Anyone who has ever called Stephen King a hack needs to go and read The Shining. It is a masterpiece of modern horror, taking the classic haunted house trope and supercharging it into a tale about one man’s descent into alcoholism and the effect it has on his family. It’s also a novel where everything ticks away with precision: story, subtext and theme are in perfect harmony. The primary metaphor used – the boiler and its subsequent destruction of the Overlook Hotel – is elegant and unobtrusive.
The Shining represents one of the few times King ever achieved true terror rather than horror; it contains a scene I will never forget. The child protagonist, Danny Torrance, is playing inside a pipe. A drift of snow falls down and blocks the opening, plunging him into absolute darkness... then he hears something scrabbling towards him. God, I actually had chills. The Shining is the sort of book that makes a reader want to become a writer.
So when I heard King was to write a sequel to The Shining, I was excited. And everything I read about the book in the lead up to its release augured well. It would deal with Danny (now Dan) as an adult, who uses his psychic powers or ‘shining’ to assist the terminally ill to die peacefully. But it would also concern itself with Dan’s past – not just the lasting effects of the supernatural terror he suffered at the Overlook Hotel, but also the unpleasant tendency the sins of the father have of surfacing in the son. Such potent material, I thought, couldn’t possibly fail, especially given its heritage.
Well, I was wrong.
Doctor Sleep is a self-indulgent waffle-fest and easily the worst thing King has written since Duma Key. It begins promisingly, with a chilling account of an old ghost from the Overlook stalking Danny, and then a fairly compelling account of Dan’s alcoholism in adult life. But there’s a clue that the wheels are about to fall off this story, and it comes in the form of a band of quasi-vampires called the True Knot.
Outwardly they appear to be ‘RV people’ trekking the highways and byways of the USA. In reality they are a troupe of inhuman creatures that literally feed off an invisible by-product of suffering and death they call ‘steam’. Humans with the shining provide a particularly deep and concentrated source of steam, so when the True Knot’s leader – Rose the Hat – learns about a 13-year-old girl, Abra Stone, who has a shining that makes Dan’s look like nothing (a lighthouse versus a flashlight, according to King), she sets about kidnapping her. The plan is to torture her and thereby provide an almost endless source of steam for the True Knot. Dan and some largely forgettable supporting characters set about thwarting this plan.
There are so many things wrong with this book that I don’t know where to begin. An almost total absence of action between page 100 and page 400 is undoubtedly one of them. The characters talk and talk about their problems and what they are going to do to solve them, but never actually do anything. I don’t mind a leisurely pace in my fiction, yet there were times when I honestly wanted to put Doctor Sleep down and never pick it up again.
There is also is a total absence of tension. Abra is so powerful compared to everyone else that neither she nor Dan ever seems in real peril. Also, I kept waiting for the bad temper and alcoholism Dan inherited from his father to make an impact on the present… but when that came at last it was dealt with in a couple of perfunctory pages and made almost no impact. Even the finale, which picked up the pace a little, ultimately left me shrugging my shoulders. Add in a ludicrous plot twist and one of the most glaring deus ex machinas I can remember seeing in a published novel, and I began to wonder if anyone actually edited the thing.
The prose certainly suggests not; it’s flabby to the point of embarrassment (“Abra was standing” instead of “Abra stood” for example, not to mention buckets of over-explanation) and somehow no one spotted the mixed metaphor where mountain peaks are “sawing at the sky like spears”. I have written in the past that I believe the highest compliment you can pay an author is to say that you forgot you were reading; that most definitely wasn’t the case with Doctor Sleep. I spent the whole time editing the prose in my head.
But I suspect the real problem with Doctor Sleep is The Dark Tower. Millions of people love King’s epic fantasy series and that’s their privilege. But to my mind, The Dark Tower is to King as the alien plant life is to Jordy Verrill in the short story ‘Weeds’; it has consumed the writer who produced such excellent work in the 1970s and 1980s. Pretty much everything King has written since the early 1990s has tied in to his overarching fantasy series, and it has been the worse for it.
Like two of my most hated King novels, Rose Madder and Duma Key, Doctor Sleep takes a healthy story idea and smothers it in Dark Tower hugger-mugger of the dullest kind. We’ve seen the True Knot before; they’re really just Atropos from Insomnia in a different guise. Doctor Sleep also smacks of King trying to be ‘literary’, where the tail of subtext and theme wags the dog of story. This has usually led to his most tedious work such, as Lisey’s Story and Duma Key. In his better novels – Under the Dome for example – the literary elements are used to enhance the story (dog wagging tail). Sadly, many critics, who are obsessed with subtext and metaphor because it makes them feel smart, are unable to comprehend that compelling story + subtext will always have a greater value than tiresome story + subtext. And no, a compelling story and literary merit are not mutually exclusive. Just look at The Grapes of Wrath.
Even the afterword, which I usually look forward to in King’s books, is a dismal exercise in self-justification. King takes yet another swipe at Stanley Kubrick’s movie adaptation of the book (this time intimating that it wasn’t scary, which is nothing short of laughable in its pompous arrogance) and then asserts that anyone who dares dislike Doctor Sleep is simply comparing it unfairly to its predecessor, which they read as a kid and now view through rose-coloured glasses. Well, I’ve got news for you Mr King. I didn’t read The Shining until I was in my mid-20s, so there is no soft-focus nostalgia for me. The contrast is simple: The Shining was a superb novel written by an author in his prime; Doctor Sleep is a lazy piece of hackwork written by an author who has outgrown the editorial scrutiny he desperately needs.
The only scary thing about Doctor Sleep (apart from that admittedly creepy opening chapter) is that it could have been even worse. During rewrites, King’s son Joe recommended Dan be seen hitting rock bottom in his alcoholism, which led King to add one of the novel’s few memorable scenes. But that only serves to show how good Doctor Sleep could have been if King had got rid of the hackneyed True Knot sub-plot and opted to tell a story about a man coping with demons, both metaphorical and supernatural. A worthwhile sequel to The Shining, in other words, and not this unmemorable hogwash.