Two Kings and I'm the winner! *The Shining and *Doctor Sleep, by Stephen King

also posted at my oddly weird fiction page

The Shining, by Stephen King
Doubleday, 1977
447 pp

hardcover (first doubleday book club edition)

Continuing on in my month of spooky reads in honor of Halloween, I now come to two books written by the same author. The Shining is a classic horror read, while the latest book by Stephen King, Doctor Sleep,  hones in on the kid from The Shining, Danny Torrance, picking up his story again as a young man. I hadn't planned on reading The Shining again (it made for some freakishly-great entertainment years ago), but because Doctor Sleep builds on Danny's (now Dan) experiences at the Overlook,  I decided to reread The Shining before I started the new one.  To be frank, I liked both books; to be even more truthful, I fell in love with The Shining all over again and found Doctor Sleep to be fun and often suspenseful but not nearly as intense as its predecessor.  More on that later.

Before I try to offer up a synopsis here, let me say this: if you're considering reading Doctor Sleep, the references back to events in The Shining come from the original book -- which is not at all the same as the movie made by Stanley Kubrick.  So if your understanding of things comes from that film, you might be a little lost.

 Jack Torrance, his wife Wendy and their son Danny used to have a good life. He taught at a prep school, he made money from publishing some of his stories, and Wendy did typing part time -- all good enough to where the couple could put money away each month.  Jack is an alcoholic, but had managed to get himself together and keep it under control, but he has temper issues: an assault on one of his students put Jack out of a job and drove Jack and Wendy into financial crisis.  Luckily, one of his former drinking buddies has found him a job as the winter caretaker at the Overlook Hotel high in the mountains of Colorado.  Jack sees the job as a good opportunity to finish writing a play he's been working on, since the Torrance family will be the only inhabitants there.  The truth is, Jack and Wendy have no choice but to take the job due to extreme financial necessity -- as Jack notes sarcastically some time later in the novel, "A man with his sterling record of alcoholism, student-beating and ghost-chasing would undoubtedly be able to write his own ticket," ending up with a job "swamping out Greyhound buses," or "washing cars in a rubber suit," or even "washing dishes in a diner."  Danny, however, is not so sure -- his "imaginary" friend Tony has been showing him visions of the Overlook in his dreams, and what he sees frightens him. Meeting the hotel's chef, Dick Hallorann, gives Danny the chance to understand why he sees things or knows things that others don't: he has "the shine," an ability shared by the chef.  They both realize it in the other, but as Hallorann explains, Danny has the biggest shine he's ever encountered.   Danny levels with Hallorann that he's frightened, but Hallorann assures him that if he needs him, he only needs to send a mental message to him and he'll come back from his other job in Florida  to help him.  He also warns Danny that places can shine, and as the Torrance family is about to discover, the Overlook is one of those very places.   The hotel is a place where "all the hotel's eras" are together at once, an "inhuman place" that "makes human monsters."

 

The Shining has long been one of my all-time favorite horror novels, meriting the switch some time back from mass market paperback to 1st Doubleday hardcover book club edition.  It may not be filled with the kind of horrors seen in the Kubrick film (which I actually loved as well, but in a way not connected to King but to Kubrick's vision and genius here), but it is one of the most intensely cerebral novels of horror I've ever read.  The symbolism of the wasps, for example, is incredibly potent, a thread that runs completely throughout the story and absolutely necessary for understanding what's going on here.  Another point: in Kubrick's film Jack's character comes across as a raving lunatic, while here, it's much easier to see Jack as more of a victim of the hotel itself, allowing the reader to view his character more on the edge of sadness and empathy rather than as a person bent on self destruction and insanity.  If I had to make a top ten list of horror novels, this book would definitely be on it, although considering the horror novels being published today, it may seem relatively tame to modern  readers.  For me though, it is and always will be a classic.

*******

Moving on to Doctor Sleep, 

9781476727653

Scribner, 2013

544 pp

hardcover 

Where The Shining is brimming over with horrific intensity, Dr. Sleep is in part a coming-of-age novel as well as a novel about demons, both internal and external, a bit more relaxed in the telling and well, for me, not nearly as frightening, cerebral or haunting as its predecessor.  That is most definitely NOT to say it's not good; it's just very different.

 The story catches up with Danny (now Dan) Torrance years after events at the Overlook.  He still has "the shine," although after years of alcohol abuse, it's been "tamped down" somewhat.  Dan has been unable to keep a job because of his drinking; at the same time the alcohol helps blot out the visions that continue to haunt him, for example, the "ghostie people" like the woman in room 217 at the Overlook.  He's also learned how to put these visions and his ethereal tormentors away in a mental lockbox, but at some point Dan just hits bottom.  Afterwards, he just wants to get away and make a new start -- after a bus ride into Frazier, New Hampshire, something inside of him realizes that this is where he needs to be.  He takes a job, and his boss ultimately gets him into AA, after which he starts work in a hospice center where he's nicknamed "Doctor Sleep" because of his ability to help the dying pass on while holding their hand.

As Dan is going through his bottoming out and taking steps to become human again, a girl named Abra is born, and as it turns out, she is also gifted with the shine.  With abilities much more powerful that Dan's ever were, she makes contact with him through her mind, and can even switch places via Spock-like mind melding.  But trouble is looming: a group of ancient beings known collectively as "the True Knot" also have powerful psychic abilities, and they actively seek out young people and children who like both Dan and Abra have "the shining," capture and torture them, and then use their psychic essence (which they call "steam")  to sustain themselves and keep themselves young -- psychic vampires, if you will.  The steam of one of their young victims, however, left some of the True Knot's members with a huge problem.  The group has also come across Abra and her potent abilities, which may be stronger than those of the True Knot's leader, Rose, who sends some of her "people" to pick her up, hoping that her "steam" will provide a much-needed solution to the group's problem as well as much-needed sustenance.  Abra reaches out to Dan for help, but he will need to revisit dark parts of his past in order to save her.

There's so much to like about this book which not only has a suspenseful horror story at its center, but also focuses in great detail about addiction. Personally, I enjoyed this facet of the book because it not only keeps in line with The Shining, but given Stephen King's own addiction background, he knows what he's talking about and it makes Dan's character much more credible.  But even if the addiction aspect fails to grab you,  the author has this incredible talent for incorporating the mundane into this story, disguising his dying-breed psychic vampire creatures as denizens of the world of  retired RV ramblers.  As he shifts to the story of the True Knot, he begins his chapter with how very annoying the traveling grannies and grandpas are on the roads in their big Winnebagos or other big vehicles,

"the RV People, elderly retirees and a few younger compatriots living their rootless lives on the turnpikes and blue highways, staying at campgrounds where they sit around in their Walmart lawnchairs and cook on their hibachis while they talk about investments and fishing tournaments and hotpot recipes and God knows what.  They're the ones who always stop at fleamarkets and yardsales, parking their damn dinosaurs nose-to-tail half on the shoulder and half on the road, so you have to slow to a crawl in order to creep by. They are the opposite of the motorcycle clubs you sometimes see on those same turnpikes and blue highways; the Mild Angels instead of the wild ones." 

Seriously, you know exactly who he's talking about because they're everywhere, and I have to admit that these few pages made me laugh out loud in recognition.  Try going down Highway 1 at Big Sur in California  behind a huge RV going 10 miles an hour listening to your otherwise calm husband bitch and moan,  and you'll know that he's described these people to a tee.  Mr. King also manages to toss in a nod to his son's NOS4A2, both in terms of a character mention and a bumper sticker on (where else?) the back of an RV.  Basically the only thing I really did NOT like about how he wrote this novel was that he throws in a major coincidence in the novel that I thought was a cop out (you'll know it when you see it) and made the whole set up kind of cheesy.  

One more thing.  In my very humble opinion, readers shouldn't judge this book as a true "sequel" to The Shining.  There are several reviewers who are saying they've been "let down" or have made other negative remarks while trying to compare the two.  My guess is that a) they haven't read The Shining in a while or are going off the Kubrick film as their source or that b) they're so fixated on the idea of this novel as a sequel that they're trying to draw parallels that aren't there.  There are large parts of the The Shining worked into this one, so it works that way, but Doctor Sleep is also a fun read on its own, though less intense and definitely less cerebral than the other.  My advice is to just sit back and read it, and enjoy it for what it is rather than complain about what it isn't.

*The Shining Girls, by Lauren Beukes

9780316216852
Mulholland, 2013
368 pp

hardcover

"It is a game. It's a destiny he's writing for them. Inevitably, they're waiting for him."

Here's another novel I'm throwing into the category of peachy beachy. The Shining Girls is a mix of time-travel scifi and serial-killer crime fiction,  but don't believe the blurb written by Matt Haig on the back cover that says it's a cross between The Time Traveler's Wife and The Silence of the Lambs,  Even if, in your wildest imagination, you could mix the two, you still don't come anywhere close to The Shining Girls.  Yes, there is time travel and yes there is a nasty serial killer out there, but this killer already knows who he's going to kill and visits his victims beforehand -- and even leaves them a little something to hold on to until he comes back.  Bought exclusively for its summer-read/beach potential, the book didn't let me down; it may not go on this year's list of favorite novels of the year, but it's still pretty good.

In this story, time runs along different chronologies.  The serial killer in this novel, Harper Curtis,  has his own time line -- he jumps in and out of time from the 1930s until 1993  -- and then there's the timeline of one his victims, Kirby, whom Harper mistakenly leaves alive after a brutal attack.  Third, there's the real, historical chronology, time and changing attitudes moving forward in history.   It may seem confusing at first, but it makes sense here. As the novel opens,  Harper Curtis is running from an angry mob in a Depression-era Hooverville.    He runs into a shack, takes a coat and leaves; in one of the pockets is a key.  He is drawn to a mysterious house in the city of Chicago, a jumping-off point into time; a place where his destiny, and those of a group of young women he doesn't even know, is literally written on the walls.  The women are the shining girls of the title, and he is compelled to track them through time and ultimately to snuff out their glowing potential in the world.   Harper  visits each one long before he kills them, leaving some token; years later when it's a woman's time to die, he leaves something else with each of them, something from one of the other victims.  One of them, Kirby Mazrachi, escapes from a savage attack and her destiny with death, but she is left with both physical and emotional scars. She becomes fixated on finding the person who did this to her, determined enough to the point where she becomes an intern on a newspaper that covered the case because of the access to the paper's archives.  She has caught on to the pattern of artifacts left behind, but trying to find someone who will listen to her is pretty much impossible, as is trying to pin down one specific person whom she knows is responsible for a number of other brutal attacks.

On a surface level I suppose you could read this book as another serial-killer novel with a time-travelling gimmick as a hook, but to me it goes well beyond that sort of simplified explanation.  Harper is figuratively plucking the wings off of  women, killing them just as they are starting to make a difference in their present;  cutting off their potential for making  a difference in  the futures of others.  Thinking about that, it seems to me that the author is not only talking about men who feel compelled to keep women down, but also about victims of violence -- where every life taken represents a loss of  future possibilities.  The crazy time loops in this novel help to point out that although time moves on, violence  against women has always been, is, and always will be part of our existence, with effects that ripple ever outward over time.

Overall, it's a good enough novel, one that kept me intrigued,  but there were parts that dragged and I had to read it twice to figure out the House. I'm also not big on graphic violence, which there is plenty of in this book; I get the point -- these were living people with personalities, lives, parents, loved ones -- but sometimes too much is just too much.  The ending, well, since I can't talk about that here, suffice it to say I think the action-packed  empowerment statement was a little too obvious,  but I know lots of people who'll disagree.  This book is getting some excellent reviews, but not everyone is loving it -- I'm somewhere in the middle of all of that.  I'll recommend it as a good summer read -- but read it slowly so you don't have to go through it a second time like I did.


ps/if you don't plan to read the book, there's already a series in the works based on the novel. 

fiction from South Africa

*The Antarktos Cycle: At the Mountains of Madness and Other Chilling Tales, ed. Robert M. Price

1568821468
Chaosium, Call of Cthulhu Fiction 6031
1999
572 pp

You'd never know it, based on the books that I normally read, but for years I've been a huge fan of HP Lovecraft, a pulp-fiction writer who died in 1936.  A number of his stories, which can be classified as both horror and fantasy, appeared in the old pulp journal Weird Tales and other pulp mags of the time.  It really wasn't until after his death that he became popular, as is the story of many a writer, and thanks to renewed interest, not only are his books being published and his stories anthologized, but a number of modern authors have acknowledged the influence of Lovecraft on their own modern works.  Robert M. Price and Chaosium publishing put together a series in which Lovecraft's works are featured, generally showcasing not only Lovecraft's writing, but authors who influenced HPL as well as stories by writers based on Lovecraft's influence.  The Antarktos Cycle is just one of these collections, and I've been collecting the first edition publications in this series for years.  This volume features stories set mainly in Antarctica, although there are two oddballs at the end. In The Antarktos Cycle, the main theme that runs throughout is that there are some things that humankind is not yet ready to know about -- and that maybe Antarctica is a place better left alone. 

The centerpiece of this book is Lovecraft's work "At the Mountains of Madness," but it begins with Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, (described earlier, so no need to reiterate here).  Poe is followed by Jules Verne and a sequel to Poe's work,  "The Sphinx of the Ice Fields" which picks up the story about ten years later.  Verne continues Poe's tradition of racism and very bad science, and adds a few incredulous explanations as to Pym's fate as well as the inhabitants of Tsalal.  Hmmm.


John Taine (pseudonym of Eric Temple Bell) follows next, with his "The Greatest Adventure," first published in 1929.  Taine's story begins with the delivery of a strange creature to wealthy scientist Dr. Eric Lane, whose very ambition in life was to "trace life to its secret source and lay bare its mystery."  The creature was purportedly still warm when the visitor,  Captain Anderson,  picked it up, and the Captain reveals that it came from  the South Polar Seas. Lane is intrigued, and eventually is talked into mounting an expedition there. Thus the adventure begins, and the scientists discover a secret that could potentially doom mankind if released. But really, I'm not sure why this one was included in the book -- it probably could have been easily left out and no one would have been the wiser.  This story is more suited to an anthology of "evolution run amok" kind of book.


And now, the main event, Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness."  Originally written in 1931, it was first published in 1936 in a pulp mag called Astounding Stories.  This is one of my favorite pieces of all of the Lovecraft lore, one which carries a theme reiterated throughout his stories: a warning to mankind to stay away from forces that could bring about the end of humanity.   Narrated by geologist William Dyer from good old Miskatonic U, the story is meant as a warning to the leaders of an upcoming expedition to the Antarctic against any further plans of exploration there.  And Dyer should know -- he was part of an earlier group of scientists who went to Antarctica, discovered a mountain range much higher than even the Himalayas.  The scientists were split into two groups -- those who first found the mountains by air and landed to explore, and the one headed up by Dyer, monitoring the group by radio. The first group tells of an amazing discovery -- and then radio silence sets in.  When Dyer goes to find out what might have happened, he comes across a set of ruins in the mountains, and what he discovers there is enough to drive his companion Danforth to madness.  They decide to keep their findings secret -- but the upcoming expedition compels Dyer to break his silence.

"The Tomb of the Old Ones," by Colin Wilson follows next. Matthew Willoughby, is swept up in his grandfather Daniel's belief in an ancient civilization existing under the Antarctic ice.  Sadly, technology hadn't advanced to the point where Daniel could offer proof, but that's not the case for Matthew.  Along with Trask, an inventor, he travels with an expedition to Antarctica and with the help of lasers, begins his search.  As in previous stories mentioned here, he comes away with the belief that there are some things better left alone.  This one is tough to get into, with a lot of extraneous stuff to sift through, but it's okay.  "The Tomb of the Old Ones" actually incorporates Lovecraft's work, including "The Mountains of Madness."

Arthur C. Clarke also has a mercifully short piece  here, "At the Mountains of Murkiness," which is a rather silly spoof of Lovecraft's story.  The editor mentions in the introduction to this story that Clarke was a fan of HPL, so it's all done in good fun.  This one absolutely could have been left out with no consequence.

The movie "The Thing" in its various incarnations (1951 directed by Howard Hawks; 1982 directed by John Carpenter),  came from the next short story, in this volume called "The Thing From Another World," written by John W. Campbell, Jr.  Its original title was "Who Goes There," and was written in 1938.  An expedition went to Antarctica to investigate the discovery of a second magnetic influence at the South Pole, and discovered an alien aircraft in the ice, evidently there for 20 million years.  Using thermite (an ice softener),  they try to get to the inside of the ship, but make a mess of things when the ship is destroyed.  The pilot, however, the group captures.  After it is thawed, it has the remarkable ability to take on the form and persona of anything or anyone.  The question is -- who is it now?  And how can it be stopped?  This one is good, a classic sci-fi/horror mix that will keep you reading.


The last two short stories are "The Brooding City," by John S. Glasby (which is set in Africa, so why it's here I don't know) and "The Dreaming City," by Roger Johnson, which also doesn't claim an Antarctic setting. Both are written in a very Lovecraftian tone, but I'm not sure why they ended up in this novel otherwise.

As is the case with any anthology of stories, you have to take the good with the not so good and that is the case here. There are some stories that could have been left out (and I haven't seen the updated version of this book so perhaps they were), but there are also some really good ones here.  My guess is that this book is most suited to Lovecraft fans, but I think also that there's enough of a mix that sci-fi/horror/fantasy fans could find something they like as well.  Modern horror readers that prefer blood, guts and gore probably won't find this one interesting...it's much more of a cerebral mix where the horror comes from inside the reader's head rather than being splashed about the pages.