The Shining

It's October, so why not? I went ahead and read The Shining. Now, I loved the movie. (Based on our recent Rank & File at gametimebro, I wasn't alone - everyone loves the movie.) But I've loved most of the Stanley Kubrick movies I've seen, and I've only loved - or even liked - some of the Stephen King books I've read; both are masters of their domain, but give me Kubrick's films over King's stories any day. So while I was excited to read The Shining, I was also a bit skeptical. I mean, what if Kubrick had made a gem of a film out of some very middling source material?

Well, props to King after all - The Shining was an excellent and unnerving story that I absolutely devoured. It's a bit different from the film it inspired, though not nearly as much as some would have you believe. No, it's all laid out here. Jack, Wendy, and Danny, spending a winter at a magnificent but haunted hotel - Jack gradually losing his mind, Wendy fearing for her safety and her son's, and Danny capable of zoning out into little trances ("shining") that let him see ghosts or other terrifying visions. What you get in the book that you don't get in the film - because you can develop people and places more with 650 pages than you can with two hours - are all these little character flourishes that I think greatly added to the overall story. When I watched the movie, I wasn't really invested in the family's wellbeing; when I read the book, it was about all I cared about, even knowing that things wouldn't end well.

We dive deep and learn that Jack's a terrible alcoholic, but that he's been off the sauce ever since his temper got the better of him and he broke his son's arm. He feels horrible about that, and also about losing his job as a teacher back in New England, and in a lot of ways he considers his winter caretaker job at the Overlook Hotel as his last real chance in life not to be a complete fuck up. Then you've got Wendy, who was ready to divorce Jack after what he did to Danny - and throughout the book it's clear she's never fully forgiven him for it, even though she wants to. But Wendy's got all sorts of apprehensions about wintering at a hotel cut off from civilization that have nothing to do with any fears that Jack will hurt anyone; she keeps thinking about the Donner Party having to eat one another when they ran out of food. And she's harboring some dark, ill-defined resentment toward her own mother. Meanwhile, Danny's "shining" abilities are much more pronounced here. Tony isn't a creepy little finger-based buddy he breaks out now and again, but a full-blown voice in his head that gives him premonitions and telepathic capabilities. Danny also reads his parents minds with some regularity, and knows - despite being just five - that they've contemplated divorce, for instance. And he knows his father feels terrible for breaking his arm. And so Danny is way more concerned with his parents staying together than he is about all the weird shit going on at the Overlook Hotel - at least at first.

So yeah - the book absolutely holds its own here. Plenty of the classic scenes in the movie - "All work and no play," "Here's Johnny," the twins, the maze - Kubrick added all of those, and his movie's all the better for it. But in their place, the book contains some unsettling elements of its own - a wasp attack, some animated topiary hedges, a few more ominous premonitions from Danny, a pesky boiler that doesn't maintain its internal pressure very well, and plenty else.

If I have to compare the two, I'd say Kubrick's much better at bringing the slow-burning tension to a head in a terrifying manner, but King did a much better job at establishing these characters and at making me care about them. Granted, those might just be strengths of "film" and "written word," respectively. But yeah, it's a great book.