Stephen King
1977
Around 450 pages
A horror novel! A rare treat on this List. I guess so much of the List is steeped in horror that the List thinks this area is well-covered already. If we were going to limit ourselves to one Stephen King entry, I would not have chosen this novel (that honor goes to my girl Misery), but this is still a fun read.
Jack Torrance is a struggling writer and alcoholic who accepts the position as the off-season caretaker at the Overlook Hotel in Colorado. He brings his wife Wendy and his son Danny, who, unbeknownst to his parents, has psychic powers. Danny sees ghosts at the hotel, and forms a bond with the chef Dick, who has the same powers as Danny. Jack unravels to an epic degree. The movie was so well cast, that's it difficult to not to picture Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall, even if the story is different.
I know Stephen King was unhappy with the adaptation, but I do think Stanley Kubrick improved upon the story in a lot of ways (the topiary animal scene was a little much). The novel places more of an emphasis on the evil of the hotel, rather than Jack being an axe-wielding lunatic, so it wasn't as frightening to me. And I do always find myself wishing King could just tie things up a little quicker, a lot of his novels feel bloated.
I always love it when Stephen King writes about the process of writing. A compelling, if not genuinely scary, iconic horror classic.
RATING: ****-
Interesting Facts:
Interesting Facts:
After writing Carrie and 'Salem's Lot, which are both set in small towns in King's native Maine, King was looking for a change of pace for his next book: "I wanted to spend a year away from Maine so that my next novel would have a different sort of background".
King opened an atlas of the United States on his kitchen table and randomly pointed to a location, which turned out to be Boulder, Colorado.
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