Stephen King, page 1 of 6

First published in 2013, Doctor Sleep is the long-gestated sequel to The Shining (coming out 36 years after the original), though not one King at first intended to write. Fans would occasionally ask him what happened to young Danny after the events at the Overlook, and the result is a quite different kind of tale than the haunted-hellhouse narrative of The Shining.

Although we get a few glimpses of young Danny’s life growing up, for the bulk of Doctor Sleep Dan (as he’s now known) is a 40 year old man. He’s had a lot to deal with, ghosts of the past both metaphorical and actual (gloopy old dead lady Mrs Massey pops up in the bathroom, even though there’s no longer an Overlook Hotel for her to haunt), as well a paternally-inherited weakness towards both drink and rage, which all leads to a descent into alcoholism. After a pretty unpleasant hitting-the-bottom moment, which involves stealing first from an addicted single mother then a homeless man, Dan arrives in the town of Frazier, joins Alcoholics Anonymous, and gets a job as an orderly at a hospice, where his uncanny ability to soothe the passage of the dying earns him the nickname “Doctor Sleep” (neatly tying in with his childhood nickname of “doc”).

Meanwhile, a group of shining-gifted oldsters who call themselves the True Knot have been ranging the United States in their RVs, extending their lives by consuming what they call “steam”—the psychic energy given off when someone, particularly someone with the shining, dies, and which is, unfortunately for their victims, made all the more powerful when combined with suffering. And, of course, “steam”, like the shining, is at its richest in children. It’s not Dan the True Knot come for (his shining abilities are a little faded from their childhood peak), it’s a psychically-powerful young girl called Abra Stone, who at first senses what the True Knot are doing when she mentally connects with one of their victims. She reaches out to Dan for help, first psychically, then physically, to put an end to the True Knot’s vampirism for good.

It was wanting to revisit King’s world of psychic powers than led to me re-reading The Shining, then reading Doctor Sleep. There’s a whole tangle of themes and ideas that recur in his depiction of these powers. There’s the association with children, for a start, in particular intelligent and sensitive children, as with super-smart Luke Ellis in what’s probably my favourite King novel, The Institute. Alongside that, there’s parental abuse, as in Carrie and The Shining, which extends to abuse by other forms of authority, such as in The Institute, Later (where the abusive figure is both an ex-step-parent and a police officer), and Firestarter (where it’s the government). All these ingredients—the abuse of a sensitive child—combine to create Carrie’s psychic rage, but Dan’s rage in this book, though rooted in his father’s (which comes from his own rageful father) is presented here as being as much inherited as down to circumstances. (Abra, though she has perfectly loving parents, has also inherited a little of that rage, and it’s part of what drives her power, in the moments when she really needs it.) Psychic powers, for King, encompass a whole range of abilities, not just telepathy and telekinesis, but premonition and the ability to see dead people—all of which, I suppose, can be divided into two basic categories: the sensitive (telepathy, premonition, seeing dead people) and the rageful (telekinesis, pyrokinesis). The members of the True Knot in Doctor Sleep tend to have a single individual talent, such as locating people, persuasion, or passing unnoticed.

Doctor Sleep is also King’s Alcoholics Anonymous novel. Dan is a recovering alcoholic, but the True Knot can be seen addicts too, it’s just they’re of the high-functioning type where their addiction doesn’t screw up their own lives (it just ends the lives of others). Their psychic gifts have led to the True Knot believing they’re special, “the chosen ones”—that, in fact, they are the only true human beings and the rest of us, including their child victims, are just “rubes” for whom they have no feelings at all. (This is the path Dan could have taken at his low point, the dehumanising effect of addiction.) The True Knot are vampires in all but not having the traditional aversions (daylight, mirrors, crosses), and their leader, Rose the Hat (they all have rather silly names), even has, in her feeding state, a single tusk-like tooth that recalls the Nosferatu-like Barlow from Salem’s Lot. (And King mentions that one of their favoured camping grounds is near the town of Jerusalem’s Lot.)

This is, I think, not so much a horror novel, certainly not like the The Shining—even though King, at the time, said this was going to be a return to the scares of yore. (I may, of course, be inured to the more horrific elements!) It’s more a supernatural thriller or urban fantasy, with its super-powered goodies and baddies doing battle in modern-day America. The main thing that makes it feel different to The Shining, for me, is it lacks the former novel’s sense of a non-human supernatural evil driving merely fallible humans to full-on evil. The True Knot certainly tick the box of being evil, but only ever a human evil, driven by greed and fear—recognisable emotions, taken to destructive extremes—rather than that cosmic coldness that seems to be driving the sentience behind the Overlook. Generally, King makes the members of the True Knot seem ordinary, even rather dull personalities (apart from Rose the Hat), meaning the impression they give is mostly of a community of self-centred, slightly grouchy, gossipy, well-off old folks living a peripatetic life, just a little bit cut off from the rest of the world, as old folks can be. They never make much of an impact as characters—I mostly couldn’t tell one from the other (again, apart from Rose the Hat, and even then I didn’t get the sense of her as a rounded human being).

What I said about The Shining and IT—that King is at his best when presenting human evil rather than overblown supernatural evil—seems to need modification here. Thinking about it, for me he can do purely human nastiness (the staff of The Institute, who are are so casually, thoughtlessly evil it’s genuinely chilling, and their only motivation is that it’s just their job; another good example is Annie Wilkes in Misery), but when he tries to make them out-and-out evil, it can come across as a bit forced and unconvincing (as in the villain in Mr Mercedes, with his rather tired set of arguments for the meaninglessness of it all). On the supernatural side, I prefer King when he has his supernatural having to work through human characters by playing on their weaknesses (something Ramsey Campbell does so well). When he lets the supernatural loose on its own terms, it all gets a bit overblown for me. Here, the True Knot don’t have a philosophy, just an unexamined sense of their own superiority. They’re a bit lacklustre as antagonists, in terms of character; but the threat they represent in the book is good—it really builds towards a tense finale.

The focus of Doctor Sleep is, on the one hand, Dan’s redemption from his lowest-of-the-low years, and on the other, another of King’s depictions of a psychically-gifted child in Abra Stone, only in this case an un-abused one. This is, far more than The Shining, a novel that’s about those psychic gifts—which, in King’s hands, really come across as being a metaphor for the individuality, humanity, and wonder of all children, and the way the world can all too easily crush those qualities. That, to me, is at the root of King’s narratives of psychic kids—basically, they’re just kids.

Doctor Sleep was adapted in 2019 by Mike Flanagan (who had by that point already adapted King’s novel Gerald’s Game, and would go on to create the Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House and the very King-like Midnight Mass, among others). Although it starts out as a fairly faithful adaptation, Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep is a sequel to Kubrick’s The Shining rather than King’s novel, meaning it gets to end in a showdown at the Overlook Hotel, which King (having blown it up in his novel) couldn’t do. It also has actors looking as much like Shelly Duvall and Jack Nicholson as possible, playing Dan’s mother and (ghostly) father, which tends to break you out of the story, as you find yourself thinking, “Hey that looks-like-but-also-doesn’t-look-like so and so”—but at least Flanagan didn’t attempt the sort of digital recreation of the original actors as seen in, say, Alien: Romulus. There are other little references to Kubrick’s film, such as Abra’s home being number 1980 (the year of Kubrick’s Shining), and Dan (played by Ewan McGregor) being interviewed in an office that looks exactly like the room where Jack was interviewed at the start of Kubrick’s film. Flanagan is an excellent horror director (this is far more of a horror film than King’s novel), with a fine cast, so it’s worth a watch, whether you’ve read the novel or not.

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.

I decided to read King’s 2014 novel Revival after hearing it recommended, on two separate occasions, by Ramsey Campbell and Guillermo del Toro — and was delighted to find it was dedicated to a host of classic horror writers from Mary Shelley onwards, with a particular emphasis on Arthur Machen for The Great God Pan (from which it borrows one of its final scenes).

The story starts with its narrator, Jamie Morton, at the age of six, meeting the new pastor for his town, Charles Jacobs. Jacobs is surprisingly young for a pastor, and comes with a pretty wife (who all the local boys immediately fall in love with) and a very young son. His hobby is electricity, and when Jamie comes to him, desperate for help with his brother Con’s loss of voice after an accident, Jacobs cures the boy with a hastily-made electrical device that stimulates his paralysed nerves back into activity. But when Jacobs’s wife and son are killed in a car accident, the young pastor delivers a bitter, despairing sermon about how religion is nothing but “the theological equivalent of a quick-buck insurance scam”, and leaves town.

Jamie grows up, becomes a gigging, getting-by musician, develops a drug habit, and is on the verge of a nosedive into junkiedom when he meets Jacobs once more. No longer a pastor, Jacobs has nevertheless not lost his faith in electricity (“If you want truth, a power greater than yourselves, look to the lightning” as he said in his infamous final “Terrible Sermon”), and is now making a living on the carnie circuit (he mentions playing in Joyland) as a purveyor of “Portraits in Lightning”, a sort of animated melding of photograph and fantasy. But his main passion is what he calls “the secret electricity”, something which bears little relation to the thing that powers lightbulbs, being infinitely more powerful, and capable of curing virtually any illness. He cures Jamie of his drug addiction, briefly inducing a few odd side-effects, and the two part.

When Jacobs comes into Jamie’s life again, he’s in the religion game once more. Jacobs is now a revivalist preacher and faith-healer, using his electrical touch to make the lame walk and the blind see. But Jamie is unconvinced — not by the healing, which he knows to be genuine, but the faith. He knows Jacobs is only using the pose of religion to go deeper still in his pursuit of the “secret electricity” — something Jamie’s friend Bree tells him was called potestas magnum universum by the alchemists and mages of the past: “the force that powers the universe”.

The trouble is, this “force” isn’t a passive thing like the electricity we know. People cured by Jacobs’s electrical touch don’t relapse, but a significant number go on to commit irrational crimes, including the murder of loved ones, or taking their own lives. It’s as if being touched by the power of the “secret electricity” lets something other get hold of them, something malignant and perhaps insane, but certainly inhuman — something Jacobs is steadily moving closer to encountering in the raw.

The dedication to Machen, an epigraph from Lovecraft, and the appearance in the story of De Vermis Mysteriis (invented by Robert Bloch, Latinised by Lovecraft), imply that, here, King is having a go at cosmic horror. And it’s evident the narrative is heading towards some cosmic-level revelation as we move ever closer to discovering the nature of the “secret electricity” that powers our universe.

But is what we get cosmic horror? Reading this book got me thinking about whether King — and this is no criticism of him as a writer or storyteller — is capable of what I’d call cosmic horror. And this is true, I’d say, of many writers, even some of the best horror writers. Lovecraft can do cosmic horror through conjuring the sheer indifference to humanity of his vast and alien, god-like entities. Ramsey Campbell, I think, does it in the way his cosmic entities, though apparently interested in individual humans — enough to prey on them, anyway — ultimately only want to absorb them into their inhumanity. Alan Moore does it in Providence, in the way deeply traumatic transformations are doled out to his characters so casually, irrevocably shattering their humanity, and then doing the same to the world as we know it. But conjuring the cold bleakness, and the crushing inhumanity of the authentically cosmic is a rare — and perhaps not enviable — talent. Clive Barker, for instance, can do perverse hells and transformed beings who follow weird philosophies, but I’d say he’s too invested in the fleshiness of the human experience to conjure something so resolutely anti-human as the cosmic. And King, also, has too much belief in the meaning of human life to go truly, bleakly cosmic.

Trying not to get too spoilery, here, Revival moves towards a revelation of what, it seems, is behind our world, and the vision King paints is of a Boschian Hell: insane, obscene, monstrous and grotesque, but, I’d say, not cosmic. It’s not cosmic because it has a place for human beings. Even though it’s horrific, it misses what for me is the truly cosmic note, the cold, bleak indifference to humanity. Just as space doesn’t care you can’t breathe in its vacuum, the cosmic doesn’t care what happens to you when it casually crushes you — or, failing to crush you, leaves you insane and traumatised. The cosmic doesn’t hate, it just doesn’t care.

But the devils of Bosch’s Hell — and the equivalent in Revival’s ultimate revelation — do care. They care enough to be really, really horrible to human beings, so I’m not saying King paints a nice picture; but humans have a place in it, so it’s not cosmic. (Not that I’m saying cosmic horror is the best or only sort of horror, it’s just one I like, and like to see done well.)

Another aspect of the cosmic is it’s horrific at a philosophical level. Its revelations have deep implications, and it is these that really deliver the blow. And the thing is, King’s revelation doesn’t even make much sense. That may be the point — King may be saying, here, that the ultimate order behind the universe is insane — but the slow build-up, with its laying out of clues as to what the “secret electricity” seems to be, imply there is an order. In a Lovecraftian tale, the final revelation of cosmic horror would bring those clues together in a way that made perfect, but terrible, sense. I don’t think that happens here.

King a few times has his narrator and Jacobs debate the ethics of what Jacobs is doing with his quest for the truth behind the “secret electricity”, but as with The Institute, while both sides raise valid points, ultimately King backs away from laying out a full, convincing argument. His narrator instinctively adopts an emotional response before Jacob’s self-dehumanising but logically-stated obsession, and that’s okay, but I’d have liked the narrator’s response to be equally convincing.

Still, it was an enjoyable read. King is a great storyteller, and at no point was I disappointed in Revival. It’s just that, once I’d finished it, I couldn’t think of much that was particularly memorable about it, either.