Tracing The Trails Of The King : The Shining

FAIR WARNING – if you have not read this book, there will likely be spoilers contained within this essay. This is the third essay in my ongoing series on Stephen King, and is intended to be a free discussion of the book. I cannot be held responsible if I inadvertently ruin the ending for you, so if you think this might apply to you, I would encourage you to turn back now.

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“He had whirled Danny around to spank him, his big adult fingers digging into the scant meat f the boy’s forearm, meeting around it in a closed fist, and the snap of the breaking bone had not been loud, not loud but it had been very loud, HUGE, but not loud. Just enough of a sound to slit through the red fog like an arrow-but instead of letting in sunlight, that sound let in the dark clouds of shame and remorse, the terror, the agonizing convulsion of the spirit. A clean sound with the past on one side of it and all the future on the other, a sound like a breaking pencil lead of a small piece of kindling when you brought it down over your knee. A moment of utter silence on the other side, in respect to the beginning future maybe, all the rest of his life.”

-The Shining, location 347 – Kindle Edition

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In any artistic endeavor, there is always that handful of examples, those shining glints of near perfection that you can’t help but hold up to everything else, the place where motifs became motifs and the original breeding ground where so many other ideas sprang from. My love for horror has always tended towards the dark and the supernatural so for me, this book is huge. The premise of the book is frightening enough, a family trapped alone in an expansive hotel, snowed into the mountains of Colorado in a place with a sordid history, that we slowly become privy to as the story progresses. I have always loved the idea of a hotel so malevolent, that has grown in power on the back of every evil and violent act which has taken place throughout its history. It’s a book that I have come back to many times and never have I felt that the story failed to entertain.

From a story telling perspective, I feel like King has put on a clinic on how to develop tension and suspense throughout a book. He starts small, hinting at the dark conclusion which the book is moving towards but takes his time, developing and crafting the story masterfully. He starts with simple, small, disparate events and builds them in scope and intensity as the hotel comes to life around the characters. We see the internalized torture that Jack Torrence lives through as well as his slow descent into madness. King also does what he does best, creating characters that feel honest and authentic and their personal tensions and fears grow throughout the book and build on each other, all the way up until the book’s conclusion.

I have always been deeply touched by Jack’s story, in particular and I think it casts an interesting light on where you find the “horror” in a particular story. The horror doesn’t always have to come from ghosts and ghouls and monsters. Sometimes, the most effective horror is in creating realistic situations and characters that act as mirrors for ourselves. Ultimately, Jack comes to do unforgivable things throughout this book and the question becomes, how many of those things can be attributed to the influence of the hotel and how many are simply a result of his own inner demons and alcoholism. How much of the darkness in Jack’s past comes out to create the darkness of his present? What I am saying is that more terrifying than the character of Jack Torrence is the notion that there are aspects of Jack inside all of us and that the amount of distance separating someone from becoming that kind of a monster isn’t as large as we might like to think.

Reading this book reminds me of why I developed a love for reading, so long ago as you are swept away into the story and the universe that he has created. You get to experience what this family goes through and in the end, you have the ability to safely close the book and move on to the next one. This book has the ability to, at the same time, drive me to want to be better as writer and it makes me want to read, even more. I have always equated Stephen King to the Beatles, in that when people tell me they don’t like the Beatles, I stand by my belief that in all those albums, there has to be at least one song that anyone can connect with. Along these lines, I think that there is a Stephen King book out there for everybody. So even if you think you don’t enjoy his writing, give this one a try because this might be the one. It’s a fantastic tale of isolation, of horrors created by the severity of the environment, in a time before the Internet and cell phones when people really could be so isolated that the only help you will ever receive is the help you provide for yourself.

I also appreciate the subtlety of the book. I don’t have a problem with gore, as it sort of goes with the territory for the genre and I certainly think it has a time and place. However, I think that when it comes to horror, the best way to convey that is to use the reader as a part of the process. I read something once that stories begin in the mind of the writer and end in the mind of the reader and I think this is especially important for horror fiction. It’s easier to describe every little thing down to the most minute detail but I think that you can create a more powerful book that the reader is going to more closely identify with if you allow them to fill in some of the narrative space with their own imagination, not unlike in comic books where the bulk of the really important story telling happens in between the frame, inside the mind of the reader. The books I have loved the most are the ones that demand at least a little bit from the reader, in your ability to put yourself into the mind of a character and live their experiences alongside them.

As I make my way through these books, I find myself re-igniting my love for this author, for these words. I can’t even imagine what it must have been like at the time, to be writing these books and putting such great material out into the market. It was definitely a big period for him with book after book and I can only speculate what it must have been like at the time from the readers’ perspective and the buzz that must have been slowly building around this great author. I would consider myself proud and lucky if I were able to write one book that was this successful and effective but to keep doing it, book after book is a little mind-blowing for me. It shows me that, if nothing else, while this quest I’ve taken upon myself will likely still be ongoing in the years to come, there is still a lot of great reading ahead of me.

My name is Chad Clark, and I am proud to be a Constant Reader.

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So as this series progresses, I will generally not be paying a lot of attention to the movies. Mostly because you could likely devote an entirely separate series of essays solely devoted to the film adaptations, but mostly because books and movies are separate artistic endeavors. I can’t evaluate a movie through the same lens as I would the book equivalent because we are talking about two separate mediums for storytelling.

However, in this case, I think that I would be remiss if I didn’t at least share some of my thoughts about what could be the most controversial and hotly contested adaptations of King’s work.

For any of you who may be less aware of what I’m talking about, I will give you the broad strokes. The original movie version of The Shining was brought into being by legendary director Stanley Kubrick. As a director, he had already established himself as a heavy hitter in the industry while King, at the time with only a few novels under his belt, could probably best be described as a fledgling author. Far from the giant of pop culture he is now, it is easy to imagine how he could be steamrolled by a larger-than-life personality like Kubrick. It’s also worth noting that Kubrick had a tendency to ignore the specifics in the source material he was adapting from. In the film version of Full Metal Jacket, for example, only one scene from the book actually made its way into the movie.

Needless to say, King was not happy with the direction Kubrick took the movie and felt that it was too great of a departure from the book. I myself tend to be sympathetic and agree somewhat with several of his issues with the movie, namely that first, Jack Torrence becomes less of a sympathetic character. One thing I loved about the book was that it was a lot easier to relate to Jack. You felt the weight of his alcoholism and the stress he felt in that environment at the Overlook. You see the hotel slowly creep into his consciousness and take over. In the movie, he seems less sympathetic from the start of the film. Much of the supernatural aspects of his journey is lost and the alcoholism is moved onto the back burners. In the movie, I felt like the character that you saw on the screen was less Jack Torrence and more Jack Nicholson.

Another issue I take with the film was in Kubrick’s treatment of Wendy Torrence. In the book, she is a strong and intelligent character, standing up to her husband and protecting her family. She proves to be highly resourceful and is a character that is easy to root for. In the movie, Wendy becomes more of a prop, something that is there to scream and be in danger.

Now, all of that said, there is a certain contingent of King fans who go so far as to say that the story of the movie is “unrecognizable” when held up next to the book and I think that is going a bit too far. The truth is that I love the movie. I think that it is beautifully shot and Jack Nicholson’s performance is nothing short of legendary. Sure, the kid is annoying but kids in movies are annoying at least ninety percent of the time. And while I find Shelly Duvall’s performance grating and irritating, I have to remind myself that I have often read that Kubrick was not exactly a dream for women to work with. So I have to remember that her performance had to be tainted somewhat by first his vision for the character as well as dealing with him personally. I think the movie is fantastic. I also love the book. I don’t see any reason why you have to choose one or the other, or even compare them in the first place. Movies are movies and books are books. Films can be inspired by books but storytelling devices that work on the page aren’t going to necessarily work on the big screen. Unfortunately, there is a certain amount of change that is going to happen in the transition from book to film. It’s just the way it goes. Is The Shining a faithful adaptation of the novel? No, not really.

But it still is an amazing film.

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