“The Shining” is the story of Jack Torrance, who is employed as the caretaker of the gargantuan Overlook Hotel in Colorado one winter. With his wife and son they hoped to spend the winter season in peace and stitch up their fractured family.
The book was first released in 1977 then made into a movie starring Jack Nicholson, just the best choice to play the main character here. I haven’t seen the movie but in the book Mr. King goes to great pains to show Jack as a good man that is simply pushed into fantasy or hallucination. Because I received its sequel “Doctor Sleep” as a gift I needed to know how this horror all started.
For 416 pages, the tense and atmospheric story centers on the family saga. Their encounters with apparitions are very visual, leaving a picture in the mind that may be scary for some and totally ridicule for others. Not only it is a very dark story, with every turn of the page things get worse and worse in the haunted resort, it also borders on the fantastical with plenty of over the top scenes rife with violence and supernatural. For some, Mr. King may be a master entertainer no matter how ridiculous his tales are or how frightening they may be, well perhaps for them but this horror did not gel with me, I simply had trouble getting through this mess. The author gets so bogged down in tedious descriptions and exposition, the story is so overwritten I fast lost interest. Don’t forget, pay attention, not only does the narration rotates between the three members of the Torrance family it is also taken over by many other characters, some human and some not so human.
I didn’t think this book was scary at all despite the considerably large cast of ghosts and creepy critters and the great amount of violence at every page. This is a tedious read, it just drags on and on, so stubborn was I nevertheless made it to the end even if I was bored to death…..evidently not my type of book.
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