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All work
and no play make Jack a dull boy...
Synopsis
In "The Shining," Stephen King
resorts to summoning up a melange of ghosts and mixing them with voguish
interest in precognition. The story has Jack Dorrance, tentatively
reformed drunk and unreformed playwright, taking his wife, Wendy, and
5-year-old son, Danny, for a winter of caretaking at the Overlook Hotel,
an old-style mountain resort in Colorado with a "checkered" history. Jim
intends to use the off- season isolation to complete his play, a labor
that shouldn't call down anything worse than the unhappy shade of George
Bernard Shaw, or maybe George Jean Nathan. Danny, however, is gifted with
"the shining"-- precognition, mental telepathy, second sight or whatever.
This, it turns out, makes him an undesirable guest at the Overlook, which
is booked solid with a convention of evil emanations from its checkered
past. The hotel's presiding evil spirit does not take a shine to Danny's
shining, for reasons never quite clear, and, by the miracle of
transmogrification, begins wreaking all kinds of bad things on the
Dorrances, who are, by now, thoroughly snowbound.
Anyhow, what with
something nasty in the bathtub of 217, those unquiet spirits of Mafia
victims in the presidential Suite, the topiary whose animal-shaped bushes
start making unfriendly gestures, the ancient boiler that if not
constantly nursed is going to blow the whole place Rocky Mountain high,
the running 1940's vintage masquerade party in the ballroom and, yes,
killer wasps, the Dorrances soon wish that Jack had gone to MacDowell to
write his play. Mr. King serves up these horrors at a brisk, unflagging
pace, and he undeniably keeps things moving.
-- Richard R. Lingeman,
New York Times
Quotes from the
Book
"You
shine on, boy. Harder than anyone I ever met in my life. And I'm sixty
years old this January."
"All work and no play make Jack a dull
boy..." |
