Welcome to our Featured Reviews! In this series, we’ll be highlighting book reviews by the S&L audience. If you want to submit a review, please check out the guidelines here! -Veronica
Review by Derek Brown
It turns out that you can go home again. Or at least you can if you’re Stephen King.
I just finished this, King’s sequel to a much earlier work. The Shining is the story of a small child, trapped in a world so much more dangerous than the one other kids inhabit, because he has a special talent. A power that supernatural forces want to consume. In Doctor Sleep, we get to see that small child, now grown, haunted by the same affliction that nearly drove his own father to murder his wife and son. Not his power, but the drinking problem he now has, the only thing he has yet found to suppress his terrible, awesome power, and keep the ghosts of his childhood quiet.
To me, this story is largely about demons. Recognizing the worst of them for what they are, and realising that you are never alone with them.
Its also a story about another small child, afflicted (or gifted) with her own set of abilities, and because ka is a wheel, and it always turns, this little girl is also chased by supernatural forces eager to consume her.
I can’t overstate how much I enjoyed this book. I first read The Shining over 20 years ago, and its one that’s always really resonated with me. Getting to revisit the landscape of that work with King, seeing what happened to Danny Torrance after the events at the Overlook Hotel, and finding out how his life turned out because of it was a lot of fun.
Fans of King’s other novels will find a healthy helping of the usual Easter eggs here as well. If you’ve read any of his other books, you’ll enjoy the many references to King’s integrated universe.
The only item to note (and it’s not a negative, but it is a warning), would be that I consider either reading The Shining or seeing the original Kubrick movie a definite prerequisite to reading this book. Preferably both, so you’ll know the correct version of the story that King uses to jump from, but also so that you’ll have the awesome imagery from the movie to help light the way.
