[kennyc]

After 36 years, King gives 'Shining' a new luster in sequel
Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY 7:02 p.m. EDT September 18, 2013
"I'm older and have learned a little more," the author says.

When Stephen King finally decided to write a sequel to his 1977 horror novel The Shining, one of the most popular of all his best sellers, he says he didn't worry if readers needed a refresher course on the horrors — human and supernatural — that plagued the Overlook Hotel.

With the sequel, Doctor Sleep (Scribner), set to be released Tuesday, King says, "It did occur to me that those who'd only seen the movie might be puzzled by some stuff."

Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film, starring Jack Nicholson, is far from a faithful adaptation. It leaves the hotel standing. (It burns down in the novel.) The film kills off a character, a telepathic black chef, who survives The Shining and reappears in Doctor Sleep. Most famously, Nicholson ad-libbed his crazed "Here's Johnnnnny!," a line not in the novel or even the screenplay. (King himself wrote the teleplay for another adaptation, a three-part ABC miniseries in 1997.)

The movie "is certainly beautiful to look at," King says in a phone interview from his home in Bangor, Maine. But it was filmed with what King calls "a cold heart" and little understanding of the characters.

In 'Doctor Sleep,' Stephen King says he has written the "true history of the Torrance family."
In writing the sequel, he chose not to worry about that: "I decided, 'Screw it.' My book is the true history of the Torrance family."

In The Shining, Jack Torrance, a frustrated, alcoholic writer who lost his teaching job, becomes the winter caretaker of an isolated hotel in the Rockies.

The hotel has no guests — at least none who are alive. The caretaker's telepathic young son, Danny, is terrorized by frightening ghosts and visions. Danny and his mother survive — barely.

Doctor Sleep picks up three years later. In Florida. Danny, now 8, is visited by the ghost from Room 217 at the hotel: "Of all the undead things in the Overlook, she had been the worst."

Two chapters later, Danny has grown up to become Dan, an alcoholic hospital orderly who drifts from job to job. "Your mind was a blackboard," King writes of Dan. "Booze was the eraser."

Part of the suspense in Doctor Sleep is whether Dan, who ends up battling new supernatural forces, is doomed to be as self-destructive as his dad.

In On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000), King describes his own addictions to drinking and drugs and how he came to see himself as "the guy who had written The Shining without even realizing … that I was writing about myself."

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