The Shining
The Shining (1977) is one of supernatural author Stephen King's early novels (the third one to be published).
Jack Torrance is a temperamental writer who is trying to rebuild his and his family's life after his drinking problem and volatile temper cause him to lose his teaching position at a small preparatory school. Having given up alcohol, he accepts a position maintaining a large and isolated hotel in Colorado for the winter, in the hope this will reestablish him as a responsible person and enable him to finish a promising novel and resume his career. He moves to the hotel (the Overlook) with his wife, Wendy, and young son, Danny, who is telepathic (the "shining" of the title) and sensitive to supernatural forces. The hotel is possessed by a life force or is itself sentient and feeds especially off people with psychic powers. Danny, who has had premonitions of the Hotel's danger to his family, begins seeing ghosts and frightening visions from the hotel's past, but tolerates them in the hope that they are not dangerous in the present. He doesn't tell his parents because he senses how important the job of caretaker is to his father's and his family's future. Having difficulty possessing Danny, the hotel begins to possess Jack, frustrating his need and desire to work as he becomes increasingly unstable, and gradually turns him to its purposes.
The story is an entry in the supernatural or horror genre that effectively uses the concept of a building having a conscious will (or a soul, as it were) and taking a place as the story's protagonist (or the antagonist, if you view Jack as the protagonist), an idea perhaps first explored by Edgar Allan Poe in The Fall of the House of Usher.
The author has said that The Shining includes an exploration of alcohol dependence and relationships with parents and children in one's life.
The Shining has been used as an example of how to structure a story to keep the plotline moving. Like many King stories it reaches a climax from which point the story moves inexorably to its conclusion.
1. Film adaptation (1980) of Stephen King's novel of the same title by Stanley Kubrick. The main part is played by Jack Nicholson.
2. TV miniseries (1997) of Stephen King's novel by Mick Garris.
King reported that he was unhappy with the filming of his work, in large part because Jack Nicholson had just finished One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and he suspected that audiences would assume him crazy to begin with. He wrote another screenplay of the novel and had it refilmed in the late 90s.
KubrickÃÂôs version only used the concept of the KingÃÂôs novel to experiment with the genre and many allegorical possibilities of the plot. One of his main aims was to describe in metaphor the background of genocide, but also some social consequences of mechanisation.Basic Plotline
Genre
The Book
Film and TV miniseries adaptations