, when they are in fact ancient hideous monsters who must revitalise themselves regularly by inhaling the steam that comes out of a shining child when they torture her slowly to death. Abra’s got enough shining to feed them for years to come.

As much as the novel is about the battle of wills between the forces of good and evil — and there are some fabulously blood-curdling scenes here — at its heart Doctor Sleep is a story of redemption and the lifelong consequences of choosing sobriety over drinking, as King himself discovered after he gave it up in 1988.

“The man who wrote Doctor Sleep is very different from the well-meaning alcoholic who wrote The Shining, but both remain interested in the same thing: telling a kickass story,” he writes in an author’s note. And he’s right: Doctor Sleep may lack the raw brutality that made The Shining so intensely, powerfully affecting but it’s still a tremendous return to form after a string of disappointments.

Go to standard.co.uk/booksdirect to buy this book for £15.99, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p

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