Product Description

Danny is only five years old, but he is a 'shiner', aglow with psychic voltage. When his father becomes caretaker of an old hotel, his visions grow out of control. Cut off by blizzards, the hotel seems to develop an evil force, and who are the mysterious guests in the supposedly empty hotel?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #47761 in Books
• Published on: 1982-07-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Ghostly bursts of plaster dust. A low, rhythmic sound in the background: Red rum-RED RUM-red rum-RED RUM. A sense of something evil swirling inward on itself, like a whirlpool of black ectoplasmic energy. The experience of being inside the actual consciousness ("come out and take your medicine!") of a frightened little boy. Echoes of Shirley Jackson ("whatever walked there, walked alone"), of Poe's Masque of the Red Death and of creepy folk tales (Hansel and Gretel).

How do we love The Shining? Let us count the ways. In 1977, The Shining was the first widely read novel to confront alcoholism and child abuse in baby-boomer families--especially the way alcoholism, a will toward failure in one's work, and abusing one's kids are passed down from generation to generation. The heart of the book is not an evil hotel but a pair of father-son relationships: Jack and his father, Jack and his son. This was both daring and insightful for its time, long before "dysfunctional family" was a cliché.

The Shining was written in a frenzy. Stephen King imagined the whole novel in his head while sitting up all night in the dark, in the very Colorado hotel where the story takes place. He then transcribed it (that's how he puts it) in a burst of sustained energy. He could pull that off because, even at that early point in his career, King had figured out a successful way of structuring a popular novel. The speed of its composition gives the writing a powerful flow that sweeps you along past the awkward wording.

The Shining is one of those rare novels that can burn its images--such as Room 217--into your brain. Time alone will tell, but The Shining may well turn out to be one of the best horror novels ever written. By the way, you know that film starring Jack Nicholson? Stephen King says, "I have my days when I think I gave Kubrick a live grenade on which he heroically threw his body." --Fiona Webster

Review
'Obviously a masterpiece, probably the best supernatural novel in a hundred years' -- Peter Straub 'You had better not read it alone' -- Mirror 'As a storyteller, he is up there in the Dickens class' -- The Times

Mirror
‘You had better not read it alone'

Customer Reviews

Best of the best
In all the books I've read in my time, 'The Shining' has to be rated as the best. The combination of Stephen King's literary superiority and horrifying imagination produce a scarily good result.

In The Shining we follow Jack Torrance who takes over as caretaker of the Overlook hotel for the winter, where only he and his family will stay as blizzards enclose the hotel. But his son, Danny is having strange visions, and the hotel itself is eerily odd.

From the story we learn about Danny, and his nightmarish visions, but the novel begins to get really scary when his father Jack, who doesn't have any psychic ability, starts seeing things too. I used to read this book at night before going to sleep, and after I'd put down the book and turned out the light, my heart would continue to pound in my chest...such is the quality of the suspense and horror.

But don't be fooled by the movie version with Jack Nicholson. Despite Nicholson's fantastic performance as Torrance, the movie is a gross miscarriage of the book, and omits 70% of the book's story. The famous 'Here's Johnny' line isn't even in the book...it's just in the film.

Above all else, you must read this book, even if you've seen the film. But be warned...once you have reached the part where Torrance enters room 217...is the part where things really start to get scary.

Remains one of King's most powerful, frightening novels
Twenty-seven years after its publication, The Shining remains a visceral, gripping read that showcases Stephen King's unfathomable powers to hypnotize and terrify readers, a power King had in abundance in the early stages of his career. Coming on the heels of Carrie and 'Salem's Lot, The Shining truly established King as a modern master of horror and an unequalled purveyor of a literary mirror into pop culture. If you've only seen the original movie starring Jack Nicholson, you really owe it to yourself to read the novel; Stanley Kubrick made a fine and scary movie, but he did not capture the essence of King's story, and his dramatization followed a different path than what you find in the original vision brought to life through the words of King. The more recent miniseries was more faithful to the novel, but it doesn't take an Einstein to figure out that a made-for-TV dramatization is limited in terms of what it can get away with in a number of important areas. Simply put, The Shining stands just behind Shirley Jackson's The House on Haunted Hill as one of the best "haunted house" novels ever written.

The plot should be quite familiar to one and all by this point. The Torrance family embarks on a months-long retreat into complete isolation when Jack Torrance signs on to be the winter custodian of the Overlook Hotel in Colorado. Jack takes some personal demons with him to a hotel chock-full of malevolent, ghostly spirits; he is a recovering alcoholic who, in the last couple of years, lost his job and broke his little boy's arm in a state of drunken fury. He thinks the months alone with his wife and son will allow him to find peace - and to finally finish the play he has been working on. His long-suffering wife has some misgivings, but the only person really clued into the dreadful possibilities is his son Danny. Danny has "the shine," a gift which allows him to see and know things he cannot possibly know; it is a powerful gift which the Overlook (which really is an entity unto itself) jealously desires for itself.

As the days pass, the Overlook exerts more and more of an influence on Jack, exploiting his weaknesses, exacerbating his paranoia and persecution complex, and basically turning him into a murderous new tool at the hotel's disposal. Danny sees what is happening, although he cannot really understand much of it given his very young age. He can certainly understand the terror of the Overlook, however, as he sees images of the hotel's murderous past and very dark near future in a number of unsettling scenes interspersed throughout the novel. This is a harrowing tale of survival against incredible odds of a supernatural nature, and King brings every nuance of the story to vivid life, capturing perfectly the internalization and externalization of fear among exceedingly real, believable characters that the reader gets to know very well indeed. As has always been the case with Stephen King, it is his incomparable powers of characterization that make the supernatural elements of his story work so amazingly well. You can't help but be emotionally committed to these characters.

The Shining really isn't one of my all-time favorite Stephen King novels, but it is exceedingly well crafted and features some of the most harrowing scenes to be found in King's immense body of work. Even though I had read the novel before and was quite familiar with the story in both its literary and cinematic manifestations, I was completely caught up in the story as I re-read it - to the point that I found myself flipping the pages faster than I normally do for a novel completely new to me. When you talk about the seminal works of modern horror, you have to talk about The Shining - it's just that good a read.

Shining from beginning to end
This book is my second favourite King novel, being surpassed by Different Seasons. The story has been immortalised in the famous Stanley Kubrick film the Shining, but once you read the book, you understand why King was upset about the film. The book features lots more things the film didn't include, including animals made from hedges which like to hurt people. The ending is completley different as well. It goes in such a different direction, you can't believe one was related to the other.
This is a must read book. Stephen King really out does himself with this one.