Doctor Sleep and the death of a legacy.

I’ve got to write about Doctor Sleep while I’m still able. It’s The Shining‘s successor, published 37 years after the huge commercial and critical victory of the original (you already know this). It’ll also prove to be one of the biggest creative slumps in King’s vast writing career (you may not know this, although a lukewarm critical reception might have given you an idea). Urgency on my part is required because I finished the book three days ago and it’s already starting trickle out of my consciousness like so much other literary cannon fodder.

I wanted to love this book. Not only because King’s huge hits in the form of 11/22/63 and Under the Dome have proven that his literary legacy won’t just remain in the booming sci-fi heyday of the late seventies, but also because Danny Torrance has so much potential to be a brilliant character. Doctor Sleep doesn’t give Danny the future he deserves, nor the legacy we want.

His pivotal role in The Shining was one of the few examples where a child can be an interesting protagonist. King imbues Danny with the perfect combination of inquisitiveness, courage and fallibility (he does, after all, crawl into that tunnel in the park), whilst his dependencies on his parents and his concerns that they’ll [DIVORCE] seem basic and simplistic. In short, he is a child whose extra-sensory abilities only serve to emphasise his infancy in the face of what he has to deal with.

As an adult, Danny has grown into the role that his father left behind when he died with the Overlook’s destruction. He is an alcoholic (EXPECTED) and drinks to forget the distant (OVERLOOK, GHOSTS) and recent past. The main difference is that whilst Jack’s demons are forced into suppression in trying to save his family, Danny has no dependants and his drinking follows a pattern of self-destruction that seems to have no lasting effect on any fleeting associations.

The well-meaning but awry Danny does develop said-dependants, but you’ll have to read the book if you want to know how that turns out. The thing I want to focus on is the ‘shining’, the ‘sixth sense’ that Doctor Sleep goes a way to try and explain. In attempting to do so, King seems to miss the point.

Danny can read minds, see ghosts and transmit telepathic signals to effect things in the physical world. We know he is not the only one, as Dick Hallorann (his ‘mentor’, of sorts) can do the same but to a lesser extent. Doctor Sleep introduces a world of ‘shiners’ (as I’ll call them) lessening Danny’s gift in this newly discovered psychic hierarchy. The thing is, the ‘shining’ was always the means through which we could properly observe the supernatural. It never really held much interest in itself, because its presence in The Shining only served to illuminate King’s terrifying occupants of the Overlook.

In the present, the ghastly guests of the Overlook are now irrelevant. When the occupant of Room 217 turns up, Danny is able to dismiss her staggering cadaver merely by accessing another facet of his ‘shine’. It is an astoundingly brief dismissal of a supernatural legacy that has resonated for nearly half a century. In a way, this is the biggest example of King’s efforts to shun his label as a horror writer.

More importantly, we were all set for Doctor Sleep to explore the dark future of Daniel Torrance. I wasn’t ready for it to be a compartmentalised, near clinical look at why Danny is the way he is. We’re denied the fragile, isolated man that Danny now is, and instead are given a groomed antihero whose skeletons are out of the closet by the second chapter. King is so keen to give cause and effect in this book that he almost forgets why Danny was so interesting in the first place.

Doctor Sleep is momentarily enjoyable, filled with the little flourishes that make King so important, but it’s ultimately not the legacy that Danny deserves. No, this was never intended to be a sequel to The Shining, but whatever way you look at it, it’s a weak addition to King’s corpus.

Dark Places

Are there dark places, or are the things that inhabit them dark? Can horror survive in and of itself where no human imprint continues to preside? Or is it humanity’s reaction to darkness that allows horror to exist?

This is a complicated topic, not least of all because we humans are inclined to find reasons to be wary of almost anything. My mother, for example, loathes to drive through a village five miles away from our own, simply because of its bad vibes. It’s a pleasant enough place, the only sign of any real element of danger is the extortionately expensive Londis set into a building made of Cotswold stone.

Fears of provincial backwaters and a strong whiff of inbreeding aside, the resonance of places like Long Marston (my ma’s location d’horreur) can rarely be backed up by real-life atrocities having left a psychic imprint on the landscape. This is proof, however, that we humans don’t need to spend a night in a creaky old house to feel our heart rate creeping up or the skin on the back of your neck start to crawl. Whether through inference, or some flashback to a time in my past, there is something intangibly off that lurks in Long Marston, because I feel it too.

This sort of location-based miasma isn’t just a Keevill family psychosis. Frank Delaney felt it at ancient Scottish battlegrounds in his A Walk In the Dark Ages, and almost everyone who walks into Auschwitz feels a deep depression about the place. Writers have taken these ideas and run with them. Stephen King’s Overlook Hotel in The Shining houses a multitude of horrors for the psychic-savant Danny, but it’s clear that the hotel’s dark past has affected previous occupants as well.

King, a master of detaching horror from direct human causality, gave us a ‘pet sematary’ that’s darkness exists of its own accord but only really manifests itself through humanity’s impact. In fact, books like Pet Sematary embody how horror is both separate, but intrinsically linked to the human condition; Louis Creed’s desperation to bring his child back is so essentially mortal but the native American burial ground which he uses to do so exists outside of his will. Created by humans, cursed to protect buried remains, it is desperately inhuman in the indiscriminate and detached suffering that it causes. The inability to find reason in it or attach a human psychosis to its motives makes it an external horror without an ambivalence of character.

Despite the ‘pet sematary’s’ malign motives, our reaction to the Creed family’s sufferings is dependent on our ability to feel empathy. Our horror at the twisted return of Gage comes as a result of our ability to engage with basic parental emotions. Our helplessness peaks because the rationale behind the ‘sematary’ is undisclosed and alien.

Our dependency as readers, and as humans, on seeking out horror is reliant on the author’s will to project all our fears and concerns into their protagonists. In that way, our subjectivity is bound to the impact that dark places make on us.

That Difficult Second Post

I’ve been re-reading The Shining as a precursor to getting into Doctor Sleep, a Christmas present from unwitting relations. I’m sure they’re totally oblivious as to what they’ve just done i.e. given me a shed more fodder for this wonderful enterprise.

I find it completely incomprehensible how Stephen King published The Stand only a year after The Shining. The former, a sprawling post-apocalyptic fantasy set in a shadowy form of America, deals with proto-religious ideas, alternative realities and a huge array of characters. As with most King novels, it’s lazily hoisted with the horror tag, yet it rarely returns the favours you’d expect from such a label. Its most fear-inducing moments come tied into the fates of its characters. You buy into King’s protagonists and his depth for projecting emotion, you sense, as they do, the creeping, approaching horror, and you empathise with their preconditioned fate.

The Shining, on the other hand, gives horror an entity of its own. This is helped, in part, by the minute cast of players (the majority of the book is just Jack Torrance, his wife Wendy and son, Danny). Of course you empathise with their plight, with Jack’s drinking, his own preconceived fate to become like his own abusive father, Wendy’s own insecurities based around her mother complex and Danny’s over-active ‘shining’ ability forcing him to grow old beyond his years. The family, forced to take the job as winter caretakers at The Overlook due to money constraints, have no alternative but to accept a role that would weigh onerously upon the rationality of even the most balanced of minds.

Outside of this bubbling cauldron of insecurities and sociopathy, there’s an even bigger, more pervading presence; the Overlook itself.

It’s this hotel, a beautiful, malicious place that stands in isolation, both in the novel, and as a character outside of the Torrances’s consciousness. Existing outside of the insecurities and personal nightmares of Jack, Wendy and Danny themselves, the hotel, and the horrors within, are timeless and preserved in frozen isolation against the Colorado mountains.

This is why The Shining remains one of King’s only pure renditions of horror. His detailed investment in characters and their progression would almost always take precedence over the entity of fear in subsequent novels – perhaps explaining why horror ‘classic’ IT‘s Pennywise is one of the most disappointing antagonists in practically all of fiction, whilst the book as a whole is still excellent.

The Overlook is King’s imagination at its most sanguine. The decadence and sexuality of its ghosts, the dark presence in the playground, Room 217’s submerged occupant and it’s superb, seemingly inescapable, isolation are all parts of a standalone, dark presence. Its collision with the Torrances’s own particular bundle of foibles is what makes The Shining so enduring terrifying.