25 January 2025
Stephen King’s The Shining
It’s been an undercurrent to my entire life, this book. I was perhaps just 11 or 12 when I first picked it up and devoured it—and remembered certain scenes with such vivid clarity: the wasp nest, the topiaries, the clock. There was something in Danny, too, that I recognized in myself, something a little bit off, a little bit precocious, an ability to see through adults’ bullshit. While I wouldn’t call what was within me a “shining,” per se, it was similar, and because of this, I envied Danny his superpower. While what I experienced was some ostracizing anomaly, what Danny experienced was a sort of magic.
Then, quite problematically, while in college in my late teens, I watched Stanley Kubrick’s movie and that superseded my own memory of the book. The wasp, the topiary, the clock, all were replaced by Shelley Duvall’s haunting face, a bloody tide, twins in blue-checkered dresses, and a hedge maze. Kubrick’s movie ruined my book.
It’s a dangerous thing, I think, to watch Kubrick’s movie and believe that it is somehow representative of Stephen King’s book. While both center upon a small family in a haunted hotel in the Rockies, that is where the similarities end. Kubrick’s movie turns the story into a pile of tropes and fantastical images, leaving the book’s complexities by the wayside.
It was the best decision I made, this winter, to re-read the original. Somewhere deep beneath the surface, somewhere way back in my latent consciousness, I could recollect that there was a reason I loved the book. There was a reason that this book inspired an interest in psychological thrillers, horror, and the gothic, that has lasted me thirty years—the movie could not explain it.
Two tropes Kubrick’s movie fosters that were never apparent in the book were that of the damsel in distress and the expendable black character. Throughout the movie, and so often depicted on the movie posters and pictures, we have this image of Shelley Duvall’s character, Winifred or Wendy, as a hapless, helpless, brainless woman. To me, in the movie, Wendy simps, following Jack around, begging for his approval. She seems helpless without Jack. Weak and frail and altogether pitiful. In the book, however, Wendy’s character is vast and deep and profound. King dedicates pages on end to Wendy’s concern over Danny’s precociousness and social differences. She worries about Jack’s alcoholism and teeters on the edge of staying with him and leaving him—often forcefully asserting her agency in their relationship. She holds her ground when Jack physically threatens Danny’s safety. She often places herself in harm’s way to protect both Jack and Danny. Her backstory, with her own demanding and judgmental mother and absent father, influences her behaviors. She is well-educated and well-rounded. Frankly, in the book, Wendy is the ideal mother figure—perhaps still a trope in some ways, but at least complex. And ultimately, she can be attributed with her own critical role in hers, Dick’s, and Danny’s salvation. King’s representation of woman in his book is far more satisfying than Kubrick’s, which lends one to contemplate the possibility of Kubrick’s misogyny.
Kubrick’s trope of the expendable black character also raised my eyebrows. I’ll be completely honest with you (spoiler alert): I’d forgotten that Dick Halloran not only survives in the book, but he is single-handedly responsible for saving Wendy and Danny’s lives and remains close with them well beyond the tragedy’s conclusion. On the other hand, Kubrick kills Halloran, leaning into the trop that the black guy dies first (while in service to the white main characters). If Kubrick’s portrayal of Wendy makes a person wonder about his misogyny, his treatment of Halloran’s character makes one wonder about his racial prejudices, too. Why did he kill off Halloran? Some critics say it was “to increase tension” during the cinematic spectacle—and perhaps because they did not have the CGI to develop the topiary animals, this could be true. Still, it leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth. Now, don’t get me wrong, many readers claim that King’s story is racist, that it overuses the N-word, and places a black man in the tropey role of servant-without-a-family. I’d press back against this assertion. Halloran’s backstory, despite being a supporting character, is very well developed. His wants and needs are clear. When the N-word is used in King’s book, it is used by characters otherwise presumed to be morally despicable: the former undertaker, Grady, who murdered his family, and the Overlook Hotel itself (which I’d argue is its own character in the book—with wants, needs, motives, and a distinct voice). That is to say, in the book, the only characters who use the N-word or treat Halloran as expendable are the villains. One could surmise that King was therefore pointing to racism as immoral. In this, the book and the movie are not the same.
More than anything, one absolutely must comprehend that a director and screenwriter cannot do justice in a two-hour movie to what is contained in a 600+ page book. The characters are more rounded, the scenes/imagery more vivid, the setting more detailed, the plot more complex, and I could go on and on. Bottom line: Kubrick’s movie was good; however, Kubrick’s movie is not a fair representation of Stephen King’s book—which I’d argue is a literary masterpiece.
To be fair, I hesitate to think of Stephen King’s book as a literary masterpiece. It’s popular fiction, no? Genre fiction, even, some would say, while sneering down the bridge of their nose. But I think yes and no. Yes, it is popular. Yes, a person could place the book into the genre of horror or psychological thriller. But also, no. It’s not just this. It’s also literary fiction specifically because of the depth into which King dives with each characters’ interiorities and conflicts.
During this reading, I spent more time noticing how King accomplishes his character development—the ways in which he will seat himself squarely in someone’s mind so that a current event unfolding will cause that character to recollect an event from the past that inspires their perspective/worldview. Sometimes King’s interiority within one character or another will last an entire chapter (for example, he may spend an entire chapter inside Danny’s head, then the next chapter in Wendy’s, the next in Jack’s). Or, sometimes King will “head-hop,” as we call it, within chapters. We might have two or three pages of Jack’s thoughts, and Jack will look at Danny, and then suddenly we have Danny’s thoughts. Often, when novice writers head-hop like this, it can be disorienting, and I noticed there were moments when King head-hopped this way that I was jarred out of the story for a moment. So even the King doesn’t always do it as smoothly as to not be noticeable. Still, I love this third person omniscience, because it permits us to be within every character, to be one with each character, and thus to connect on all levels with each. It’s something you could never accomplish with a movie. Quite masterful.
You might’ve thought this would be all praise, but you’d be wrong. There is one thing King does perpetually throughout this book that bothers me: he uses parentheses and italics to portray some interior thoughts, and I can’t figure out why. Sometimes these asides are clearly the character’s thoughts, as with Wendy. But sometimes, with Jack and Danny, I can’t tell whether it’s the Overlook inserting its ideas into Jack’s mind or Tony inserting ideas into Danny’s mind—or if in both cases it’s just Jack’s and Danny’s thoughts. It’s a bit confusing. Is something imposing itself upon their thoughts each time? Maybe that’s the key right there. In any case, it felt as though King was not always consistent with his intention with this element, where sometimes the thought wouldn’t be italicized, sometimes it would be interior, sometimes exterior, and because of these inconsistencies it was difficult to keep track. My brain often just glossed over these bits when I did not understand. And with King, perhaps a reader will overlook something like this because they know they must trust the author to take them wherever they need to go. But I doubt I could get away with it myself…nobody trusts me and my writing yet. So I’ll have to be more consistent and intentional with it.
I’m so grateful that I took the time to reread this book. There is so much to be learned from it craft-wise that I’ve added a few other Stephen King books to my TBR for 2025: The Talisman and 11.22.63. It was shocking how often Stephen King’s name was mentioned (by others too!) during Regis University’s MFA winter residency two weeks ago. It’s all too easy to look at a popular writer and dismiss them as continuingly successful only because of past success—but although this might be true, in part, for King, I think there is more to his craft than we might credit him at times. I no longer hesitate to claim him as one of my primary writerly influences.
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