Hot Stuff

If you're in any way a Stephen King fan and haven't yet read Doctor Sleep I strongly recommend that you do so. In terms of being a beautifully told story that grips from beginning to end - and the ending is one of the horror maestro's best - it doesn't disappoint. The only thing it doesn't do is to scare the pants off you, in the way its illustrious predecessor did, but that's hardly surprising. I think King rightly avoided a reprise of The Shining. He invents a whole new supernatural apparatus in the form of the True Knot, the villains of the piece, but this remains just that, an apparatus, effectively done but never believable in the strangely unnerving way the earlier novel managed to be.

The Shining worked its magic by seemingly effortlessly combining in a beautifully inter-locking manner, three archetypal ideas-cum-situations. There was the notion of shining in itself, maintained in Doctor Sleep with another youngster who has the gift at the centre of the plot. Then there was the archetypal family tragedy, with the brilliantly realised loving yet abusive father. Given what King has since revealed about his own addictive demons, it's easy to understand how he got the details of Jack Torrance so unerringly right. Dan Torrance's struggles with the demon drink are probably the strongest part of the later novel, but here King looks at the recovering alcoholic, hence the claustrophobic intensity of the earlier work is lost - but obviously deliberately so. This is a different Stephen King writing and it feels right to explore new territory.

But it was the third archetypal aspect of The Shining that took it into a genuinely terrifying space beyond the notion of a kind of crafted apparatus. This was the idea of the Overlook as the Bad Place. The Bad Place doesn't need any kind of rationale or justification. It just is, as we all know. And to have a Bad Place on this scale, the idea of the grand hotel with its strange history, which of course would attract more of the evil to fuel its sheer badness, creating more evidence of its nastiness in the form of all the things that haunted it - well, this just hits the mother lode. Consider the fact that the winter closure of the hotel, leading to the Torrance family being left alone there, is really an obvious contrivance of the plot yet seems entirely natural. It's as if once his premise is established everything falls into place - so you accept even the goofy stuff, like the weird moving topiary, because the Bad Place can do whatever the heck it likes. The epic aspect of the novel - the huge Overlook and its situation both geographically and historically as a peculiarly American hotel - blends seamlessly with the small story of the family destroying itself.

Nothing in Doctor Sleep gets close to this, but it's good, I think, that King doesn't try to. There's really no going back. The interest lies in new kinds of story and the new pleasures these might involve. It takes someone as talented as he is, and as extraordinarily imaginative, to recognise this.