The Shining

About The Shining

Jack Torrance, a struggling writer and recovering alcoholic, takes a winter caretaking job at the isolated Overlook Hotel, moving his wife Wendy and psychic young son Danny into its empty corridors for a season of total isolation. The hotel has a violent history of its own, and it begins working on Jack's already-fraying sanity while Danny's telepathic gift -- the 'shining' -- lets him see the horrors soaking into the walls long before his parents do. Published in 1977, The Shining was King's first hardcover bestseller and remains one of horror fiction's defining haunted-house novels, built less on jump scares than on the slow, believable collapse of a family trapped together with something malevolent.

Doctor Sleep picks up decades later. Danny Torrance, now going by Dan, is an adult wrestling with the alcoholism that nearly claimed his father, working AA's steps in a small New Hampshire town while using his shining to ease dying hospice patients into death -- work that earns him the nickname of the title. When he telepathically connects with Abra Stone, a girl whose gift dwarfs his own, the two are drawn into a battle against the True Knot, a cult of quasi-immortals who feed on the psychic residue of tortured children. King wrote Doctor Sleep in 2013, thirty-six years after the original, explicitly as a way to give Danny the sober, functional adulthood his father never got.