The Shining
question
Should it have been shorter?

I liked it when I first read it, looking back though, I wonder if it really should have been shorter? Do you think so?
Some post that the build up takes too long, and I know that the classic Dr. Jekyl and Hyde was about 52 pages and other brilliant scary works were novelettes or short stories. (Some like like King's shorter works best)
Should parts about English Leather and stuff which add nothing to story, have been deleted from The Shining? Or do these parts add something?
Some post that the build up takes too long, and I know that the classic Dr. Jekyl and Hyde was about 52 pages and other brilliant scary works were novelettes or short stories. (Some like like King's shorter works best)
Should parts about English Leather and stuff which add nothing to story, have been deleted from The Shining? Or do these parts add something?
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A lot of King's work is too long, but this one didn't seem awful to me. I didn't think it was very scary and the pace did drag, so it's possible some bits could have been cut out. I do think all the side plots added something though. I really knew the characters. It felt real.
King is like Dickens, he writes the story that's in his head with all the digressions and sub plots that he wishes and that's the book we get
sometimes it feels like his work could do with an edit - Rose Madder and Desperation for example, but could you imagine IT without the extraordinary length? or The Stand?
The Shining never felt long to me.
sometimes it feels like his work could do with an edit - Rose Madder and Desperation for example, but could you imagine IT without the extraordinary length? or The Stand?
The Shining never felt long to me.
Ditto Richard.
W/ King, more problematic for me is his plethora of literary allusions.
Sometimes they support, (the Poe allusion in The Shining for example—although that, too, goes on a bit too long.
And both The Stand and Pet Sematary are replete with the Yeats and Mary Shelley allusions respectively—to the point of distraction.
If King hadn't made the family-social commentary in The Shining, the book would not have had the power and weight it seems to still maintain.
Oh well . . .
"Good reading."
W/ King, more problematic for me is his plethora of literary allusions.
Sometimes they support, (the Poe allusion in The Shining for example—although that, too, goes on a bit too long.
And both The Stand and Pet Sematary are replete with the Yeats and Mary Shelley allusions respectively—to the point of distraction.
If King hadn't made the family-social commentary in The Shining, the book would not have had the power and weight it seems to still maintain.
Oh well . . .
"Good reading."
The book is exactly as long as it needed to be. The reason I know that is because it has a beginning, a middle and an end. You cant justify saying any piece of literature should be shorter, or longer for that matter, because the work is as the author intended it to be. I constantly read on here that people "were so bored" "I could hardly get through it" "So many wasted words" and so on. Seriously! Then don't read the book... try a comic book...
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