mewsings in April 2025

An impulsive re-read of King’s third published novel, from 1977, which I’m going to follow soon with his more recent sequel, Doctor Sleep. (Which feels like it was published only a couple of years ago, but I see it came out in 2013, and King has no doubt written a score of novels since then.)

Recovering alcoholic and would-be writer Jack Torrance, recently fired from a teaching post after assaulting a pupil who’d slashed his tyres, gets a job (thanks to a much wealthier ex-drinking buddy) as winter caretaker at the remote Overlook Hotel. Perched high in the Colorado mountains and mostly unreachable from late October to April, the Overlook has a murky past, as one of the locals at the nearest town, Sidewinder (forty miles away), muses at one point:

“Murder had been done up there. A bunch of hoods had run the place for a while, and cut-throat businessman had run it for a while, too. And things had been done up at the Overlook that never made the papers, because money had a way of talking.”

To top it all, a previous winter caretaker, Delbert Grady, had slaughtered his wife, two daughters, and then himself. All in all, it’s a nasty brew of bad psychic residue. But, desperate for a job and a chance to make it as a writer, Jack sees it as the perfect opportunity to finish a play he’s working on. Plus, he’ll be completely out of reach of alcohol, so that temptation will be removed. The trouble is, the Overlook is as haunted as Hell itself, and it’s hungry for more souls—most hungry of all for Jack’s five-year-old son Danny, who has a strong telepathic ability, “the shine”.

As a haunted house novel, it builds interestingly on Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House (and perhaps the only reason King didn’t use an epigraph from that novel is he’d already used it for Salem’s Lot). Both King’s and Jackson’s books are about a haunted place whose haunter isn’t so much an individual spook, as a sort of evil consciousness all of its own, a consciousness you can never be sure was ever human, but which certainly wants to collect human souls. In both, there’s a sensitive character particularly vulnerable to both the hauntings and the haunted place’s invitation to be part of it.

King adds a few turns of the screw to Jackson’s idea. First of all, the sensitive character here is a child—and though in some ways this makes Danny more vulnerable to the Overlook than Eleanor is to Hill House, in others it makes him more resilient, as he doesn’t have her sense of hopelessness. Jack, on the other hand, is a mess of weak points for the Overlook to needle at: he has a temper, is haunted by his own father’s alcoholism and violent rages, and is tottering on the edge of a host of failures:

“He had failed as a teacher, a writer, a husband, and a father. He had even failed as a drunk.”

Perhaps the most intriguing difference to Jackson’s haunted house is that the Overlook, of course, is a hotel. And that doesn’t just mean every room holds a potential spook. The luxurious and remote Overlook seems to sum up the dark, oppressive threat of excess wealth and leisure. There’s something inherently sinister, almost evil, about the idle rich—and the Overlook is where the rich go to idle. Its most characteristic haunting is a 1940s-era party, though I don’t think we’re ever told exactly what evil occurred at that event—it’s as though the very air of wealth, idleness, and power are enough. At one point, the hotel’s evil is explicitly likened to money:

“Little by little a force had accrued, as secret and silent as interest in a bank account.”

And its leverage over Jack is in good part down to his poverty—he has no choice but to stick to this job, however supernaturally dangerous it starts to seem, as it’s that or the very real dangers of divorce, joblessness, and a return to alcoholism.

For me, one of the best aspects of the novel that the film (which I’m much more familiar with) all but leaves out, is Jack’s researches into the Overlook’s history. In the basement, piled high with boxes of receipts, old newspapers, and the occasional scrap of juicy history, he finds a scrapbook in which someone has pasted a record of all the dark goings-on at the hotel—those that made it to the papers, anyway. It leads Jack to want to write about the hotel’s history (though this may be just the hotel itself trying to charm him into staying) and he at one point muses that the Overlook “forms an index of the whole post-World War II American character”, rife as it is with the evils of excess riches, misused power and organised crime.

Perhaps disappointingly, perhaps wisely, King doesn’t trace the Overlook’s evil back to a definite origin. (It’s the film that has it being built on a Native American burial ground.) The feel is, rather, that the accumulation of human evils somehow coalesced into something new and far worse—or perhaps attracted some non-human supernatural evil that could take advantage of it all, like the investment banker to all those little deposits of lesser evil. In a way, this aspect of King’s work echoes David Lynch, another American artist who has a real sense of evil, the way it can latch onto and exaggerate human evil, elevating it to a supernatural dimension.

As I’ve said before (in my re-read of IT), I think King’s at his most effective when his supernatural darkness needs human beings to work through—when he unleashes the pure supernatural he can go over the top for my tastes, into realms that are no longer scary. In this book, I think he does that with the topiary animals, who I just can’t find scary. (Perhaps because I keep imagining an attempt at what I think is a hedge squirrel in a road not too far from me, which convinces me that no hedge animal could look as detailed, or expressive, as King makes his.) The other thing about the hedge animals is it opens up the question of, if the Overlook can animate these things, why doesn’t it animate other things inside the hotel itself and simply kill the Torrances that way? Strangle them all with fire-hoses, for instance, or bash their heads in with doors? It’s much better when it needs Jack to do its work for it, and Jack’s slow descent into paranoia and self-justification in the need to murder his family is what makes The Shining so chilling.

King has spoken about how it was only sometime after writing The Shining that he admitted to himself he was an alcoholic, and that some of his darker thoughts went into Jack. But I think a fuller portrait of the author comes through in Jack’s relationship with Danny. As much as King might have been a less exaggerated Jack, inside he’s surely a Danny: the sensitive, intelligent kid trying to deal with an overwhelmingly difficult and dangerous world. (As Dick Hallorann says: “The world’s a hard place, Danny. It don’t care. It don’t hate you and me, but it don’t love us, either. Terrible things happen in the world, and they’re things no one can explain.”)

King famously dislikes Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of the novel, but for me it’s hard not to see and hear Jack Torrance as Jack Nicholas. Kubrick drops some of King’s ideas (and as one of these is the hedge animals, that can’t be all bad), swaps King’s roque mallet for an axe (surely a more sturdy tool, even if the roque mallet comes with associations of idle luxury while the axe is a workman’s tool), and best of all adds those images that linger in the mind: the blood gushing from the lift doors, the spooky not-twins-who-look-like-twins, that 70’s carpet pattern. In a way, these images, though they’re not in King’s novel, still fit the spirit of King’s writing, as they’re like the catchphrases and (bracketed thoughts the characters are trying not to think) he peppers his text with. Plus, Kubrick’s film has that 70’s bleakness in its high-contrast film stock, an added element to any supernatural film.

The last book in Jane Gaskell’s Atlan Saga was published in 1977, either prompted by or coinciding with a reissue of the previous novels that same year. Part of what led to my reading this last book in this series (which, for me, has been increasingly discouraging, and often powered wholly by my difficulty in abandoning something I’ve started), was the thought that, after a gap of a few years, Gaskell might have returned to Atlan with a fresh approach—something that was backed up by knowing this book was narrated not by Cija, but her daughter, Seka. And, early on, Seka (after reading her mother’s capacious but seemingly unloseable diary) in effect reviews the previous novels, calling Cija “a natural observer of life unless forced to be a protagonist, and a coward too”—so, passive, which I’d agree with, though I don’t think of her as cowardly—and concluding that “my cautious, sensible mother was an extremely silly lady”. I was hopeful, then, that Seka might be different.

Aside from the change in narrator (who, I have to say, writes exactly like Cija, so not much change there), there were a few notable differences. Gaskell allows herself more sexually explicit language, though most of it occurs in the first few pages, as though she soon tired of the novelty. Also, she has at last discovered names: we get Soursere, Quar, Ilxtrith, and Quantumex. But not all the time. One key character is referred to as “Beautiful” before being renamed “the Saint”.

But soon enough, it was clear not much had changed. For a start, Seka is a child and tied to her mother—so when Cija gets kidnapped, as she inevitably does (several times), Seka gets kidnapped with her. What’s more, Seka lost her voice in a previous book, so can’t play much of an active role in terms of asking questions, telling people things, etc. She doesn’t even show much initiative in terms of making herself known without the use of her voice. By the time Cija and Seka found themselves part of the Dragon General Zerd’s army train, heading north for another conquest, I began to feel that I might as well be re-reading the first novel. I have to admit I started skim-reading pretty early on, and only finished this novel because I looked up some reviews and criticism and found a few people saying this was the best book of the series (it may be, I had ceased to be able to tell) and that it had a visionary ending.

It did have a more fantastic ending, with Cija, Seka & co. being taken, at last, to Ancient Atlan, which seems to resemble, much more, the faerie-like strangeness of Gaskell’s first novel, the genuinely unique Strange Evil. But we’re only there for a short space, not long enough for things to develop, and for a lot of it the Atlantean Juzd is telling Cija what the deeper spiritual meaning of all her adventures has been. At this point, I tried breaking out of skim-reading mode, but whenever I did, I just couldn’t bring myself to read more than a few sentences. I’d ceased to care about any of the characters, let alone the supposed meaning of their adventures, and was just reading to see how things ended.

But, every so often, Gaskell would throw in an idea you just couldn’t find anywhere else. For instance, as the characters are passing through a funeral chamber, they see a snake, and one of the mourners says that this is the dead man’s “self-regard”, which we all have, in serpent form, wrapped around the base of our spine. It was a moment where the strangeness of this world Gaskell had created seemed to come alive, but it was never mentioned again, and the possibility of a world being created in which such a belief fitted was lost.

Throughout the series, there’s never been an overall sense of direction. Each novel is just a loose bag of episodes, each episode a loose bag of events. There are moments of interest, occasional striking ideas, but just too much drudgery overall, and certainly no sense of a mythic underlying structure, or a coherently created world.

Another thing that has driven my reading of the series has been looking at how it was received in its day, as prior to this instalment the series was coming out in the days before otherworld fantasy was a commercial genre, or even much of an uncommercial one. The initial books were, then, reviewed in the mainstream press (particularly as Gaskell was also writing non-fantasy books at the same time). But with Some Summer Lands, that’s no longer the case. Fantasy was—had just become—a commercial genre, and so perhaps was now considered beneath the dignity of mainstream reviewers. I’ve only been able to find one newspaper review. Michael Unger, writing in the Liverpool Daily Post (3 September 1977), said:

“Miss Gaskell’s writings have been compared with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, so that, plus the fact that she was once a child prodigy with her first book written when she was 14, led me to believe that she must be a formidable writer. Sadly, therefore, I have to report that the book was hugely disappointing. The only connection between Miss Gaskell and Tolkien is that both invented their own fantasy world. Miss Gaskell’s was introduced to us in her Atlantis trilogy, and her latest offering is again set in this imaginary continent. But it is really escapist writing of a style similar to many a science fiction writer.”

Ultimately, the view I most chime with seems to be John Grant’s, from the St James Guide to Fantasy Writers (1996). After calling Some Summer Lands “this fascinatingly bad book”, he goes on to say “Yet there are also sections in which Gaskell seems at last to have become interested in her Atlantean epic” — which makes me realise how one of the things I’ve felt throughout is to wonder why Gaskell was writing this, when she didn’t seem interested in it, except at brief moments.

Oddly, I feel as though I could still read something by Gaskell—her vampire novel, Shiny Narrow Grin, sounds interesting. But, having been aware of the series since my epic-fantasy-reading days began in the 80s, I have to admit it’s just so unlike I expected it to be. I was at least hoping to encounter something with the originality of pre-genre fantasy, combined with the growing air of imaginative and individual freedoms created by the 1960s social revolutions; but the result has been, if anything, more the dreariness of the kitchen sink 60s than the wild imagination of the psychedelic 60s, and dreariness is not what I come to fantasy for.