Horror Book Review – Stephen King – Doctor Sleep
2013 Scribner Press.
Spoilers
Brave of King to write a belated sequel to one of his most iconic novels, The Shining, and a pretty good novel it is too, though not without its flaws. The book is very much a sequel to King’s book and not the Kubrick film, which King loathed with a vengeance.
Decades on from the events at the Overlook Hotel (destroyed in the original novel), Danny Torrence has followed his father, Jack into alcoholism, partly to blank out the terrifying visions he still gets of psychic terrors and visitations by some of the ghosts from the Overlook. The book’s focus on Alcoholics Anonymous recovery takes on a powerful, authentic air given King’s own openly admitted struggle with inebriation. The best writing in the book isn’t the supernaturalism, of which there is plenty, but the fight against going back on the booze.
Danny works in a nursing home where he uses his Shining gifts to help the dying move on to the other side. He is aided partly by the nursing home cat, which gets little to do despite featuring on the book cover as if more important to the narrative.
The Shining also puts Jack in telepathic contact with a young girl, far away, called Abra (as in Abracadabra), who has a much more powerful level of Shining power than he does. Abra has also drawn the attention of a murderous cult of psychic vampires called The True Knot with a need to feed on the energy of kids with the Shining. The Knot are led by a formidable entity called Rose The Hat. Jack gradually forms a posse to go to combat Rose and survivors of the Knot (weakened by limited contact with Shining-bearers and having contracted Measles, (they previously had immunity to mortal illnesses). Though often on a road trip, the nomadic Knot do have a fixed base in a trailer park built on the site of the now demolished Overlook Hotel.
The Knot are a great creation, with a credible relaxed way of going un-noticed, blending in to trailer trash communities, avoiding drawing attention to themselves, etc. Rose is fantastic character, vicious to human potental victims, but kind and loyal and protective to her Knot allies, but her increasing failure to nab Abra (a rich source of psychic patrician, while being canny and angry enough to fight back hard on the psychic plain), jeopardises her leadership and puts her followers in danger too.
For much of the book, the three strands of plot don’t converge. Dan struggles with alcoholism, Abra struggles with her psychic gifts and senses that someone is hunting her, and Rose protects her cult while sensing but coming to locate Abra late on.
That Rose remains largely unaware of Danny until he finally turns up to attack her in her home base (with Abra aiding psychically from afar, but not without some danger), keeps the promised main confrontation battle late to materialise but it is well handled. The book makes Abra a more central focus than Danny, and the scenes in which she plays cat & mouse with a member of the Knot who has abducted her with intent to take her to Rose are terrific.
I would have liked to see Rose get more aware of Danny and his Shining, as he clearly has the very powers the Knot need to feed on to survive. Somehow she and Danny are oblivious of each other (bar for a brief half-remembered vision by Danny of their paths once crossing). The friends believing Danny’s story and helping start the fight back against the Knot seems unconvincing, as does the willingness to let Abra even engage in the psychic combat against an entity as powerful as Rose. There are many touching scenes, Danny’s early talks with his Mum and the old janitor from the Overlook, Danny’s bedside support for the dying, etc. Scenes of The Knot feeding and ‘taking steam’ are terrifying as is the description of them dissolving when they die. While not quite as impactful as The Shining, this is a very good sequel. I’d just like to have seen the separate strands pulled together more tightly.
Book cover photo taken by me.
Arthur Chappell
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