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Loading... Doctor Sleep: A Novel (original 2013; edition 2016)by Stephen King (Author)
Work InformationDoctor Sleep by Stephen King (2013)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Oh how I love Stephen King’s writing! This was, yet again, another fantastic book by Mr. King and a perfect sequel to The Shinning. I know the movie won’t live up, but I do look forward to seeing it as well. Another amazing story...only sad that I will have to wait until next spring for another one of his books. I found this to be an enjoyable supernatural adventure story but not not especially scary. It had very little of the annoying over the top gore / shock stuff that often bothers me with Stephen King and it didn't seem to be overly wordy either. I enjoyed seeing a follow up on Danny and I thought the enemy he and Abra faced (the True Knot) was a great concept. As usual, the finale was a *bit* of a letdown for me but overall the book was good and worth reading if you are a King fan. Bottom line for me is if I think about and want to get back to reading a book when I am away from it and this definitely delivered on that score. I loved The Shining and was a bit scared to read this follow up book, scared to be disappointed. At first, I didn't like the new characters and also didn't like what Dan Torrence had become, however, after the first 100 or so pages, things started to change and I really started to enjoy this book. In the end, this was really a fun and exciting read, very glad I picked it up.
What are those virtues? First, King is a well-trusted guide to the underworld. His readers will follow him through any door marked “Danger: Keep Out” (or, in more literary terms, “Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here”), because they know that not only will he give them a thorough tour of the inferno — no gore left unspilled, no shriek left unshrieked — he will also get them out alive. As the Sibyl of Cumae puts it to Aeneas, it’s easy to go to hell, but returning from it is the hard part. She can say that because she’s been there; and, in a manner of speaking — our intuition tells us — so has King. Second, King is right at the center of an American literary taproot that goes all the way down: to the Puritans and their belief in witches, to Hawthorne, to Poe, to Melville, to the Henry James of “The Turn of the Screw,” and then to later exemplars like Ray Bradbury. In the future, I predict, theses will be written on such subjects as “American Puritan Neo-Surrealism in ‘The Scarlet Letter’ and ‘The Shining,’ ” and “Melville’s Pequod and King’s Overlook Hotel as Structures That Encapsulate American History.” Has the adaptationAwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
The now middle-aged Dan Torrance (the boy protagonist of The Shining) must save a very special twelve-year-old girl from a tribe of murderous paranormals. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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I have to admit I had some prejudices before I started. It's true I had read The Shining not so long ago, but I thought it was an early work and probably not very representative. I was convinced (given the high productivity of Mr King) that this would be the sort of popular literature, addictive but not particularly well written.
But man, was I wrong? It has all the ticks of a guilty pleasure: the story builds up slowly, chapters are not long and broken up in smaller sub-chapters so you will want to read "just one more", the good guys are really good and the bad ones are really bad... etc. But on top of that I find it's really well written. The story can be a bit confusing at points, but I never got lost. Also, it's really well linked with The Shining.
I will definitely read more King in the future. I now understand how is such a phenomenon. ( )