1977′s The Shining helped cement Stephen King as a literary horror monarch. With its adaptation by the decidedly quirky Stanley Kubrick, it became a horror classic. Now 30+ years later, King is releasing the sequel to the rabidly popular story, titled Doctor Sleep.
The synopsis from StephenKing.com:
On highways across America, a tribe of people called The True Knot travel in search of sustenance. They look harmless—mostly old, lots of polyester, and married to their RVs. But as Dan Torrance knows, and tween Abra Stone learns, The True Knot are quasi-immortal, living off the “steam” that children with the “shining” produce when they are slowly tortured to death.
Haunted by the inhabitants of the Overlook Hotel where he spent one horrific childhood year, Dan has been drifting for decades, desperate to shed his father’s legacy of despair, alcoholism, and violence. Finally, he settles in a New Hampshire town, an AA community that sustains him, and a job at a nursing home where his remnant “shining” power provides the crucial final comfort to the dying. Aided by a prescient cat, he becomes “Doctor Sleep.”
Then Dan meets the evanescent Abra Stone, and it is her spectacular gift, the brightest shining ever seen, that reignites Dan’s own demons and summons him to a battle for Abra’s soul and survival. This is an epic war between good and evil, a gory, glorious story that will thrill the millions of hyper-devoted readers of The Shining and wildly satisfy anyone new to the territory of this icon in the King canon.
Doctor Sleep is scheduled to be released September 24, 2013 and to be perfectly honest with you… I don’t know how I feel about it. For me The Shining was amazing not because of Dan Torrance’s character, but the character that was the Overlook Hotel. The hotel was what intrigued me and what I wanted to know more about. To me, Dan was just a mechanism. The premise seems kinda hokey and hanging on to the ragged edges of a bygone classic. And like a prescient cat, I’m going to make a prediction. Those hoping for The Shining will be disappointed, but that doesn’t mean the story won’t be an entertaining one.
