Almost ten years later and thoughts of The Shining still give me the creeps. I can't remember anything other than the general plot-line, and the movie forever tarnished the book for me as a "good one," but I still think it is a must-read. I didn't know King was releasing a sequel until about a week before, and while I've never been excited about a book release (Harry Potter doesn't count, of course), the news of this made me excited in the way you are to go on roller coasters. I didn't remember most of The Shining and that was written over 30 years ago; only God and Mr. King knew what could possibly be in...Doctor Sleep.
Danny, being too smart and too experienced for his young age with a mother who was too naive and too inexperienced for her age, didn't have the best childhood. His horrific history in Colorado combined with a family history of alcoholism didn't line him up for the best of opportunities, either. Running from town-to-town, bottle-to-bottle, the now-middle-aged Dan searches for a place he can call home. Far-removed from the horrors of Colorado, in a small, Norman-Rockwell, New-England town, Dan begins to make a life for himself that just happens to include being able to do the same....uh....tricks he was able to do when he was younger. Only now he's not alone.
A young girl with talents similar to Danny is wanted by sub-human, literal soul-suckers (there are a lot of those in Colorado) and the only person who can really help her is Dan. This, of course, means facing evils he's spent his entire life running from and drowning in liquor. But the question isn't if he'll save her but how.
Given that King isn't the first author on my reading list, his books are always a bit of a surprise. I don't remember what I was expecting from The Shining, but there are parts of it that I still don't understand. Ten years and a lot of read-books later and what I expected from Doctor Sleep was not to understand everything. Probably the biggest thing I don't understand with authors like King, Martin, and Tolkien is the extent of their imagination and the expert way they are able to weave together stories to make one fantastic tapestry of story-telling. So many times I had to put Doctor Sleep down so my heart could quit racing and let my brain digest everything. Reading like part diary, part novel, part AA pamphlet, King's latest scare-fest is something you can't put down and could conceivably finish in a weekend if you're ambitious.
I'm not a fan of being scared. I've hated Halloween most of my life, and horror movies have grown largely distasteful after they turned into the exploitation of the worst of the human race instead of creating monsters that could never actually exist. King expertly delivers both. Doctor Sleep creates the monsters from under your bed but has them prey on the fears and evils of the human condition. And I'm not sure about King's other books, but in this read, one bad-ass literary hero emerges and that is always a bonus.
Abra Stone is the only other person in the world who knows what it's like to be Daniel Torrance. Plagued by the same...shining...we go along for the ride as she is born, lives, "meets" Dan, and battles to keep her life from ending before hitting her teens. And all the while I'm reading her journey, my friend's question of If You Could Be Any Female Character from a Book, Who Would You Be? kept running through my mind. While I don't think I'd change my answer from Hermione to Abra, I think they are one in the same: problem-solvers, smart, brave, kind, true, and strong. But of course Hermione still wins because she ends up married to Ron Weasely in the end.
Other Doctor Sleep reviews prohibit reading The Shining first, obviously mistaking it for the Robert Langdon trilogy of Dan Brown, a case in which I adamantly suggest reading The DaVinci Code before Angels and Demons as the latter will literally give you nightmares. But I think reading The Shining first is imperative to really understanding Dan, how Abra and him are so inexplicably linked, how they're able to fight the ultimate fight, and in being able to comprehend the importance of certain characters who only make small appearances but huge impacts to the story.
Doctor Sleep truly is a remarkable story and King is nothing short of a miraculous storyteller. Weaving factual information with personal experience and the ultimate imagination results in a book you sort of float through; you're not consciously aware of picking up the book and reading but all of a sudden you're on page 400. If there is one thing that plagues me, it is that there is one main question left, if not unanswered, largely assumed. Given it took 30 years for the sequel, I highly doubt a third book to accompany The Shining, so that can't be the reason, in which case I will assume what I can only assume the author wanted me to assume.
That point aside, Doctor Sleep is definitely worth a haul in your tote and highly recommended. Score another one for pop culture!
(The creepy starts about page 4 but the cover gets things going well enough.)
