Doctor Sleep

Stop the presses! I just finished a good Stephen King novel, with only a bearable amount of cheesy dialogue and a fraction of the usual editing required! Also, this is the first 'new' King story I've read since giving up on him after From A Buick 8, so I'm doubly impressed. I also notice there's a film adaptation in the works - of course there is - but I'm not too taken with the casting. Ewan McGregor?

Bringing to mind both The Stand and a Dean Koontz novel - sorry, Mr King! - called The Servants of Twilight, Doctor Sleep isn't exactly original, but it is a very good sequel to The Shining, with Danny Torrance (and the author himself) admitting that alcoholism is no excuse. Jack Torrance was a weak man and a crappy father, but Danny at show more least has the strength to get help with his drinking. There is quite a lot of pontificating on the evils of drink and the great saviour that is Alcoholics Anonymous, but I figure King has earned those few extra pages.

Dan Torrance, now approaching 30, is 'Doctor Sleep', using the last glimmer of his 'shining' to help the terminally ill let go of their pain and move on, while also trying to make up for some of the pain he has inflicted on others while drinking. He's working at a hospice in New Hampshire when he receives a message from someone called Abra, a girl whose shining is like a lighthouse compared to his weakening torchlight - but she's only a few months old when she first reaches out to him. The two stay in touch as Abra grows, with Dan taking on Dick Hallorann's role as mentor for the young girl. But Dan isn't the only person who knows about this special little girl. A vampire-like cult called the True Knot thrives on children like Abra, and when their leader Rose the Hat takes a personal interest in tracking her down, Abra and Dan need all the help they can get.

Ah, I loved the whole story, what can I say? The flashbacks to The Shining, with the True taking over the site of the former Overlook - no passing mention of Stuart Ullman, sadly - and the showdown between thirteen year old Abra and the (almost) immortal Rose the Hat are well-paced, and the psychic world-building is intriguing but not overdone. The villains are all a bit extra - there's no chance of feeling sympathy for them, or wondering who the real enemy is - but Rose is a striking character. And yes, King does struggle with writing teenagers, especially female teenagers, but he struggled with Carrie and he's in his seventies now, so Constant Readers will just have to let that one go, I think. Now I just have to concentrate really hard and get Stephen King to write a sequel for Ellie Creed of Pet Sematary! show less

The Shining being one of the best books ever written, I was on the fence about a sequel. As curious as I was about what happened to Danny Torrance, I wasn't sure I'd be satisfied with the answer. I should have just trusted Uncle Stevie, as I tell so many people to do when they read him for the first time. He always knows what's best for his "people", even if it's not good and shiny and perfect. I love that he isn't shy about the ugly side of people and things, I think that's why there's so much realness to his books so it's easy to suspend belief for the speculative parts. The honest look at Danny's life is a little tough, I was hoping after the horrors of that winter, he'd have a better time of things, but I guess when you're haunted, show more life is anything but easy. The introduction of new characters was a great time, Rose the Hat is a formidable villian and I liked and young Abra is absolutely delightful. It was also nice to check in on familiar "friends" like Wendy and Dick Hallorann. When you spend as much time with characters as you do in a King novel, you do form some level of attachment so it's nice to check in with them. This was an excellent sequel, and I hope there are more featuring Abra, she's a talented young lady. show less

Six-word review: Engrossing, intermittently gruesome creepy-horror story.

Extended review:

Stephen King once said of himself, "I'm the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries." Sure enough. Even though his work began to take on some deeper themes around the time he produced Pet Sematary (1983), and his style and scope have certainly matured over the years, there is still a certain Kinginess that pervades his work. And it's not the sort of quality that English majors typically have to write about in term papers. Rather, it's the sort that turns a fast read into a best-seller, with the illusion of depth that you get from a pair of facing mirrors and not from peering over the edge of a fathomless abyss.

And all this is perfectly fine. It's show more what we pay him for. It's what we love him for.

Doctor Sleep gives us an adult Danny Torrance, last seen as a little boy in 1977's The Shining, who has grown up with the horrendous memory of what happened at the Overlook Hotel and also with a profoundly disturbing ability to see things that are not materially present to normal sensory awareness. It turns out that there are many among us, so the story goes, who possess special powers like his, some in greater bounty than others--and also that there is a race of once-human predators who derive their sustenance from torturing children gifted with those powers. What the grown-up Danny has done with his abilities and memory is drown them in alcohol; but his bond with a young girl who has prodigious talents like his own sets him on a heroic quest to defeat the nomadic band of vampirish murderers and in the process achieve his own salvation.

This breakwrist volume is thoroughly entertaining King, with a bonus helping of an insider's grateful but not reverential insights into the workings of a twelve-step program.

I can't rank it with literature, but as a fun read for those who have a stomach for the nasty parts, it delivers what it promises. And that's a big part of what I want out of a novel: to promise and then deliver. Not all of King's work has done that, but this is one that does. show less

This is a perfect book for King fans. It has a little of everything that his readers love about his books. It has an ending slightly more unusual than most. In my opinion, this ending does a lot to overcome a deficiency in some of King's writing which is lack of emotional tenderness among his characters. A Shakespearean broad scope of human feeling encompassing both good and malign influences, I had found to be missing. Attention to vocabulary and continuity of language is excellent. Dialogue is quirky in the King way of writing. Most characters are skeptical about the world (hurt by pain and sorrow) but they are willing to take a chance to do good and deciding that their intention is honest, positive, and pure.

I read this book as show more slowly as possible to take in all that I could about the story. Being handicapped by not having previously read The Shining first, this book is still, for the most part a stand alone novel for King fans. There are a few important details to be appreciated for readers of the first novel but Doctor Sleep is a work with entirely new characters except for Dan Torrance. This book was recommended by some of the smartest readers I know.
This is a highly sophisticated narrative which makes use of King's fertile imagination to pace the story and the readers' interest up until the final pages. King said that he used several people to help him research his own original The Shining story and thus to dovetail with Doctor Sleep. This extra help with the narrative structure is evident as no detail is left open hasty misinterpretation unless the King was purposeful in his ambiguity.
There are elements of horror novel in this but it falls, in my view, under fantasy and thriller genres. King does something interesting here in that he invents a form of dialogue between people communicating telepathically. It's interesting since most writers would have just related this interaction using third person retelling.
Now in Doctor Sleep (title taken from Dan Torrance's helping people peacefully transition from life to afterlife working in a hospice facility) evil has another form from the other descriptions in The Dead Zone or 11.22.63, for example. There evil lurks waiting for a new host to live when it is cast out of one entity. This is a somewhat biblical framework given in the Gospels. Here evil (the source of evil is not explicitly accounted for here) is an ancient coven lasting several hundred years who live off a vital source within persons who are known to be touched by Shine. The coven live an existence unto themselves and appear to not be aligned with other shape-shifting entities. Evil in Doctor Sleep is part of a dualist landscape and the Knot are defeated (at least temporarily) when their host bodies are destroyed. This seems like a version of Gnosticism which has appeared in world literature previously (e.g. The Gospel of Judas). Gnosticism is often well suited to those minds prone to superstition. There are some elements of Roman Catholicism featured in this story as well. So for me I like the horror elements of The Dead Zone and 11.22.63 but Doctor Sleep is also worth reading since it shows the defeat of new age astral travel (fantasy) while still being attentive to the need for Dan Torrance to confront his own harmful past family history of personal horror.
This book introduces a new realm of evil into King's cosmology that specifically torments Shiners but also allows evil to be defeated by humans working together with a plan to use supernatural forces against evil itself. show less

If you thought that the most terrible thing that could happen to you at a caravan park was visiting to the shower block, think again. That's not to say that facilities at caravan parks can't be sinister, shower blocks made out of concrete that never quite dries, surrounded by a ruff of lush unnaturally green grass even in the hottest of summers, shimmering in a half miasma, half tang of competing soaps including, if your caravaners had airs, Imperial Leather. The toilet block was much the same, except that vegetation yellows and vanishes around its perimeter. If you have ever visited either of these with a torch, flannel or your own soft loo roll in the dead of night, you will know that they seed the imagination with terror.

Americans show more don't do caravans. Americans lost their taste for caravans with the Donner Party. Americans do travelling bigger and better. Americans have Recreational Vehicles. Yet the mobile holidaying tribes King describes in Doctor Sleep are familiar, with stickers on the backs of vehicles, tee shirts proclaiming the wearer has visited this feature or that landmark, and tailbacks snaking behind them.

Americans do frights bigger and better too. Tailbacks and tee shirts is as far as familiarity goes before King branches off into white-knuckle horror, with a band of travelling child murderers who call themselves the True Knot. That the True Knot are a bunch of vampires with unnaturally prolonged lives and supernatural gifts is fascinating, as is the idea of them hiding in not quite plain sight at the edge of society, not gypsies but travellers seemingly endlessly vacationing and cross-crossing the country, never stopping in one place for long. What's truly horrific is that they abduct bright, intuitive children who are actually phychic to a greater or lesser degree, torture them to death, drain their phychic energy and then bury the body, leaving a trail of human misery in their endless wake.

There a ghosts here too. They come in two forms, the first are the ones that pursue Danny Torrance, who was tormented by angry spirits in his youth during a brief and traumatic stay at the haunted Overlook Hotel, and is now tormented by spirits of the bottled kind. The second are the memories of the mistakes of Danny's own making, the result of the alcoholism he has adopted as a blanket to dampen his own psychic powers that allow him to see, and be pursued by, vengeful spirits.

All of this comes together when Danny has one hungover experience too far and gets off the bottle. In AA and with his 'shining' as he calls it, fully functional, he becomes aware of a precocious, powerful phychic little girl. When the Tue Knot sense her too, they realise the girl is mother lode and feast combined. The book moves from examination of frailty and fear to Danny's fight to save the girl, her fight to protect him and her secret, and their battle to defeat the True Knot.

There is charm here. Danny works in a hospice, complete with a cat that can sense death, and brings a touching humanity to his role, but he also works for a spell running the miniature train that takes tourists for rides round the small New England town he settles in. And while alcohol runs through the story like a poisoned stream, redemption is at hand. Danny's visits to AA are particularly well observed, leaves you craving coffee and cake, and establish the informal network of people who would never normally speak to one another, but who trust one another with their most dreadful secrets.

Danny's battle with the booze is prolonged and desperate and serves as a link back to his own traumatic experiences in the isolated Overlook Hotel one winter when his alcoholic father was driven insane by the same ghosts that continue to chase Danny all the way down to the bottom of the bottle.

But it is with the True Knot that King has accomplished something special and horrific, updating the folk fear of gypsies stealing children in a way that is profoundly unsettling. You may never look at an RV the same way again. show less

I’d read this book before but decided to read it again after finishing The Shining last week. I thought it would be interesting to read them together. That close contrast was so revealing. Whilst The Shining is a superb piece of skilful horror writing, Doctor Sleep is King at his worst. Flabby, self-indulgent and in need of a hard edit.

What I like about The Shining is the tightness of it. Tension and fear are built up in layers, each new episode ratcheting up the stakes and the improbability, until by the end of the novel when the full evil of the Overlook is unleashed, the reader is spellbound. Later period King, freed of the constraint of having to persuade a publisher that he’s worth it, rambles for page after page about show more background stuff and forgets about the story. You could skip big chunks of Doctor Sleep and miss absolutely nothing.

In The Shining, the Overlook hotel itself is the seat of evil and the ghostly denizens are merely tools of that evil, trying to ensnare Danny to boost its power. Doctor Sleep introduces a new evil in the form of the True Knot. This was a good concept, but poorly delivered. They were too folksy and two-dimensional to evince any real emotion. It was impossible for me to accept that a gang of child-killers could drive around in a mass convoy of RVs without ever attracting attention or suspicion. The delivery of this important element of the story was a misfire. Flabby King at work again.

The novel struggles to justify its own existence.Was it a second chapter of the Overlook story, or was it a completion of Danny’s arc? If the former, it was poorly done. If the latter, I struggle to understand the need. It is arguable whether Danny was the main character in The Shining. An important character yes, but no more prominent than Jack or Wendy. As he was five years old and lacking insight I could see no need to complete his story. And the alcoholic self-indulgent wallowing… so boring and unnecessary. show less

King described this book as "a return to balls-to-the-wall, keep-the-lights-on horror". The Shining is one of my favorite books (of his and of all time) so I was hopeful but skeptical. It's very good, but it's not The Shining. He himself kind-of admits this at the end. Like much of his later work, it's more of a novel than horror. To be sure, it's a story about demons but the real ones are just that, 'real'. Things like the past, childhood, alcoholism, forgiveness, dying and regret lurk in broad daylight. As we age (each day a little closer) it's this stuff that keeps grown-ups lying awake at night.

People wonder if King has lost his touch. I think his touch is as deft as ever. Without the substance abuse that seemed to amplify (and at show more times warp) his creativity before, now all he has is his writing ability, his raw creativity and more life years of experience (all of which in his case are plenty). In the end, I think this makes for better stories that leave a mark, make you think and stay with you.

Doctor Sleep is a new favorite for me. It is not better than The Shining but neither is The Shining better than it. They are two different books written by the same man who has outgrown his own demons (thankfully) and writes for the rest of us to enjoy and share in his life's wisdom without us having to experience the pain ourselves (more thankfully). show less