The Shining

• Throughout the last century, there were many authors who wrote haunted house stories. In 1977, Stephen King beat 'em all with a haunted hotel story. You see, this is not just *any* haunted hotel story; this is THE SHINING.

  THE SHINING is about several things, all tied up into one complex and multilayered whole. It is about a five-year-old boy who is impossibly mature and wise beyond his years, and who has a terrifying gift that seems as much a curse.
  
  It is about his father, a recovering alcoholic with demons in his soul and skeletons in his closet, who is battling both in order to keep his family financially afloat. It is about his wife, a doting mother who has braved the ups & downs of her husband's turbulence, who loves him, and who wants to trust him beyond his past mistakes but is just on this side of being unable to do so. It is about a classic, Art Deco hotel tucked deep within the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, whose name is respected but nevertheless has a mysteriously chequered past.
  
  It is about the ghosts that occupy this hotel, that wish to possess the above family but can only be seen by the boy and the head cook. It is about the head cook, an older black man who shares the same gift with the boy, and who develops a special friendship with him as a result. It is about a family who begin at their last chance for hope & unity, who end up fighting for their last chance at survival. This is THE SHINING.

  THE SHINING is a true gestalt entity: it is more than the sum of its parts. Stephen King masterly intertwines all of the above elements, plus some truly frightening imagery, to create a novel of several hundred compulsively-turning pages that add up to one of the greatest experiences that I've ever had as a reader of fiction.

  MOST RECOMMENDED; AGES 15 & UP

• Twenty-seven years after its publication, The Shining remains a visceral, gripping read that showcases Stephen King's unfathomable powers to hypnotize and terrify readers, a power King had in abundance in the early stages of his career. Coming on the heels of Carrie and 'Salem's Lot, The Shining truly established King as a modern master of horror and an unequaled purveyor of a literary mirror into pop culture.
  
  The plot should be quite familiar to one and all by this point. The Torrance family embarks on a months-long retreat into complete isolation when Jack Torrance signs on to be the winter custodian of the Overlook Hotel in Colorado. Jack takes some personal demons with him to a hotel chock-full of malevolent, ghostly spirits; he is a recovering alcoholic who, in the last couple of years, lost his job and broke his little boy's arm in a state of drunken fury. He thinks the months alone with his wife and son will allow him to find peace - and to finally finish the play he has been working on. His long-suffering wife has some misgivings, but the only person really clued into the dreadful possibilities is his son Danny.
  
  Danny has "the shine," a gift which allows him to see and know things he cannot possibly know; it is a powerful gift which the Overlook (which really is an entity unto itself) jealously desires for itself.
  
  As the days pass, the Overlook exerts more and more of an influence on Jack, exploiting his weaknesses, exacerbating his paranoia and persecution complex, and basically turning him into a murderous new tool at the hotel's disposal. Danny sees what is happening, although he cannot really understand much of it given his very young age. He can certainly understand the terror of the Overlook, however, as he sees images of the hotel's murderous past and very dark near future in a number of unsettling scenes interspersed throughout the novel.
  
  This is a harrowing tale of survival against incredible odds of a supernatural nature, and King brings every nuance of the story to vivid life, capturing perfectly the internalization and externalization of fear among exceedingly real, believable characters that the reader gets to know very well indeed. As has always been the case with Stephen King, it is his incomparable powers of characterization that make the supernatural elements of his story work so amazingly well. You can't help but be emotionally committed to these characters.