The Shining

The Shining is a novel about alcoholism wearing a haunted hotel, and it is far warmer, angrier and sadder than the film everybody has seen.

King's Jack Torrance is not a sinister man from the first page. He is a failed teacher with a temper he hates, five months dry, who once broke his son's arm in a blackout and assaulted a student who slashed his tyres, and who has been given one more chance than he deserves. The novel's first half is a man white-knuckling it in a building with a fully stocked bar he has been told is empty. The Overlook does not create Jack's problem; it identifies it, waits, and then offers him a drink. That is the book's architecture and it is why the ending lands as a tragedy rather than as a chase.

Danny is the other difference. King gives him an interior life, a vocabulary he does not fully have, an imaginary friend called Tony who is something else, and a precognitive ability the novel takes seriously enough to give rules. Wendy is a person with a history and a mother problem. Dick Hallorann, the hotel's cook, is the book's moral centre and drives from Florida in the dead of winter because a five-year-old shouted at him across two thousand miles.

The Overlook has a biography and uses it

King's hotel is specific: built on money, owned successively by gangsters and by a magnate called Horace Derwent, with a scrapbook in the basement that lays out sixty years of suicide, murder and mob killing. It supplies the masked ball, Room 217, the woman in the bath, Delbert Grady — the previous caretaker who killed his wife and two daughters with a shotgun and then himself — and the topiary hedge animals in the garden, which move when you are not looking at them and which are the most frightening thing in the book.

And underneath it there is a boiler that must be dumped twice a day or the pressure climbs. It is introduced in chapter four, repeated a dozen times, and it is the ending.

Where the novel is weaker than the film

It over-explains. The scrapbook, the Derwent history and the hotel's rules are all spelled out, and Kubrick's refusal to supply any of it is why the film is more frightening as an object. The prose is 1977 King — italicised interior voices, heavy repetition of motifs, a lot of exclamation. And the wasps' nest sequence is magnificent and is also, structurally, a short story in the middle of a novel.

For Kubrick's version, which King hated, The Shining; for King's bleakest book and its nearest relative, Pet Sematary; for the other great King adaptation of a child who sees, It.

The short answer: Jack, fully taken by the hotel, hunts Wendy and Danny with a roque mallet. He breaks Wendy's ribs and back, and beats Dick Hallorann badly when Hallorann arrives. Danny finally faces him in the lobby and does the only thing available: he tells his father the truth, that he is not Jack and that the thing wearing him has forgotten the boiler. For a moment Jack surfaces — genuinely, lucidly, enough to tell his son to run and that he loves him — and then the hotel takes him back and he destroys his own face with the mallet. Danny runs. The boiler, undumped for days, explodes, and the Overlook burns to the ground with everything in it. Hallorann gets Wendy and Danny out on a snowmobile. The last chapter is a resort in Maine the following summer, where Hallorann is working and Danny is fishing, and the book ends on him telling the boy that grief is allowed and that he has to go on being a person anyway.

Does Jack Torrance die in the novel?

Yes, in the hotel, in the fire. Kubrick's Jack freezes to death in a hedge maze; King's Jack beats his own face in with a roque mallet when the hotel reclaims him, and is still in the building when the boiler goes. The distinction matters because King's version requires Jack to come back to himself first — the novel's last act turns on one lucid sentence from a father to his son.

What is the shining?

A precognitive and telepathic ability. Danny has it strongly: he sees events before they happen, reads adults' thoughts as fragments and images, and receives information in forms he cannot interpret because he is five — the word REDRUM, the woman in 217, the repeated vision of a mallet. Hallorann has a weaker version and names it for him, and the novel's rules are consistent: the shining lets you see, it does not let you change anything, and the Overlook wants Danny precisely because of it.

Is it Room 217 or Room 237?

217 in the novel. The hotel that inspired it, the Stanley in Estes Park, had a room 217 and asked the production of Kubrick's film not to use the number, so the film invented 237. Both rooms contain the same thing: a woman who died in the bath and who gets out of it.

Who is Delbert Grady?

The Overlook's previous winter caretaker, who in the novel's history went mad in isolation, killed his wife and his two young daughters with a shotgun and then shot himself. He appears to Jack as a servant at the hotel's party and talks to him about correcting his family. The film renames him Charles in one scene and Delbert in another, which is deliberate on Kubrick's part and not in the book.

How is the novel different from Kubrick's film?

Substantially, and King's objection has always been to the character rather than the craft. In the novel: Jack is sympathetic and fights the hotel; the hotel is explained at length; Wendy is capable and fights back; Hallorann survives and matters; the hedge animals replace the maze; Room 217 replaces 237; there is no "Here's Johnny", no twin girls as the film stages them, no blood lift as an image and no frozen final shot. The novel ends with the Overlook destroyed and Jack redeemed for one sentence. The film ends with the hotel intact and Jack in a photograph from 1921.

What is the boiler for?

It is the novel's gun on the mantelpiece and the mechanism of its ending. Watson the handyman shows Jack the boiler in the first act and explains that the pressure creeps and must be dumped twice a day or it will blow the building apart. Jack is told this, repeats it to himself, and then — once the hotel has him — forgets it. Danny's one weapon in the final confrontation is reminding him.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

Tone 016 is bleak — 40 works score lower. A father is destroyed by the thing he was trying not to be, and the coda is a cook explaining grief to a traumatised child.

The threat at 052 is almost exactly the midpoint, which is the right reading: the Overlook is supernatural and every blow in the book is thrown by a man.

Viscera 044 is just under the median — 51 works score lower. A beating with a mallet, broken ribs and a spine, a face destroyed, a shotgun murder in the hotel's history, and the woman in the bath.

Era bias 018 is deep analog — only 31 works score lower. A 1977 novel set in a hotel with a CB radio, a snowmobile and a coal-fired boiler.

Pace 030 is slow — 42 works are slower. The first two hundred pages are a family arriving and a man not drinking.

Reality anchor 058 leans towards dream logic — 59 works score lower. The hotel's party, the hedge animals and Danny's visions are all presented without a frame.

On shocks: several, and the hedge animals closing in on the path are worse than anything in 217.