Doctor Sleep

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

I randomly wrote a review of this for Time Out London as they were doing an edition written by Londoners and asked if people at my book club wanted to review it - this is what I sent to them (though the version they printed was pretty different after editing!):

Doctor Sleep answers the question ‘What happened to the kid from The Shining?’ Well, Danny grew up, became an alcoholic, and it turns out he still attracts trouble. Through his ‘shining’ he gets to know a gifted young girl called Abra. She also attracts the attention of a kind of vampire tribe called the True Knot who want to feed on her powers.

Danny and Abra are both interesting characters and their relationship is quite touching and nicely drawn, plus there are some show more good twists and turns and nods back to The Shining along the way. Unfortunately the True Knot are just not that scary, and don’t really seem like very difficult adversaries, so although it was an enjoyable read it was lacking in real peril and horror and ultimately a bit disappointing.

If you want a good scare you’re probably better off reading The Shining instead. show less

Did you ever wonder what happened to little Danny Torrance and his mom Wendy after Dick Hallorann took them down the mountain when the Overlook Hotel blew up? Oops. Spoiler if you haven’t read The Shining. Sorry. But seriously, if you haven’t read it, go read it right now. Then come back.

Anyway, so did Stephen King. Wonder, that is. And some 30+ years later, he wrote it down.

Wendy raised Danny on her own; she never remarried. Danny never lost his “shine”, but he learned to control it for the most part, or at least tamp it down with liquor. Eventually Danny became Dan, and eventually Dan became an alcoholic, like his dad, Jack. Except, unlike Jack, Dan made it into recovery, still with a shine, which he learned to use to ease the show more passing of the terminally ill in his place of employ.

All through Dan’s sobriety, though, he keeps catching glimpses of a young girl in his head, a young girl named Abra with a powerful shine of her own. He and Abra both become aware that someone was hunting her, stalking her, waiting for that shine of hers to reach its peak so it could be harvested. Abra was food.

Those stalking young Abra called themselves The True Knot, or just the True. Disguised as aging RVers, they roam the highways and campgrounds of the United States, using their own shining to search for children just like Abra: those with a shine or, as the True call it, “steam,” using the psychic energy generated by the torture and murder of these young people to extend their lives. Sooner or later, they’re going to find Abra. But not if Dan and Abra find them first.

King drags us on the journey through Dan’s alcoholism, down to his bottom, and back up to his recovery. It’s an ugly and occasionally stomach-churning story, but those of us who’ve been there need only hold up a mirror to see ourselves in Dan’s shoes. And when Abra enters the picture, we bite our nails while we cheer for both of them in their struggle against the True.

As for the inevitable comparison to its predecessor, in many ways The Shining may be the superior novel in terms of sheer scariness: that was the first novel I ever read that frightened the teenaged me so badly I threw the book across my darkened bedroom and went running into the living room where the rest of my family was gathered. Damn those topiary animals! But Doctor Sleep holds its own in the quality of its story, the development of its characters, all done, of course, in King’s incomparable style. A worthy successor, indeed, and another winner for the master of modern horror. show less

Great follow-up to The Shining. Danny Torrance has matured... and so has Stephen King. King's storytelling in this book is just as eerie and suspenseful as it has always been—I can't count how many times he made the hair on the back of my neck stand up—but our lead character is now more thoughtful and reflective. The story is therefor richer, and feels much more personal. King has always had a talent for making the reader feel they're sitting down with him, listening to a story from his own lips during a dark and stormy evening at home; but in Doctor Sleep King takes this one step further. It doesn't just feel like he's telling A story, it feels almost as if he's telling you HIS OWN story. The ending felt as if perhaps it came along show more a bit abruptly, but that could very well just be my dismay at the book having to end at all. show less

In Stephen King’s nonfiction work “Danse Macabre,” he asserts that horror is a conservative genre. What he means is that in horror fiction, the familiar and the normal and the same is good. Danger comes from the unusual, the queer, the different that threatens the stability of The Way Things Are.

Agree or disagree, you won’t find a better illustration of this thesis than King’s own “Doctor Sleep.” The preternatural menace here is every good parent’s nightmare: a band of rootless deviants with a hunger for special children. The grand old American virtues of motherhood and baseball wither when the True Knot, rife with unnatural needs, comes calling for your child.

The archetype feels even older to me, harking back to settled show more farming and urban societies uneasily scanning the horizon for barbarians. Between the villagers and the pillagers stands Dan, the civilized barbarian — the drifter who’s beaten his own brokenness and alcoholic demons to settle down, in stark contrast to the vagabond evil homing in on the innocence of youth.

That said, beneath the theme of defending the settled from the unsettled, a theme King would label conservative, runs a tune you might call progressive — that the old should make way for the young. Whereas the members of the True Knot lengthen their unnaturally long lives by consuming the brightest of the young, Dan uses his gift to ease the passage of the dying from this life to the next. On one side are the graceful elderly who accept that their time has come, and on the other the ancient horrors who cling to life by robbing the young of their future.

Whatever you make of any of that, one of King’s favorite morals shines brightly in “Doctor Sleep”: that you have a responsibility to use your suffering to help others. That he draws this dogma from his membership in Alcoholics Anonymous is clear enough. If this novel is anything at all, it’s a love letter to the program that saved King’s life when, in his own youth, he was hooked on drugs and booze.

For if you’ve been around King’s work long enough, you might have known Dan when he was Danny Torrance, the son of alcoholic writer Jack Torrance, who once upon a winter found his soul besieged by the restless spirits of the Overlook Hotel. The child’s trauma nearly destroyed the man; but unlike his father, Dan learned to master his monsters before they could eat him.

This ability to find strength in weakness serves him well when a young girl with a shining vastly more powerful than his own attracts the attention of the hunters of children. Often enough, this is the fundamental moral of King’s oeuvre: that although pain is inevitable, only you can decide whether to give in or to rise above, to endure, to learn, to grow, and to rescue others from the darkness that already failed to take you down. show less

Danny Torrance, who survived the explosion that destroyed the Overlook Hotel, is an alcoholic, moving from town to town until he's drunk it dry or beaten someone up or gotten fired. The True Knot travel the roads of America in RVs and Winnebagos and every now and then they take a child with the shining and torture and murder them, generating steam, which keeps them alive long past the natural stretch of human years. Alba is a young girl with an extraordinary power, and while Danny finally reaches bottom and starts the long climb to sobriety, Alba begins to grow into her power and the True Knot migrate along the highways and turnpikes and camper parks, all three paths destined to cross in a savage conflict.

This is the newest Stephen King show more I've read in a very long time, and it's great to see he still has it, refined by the sort of craft and skill you can only possess after writing more than fifty books. The fact that it's a sequel to The Shining should have been more of a big deal for me than it was, maybe, and indeed, the true heart of this sequel is Danny's heartbreaking descent into alcoholism and his efforts to shake off his father's legacy and his own disease, not the supernatural battle and the climactic return to the site of the long-gone hotel. That was never going to match the raw power of the toxic man and the good woman and the little boy in the haunted hotel in the first book, for all that the years of experience have tempered his abilities. But Danny in AA? Yeah, that's where it's at, and that's what you get and that makes this a Good Book and even a Great Sequel. show less

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