CW: alcoholism, addiction, family trauma, domestic violence
I recently finished reading Stephen King's The Shining for the second time. It landed differently this time. I enjoyed it more than when I first read it. This time, I was sober.
For those not familiar with this book: Mum (Wendy), Dad (John/Jack), psychic kiddo (Danny) all go to a hotel in the snow and shit goes down…
While this is very much a rambling personal response to a text, there is a chance it will contain spoilers.
For a look at the differences between King’s book and Kubrick’s film, there is a helpful CinemaBlend article here. For the purposes of this post, i’ll refer to John/Jack only as Jack. And will state up front that I think Wendy and Danny are much more rounded and interesting characters in the book. As is Jack. They all have more time with the reader as a family and as people before things get freaky, and Jack gets a moment towards the end of the book that really speaks to his humanity. And the book somehow manages to make topiary scary.
[Side note: I actually really like the mini-series with Stephen Weber and Rebecca de Mornay - directed by long-time King adaptor Mick Garris and written by King himself, it lacks the visual and sonic flair of Kubrick’s horror masterpiece but is much more faithful to the novel.]
Generational trauma and parental fears are front and centre in the novel of The Shining. Jack is haunted by the memory of his father, as Wendy is haunted by her mother’s anxieties. Both are terrified of turning into their parents and subjecting Danny to the kind of cruel and tempestuous childhood they had each experienced. Jack’s view of his father shifts through the book and he is shown to have some fond memories as well as bad ones; Danny - whose ‘shine’ gives him a scary insight into his Dad’s brain - still runs and clings to Jack even though he is scared of him. Kids just wanting to be loved and parents trying and failing to prevent history repeating. I do not have children and while that decision has myriad influencing factors now, I can't deny that fear hasn't run through me when i've behaved terribly, having seen and experienced the damage booze and violence can do.
I was in a play a few years ago and these lines spoken by one of three siblings keep floating back into my mind:
“Because all things start at the wellhead, right,
Sins of the father,
Sins of the mother, too, they should get their due,
And it trickles on down
In little streams and rivers and floods
Down to the children.”
In a podcast interview (yes, I will remember which one and yes, I will come back and add a link!), Mike Flanagan - responsible for some of the best King adaptations and finest TV of the last decade - talked about adapting Doctor Sleep, and about horror and life, and how trauma stays with us. He described the “long arms of the past” as constantly reaching for us until we face and make peace with it. The longs arm of the past. *shudder*
When I first read The Shining, I was still drinking - occasionally Googling ‘Am I an alcoholic?’ and dying of shame 95% of the time, but the other 5% of the Fun Times kept me in denial, and I hadn’t yet had therapy for traumatic childhood memories of domestic violence. When I first saw the film, then read the book, I desperately didn’t want to recognise myself in Jack, and instead just saw my Dad in Jack’s drinking, outbursts and unpredictability. I wanted to feel like Danny - small, scared, innocent, but surviving. It took sobriety and the self-awareness that comes with it to admit that yes I am Danny, but I am also Jack. There’s a point in the book when Jack takes a seat at the Colorado Lounge bar while bartender Lloyd racks up a row of twenty martinis. The drinks aren’t real, but the idea of them and the temptation of them is very real and the desperation with which Jack knocks them back made my hands grip the pages. Three years sober and a self-destructive part of my brain imagined leaping into the pages to knock them back to oblivion with him. That Jack ends up bashing his own face in as everything goes up in flames around him is a fair picture of where booze can take you.
Is it the Overlook? Is it the drink? The ambiguity around where the lines are drawn in The Shining is one of the things I love most about the book, and one of the things that makes it an effective horror. Whether it is Jack’s addiction that drags him under, or the hungry hotel and its supernatural inhabitants, his downfall is tragic and terrifying. King's novel sees an essentially good (and sane) man dragged to the pits of hell, at the expense of everything he loves, and the fact that Danny has a direct line to his Dad's thoughts during this is all the more scary.
In the same interview mentioned earlier (I think, sorry this is very unreliable referencing!), Mike Flanagan talks about needing to face up to trauma in some way in order to live with it. Having had six months of EMDR therapy for complex-PTSD, last year was very much spent all up in trauma's face. Books and words have always helped me to make sense of things, but the therapy helped me gain new perspectives and the ability to step into memories without being completely derailed. From that I hope I can reflect more, understand more, and close some doors now I know but no longer fear what is on the other side of them.
“The actual act of his writing made her immensely hopeful[...]because her husband seemed to be slowly closing a huge door on a roomful of monsters.”
There will be a second part to this post, exploring Doctor Sleep, healing and recovery.
I have also written about Stephen King, books and sobriety in an earlier post here.
Full version of the cropped cover art at the top:
Cracking stuff. Just the right length for a cuppa and just enough provocation to be re- visiting it in my mind over the coming days. Thank you