Rating: 5-out-of-5 dead wasp nests

Buy The Shining here. (Amazon)

Buy The Shining here. (Bookshop.org)

Review (i.e. get in, we’re going spoilering)

I read this before when I was a teenager, and I remember it being great. Now, as the father of a 20-month old boy, I found it devastating – a 500-and-change-page book-brick heaved threateningly through the window of my emotional centre. I don’t even have the number of a pancreatic glazier.

Both of King’s previously published books, Carrie and ‘Salem’s Lot, featured young protagonists, and you could see him getting a feel for exploring the victimhood of innocents in those. But he pushes it to a whole new level with Danny – who, at 5, is significantly younger, and in some ways more burdened.

I don’t know how much it is to do with being a father to a young boy, but the tragedy of Danny’s uncomprehending wisdom beyond his years (through being accidentally exposed to the adult world before his time via his “shining”), coupled with his keen and unconditional love of his parents even when they accidentally hurt him, filled me with such a powerful need to protect him that it genuinely took me aback. Wishful thinking, of course – King laid down Danny’s fate in black ink before I was even born, and I can’t step into literature and meddle about, which is good news for literature, because I’m as ham-fisted as a fat-handed pig. But it’s been a long time since I’ve really felt such a connection to a fictional character, and that is testament to King’s ability to inhabit the character of Danny, and make him feel real and worthy.

It’s pretty clear that King is using The Shining to work through some of his own stuff. At the time he wrote it, he was the father of a three year-old boy, and also in the flow of his own addiction to alcohol. The real scares that drive the book aren’t the dead woman in the bathtub or the violent topiary (which would, incidentally, be a good title for a debut album – thank me later (cash, please)), but the fear of passing damage down through the generations; of losing control of yourself and hurting those you love.

For me, the neatest example of this in the book is when Jack gives Danny the dead wasp nest to keep in his room, just as his father had done for him. But the wasp nest was a symbol of his father’s violence, a metaphorical black eye, and when the wasps come back to life to sting Danny, the ghosts of wasps are really standing in for the ghosts of past hurts coming back to haunt Jack – except now he’s in the parental role, and Danny is the innocent getting hurt. I thought this was perfectly and subtly executed, and was one of the elements of the book that elevated it beyond what had come before.

There’s also the excellent, slow-burn dissolution of Jack’s mind in the semi-first person. What’s more terrifying than a sane mind going sour? Being inside its inner working as it does so, and being able to follow the logic as it twists itself into self-serving knots. It’s the difference between watching somebody drunkenly singing karaoke and being in the skin of the singer as the bar empties.

A lot of people have issues with King’s endings, and this one in particular, calling it a deus ex machina (not to be confused with a deus sex machina, which ships directly to Heaven in discreet packaging) – but the ending really works for me. Distracted by its own self-interest, the hotel’s internal pressure builds up until it self-destructs. What more fitting finish to this story than a metaphor for the self-destruction of a father distracted by his own ego, excess and/or addictions?

I’ve been a bit poncey in this review, talking a lot about metaphors and so on, which King himself would surely disdain as masturbatory nonsense when he was just trying to tell a gripping story. But the deeper layers here are what take The Shining from being a standard haunted hotel story and into the realms of deeply-affecting brilliance – so pipe down, Steve.