Part Three: The Wasps' Nest

Yep, it's just a nest of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants up in here. Oh shit, you mean actual wasps. Goddammit, I hate those guys.

Jack does too, as he stumbled across the nest under the shingles on the roof, which he is replacing. Things are going great for the family, Wendy is happy, Danny is ignoring the weird hotel, and Jack is in good spirits and writing better and more often than he has in years, and anyone who's ever had serious writer's block knows how good that feels.

But then there are wasps, which become a metaphor in Jack's mind for all the things that went wrong for him in the past few years, as he descended into alcoholism, hurt his son, almost lost his family, and lost his job after beating up a student. Jack has convinced himself that none of what happened was really his own fault, he was more like a guy who sticks his hand accidentally into a wasps' nest and gets stung so hard he can't be held accountable for what his body does (even though there are hints that Jack subconsciously goaded the student who eventually slashed his tires causing Jack to beat him up). So Jack goes and gets a bug bomb and kills all the wasps, exorcising his demons and claiming the empty nest as a prize for his son. Hooray, happy ending! Book over, all done, whew.

Oh wait. That night Danny has another vision of horror and his parents witness the physical end of that process, wherein Danny is rendered temporarily catatonic. They freak out a little, Jack almost loses his temper again, Wendy is all kinds of upset, Danny is scared, and just like that the psychic residue of the hotel has them all on the verge of falling apart again. Then wasps come out of the supposedly empty nest and sting the fuck out of Danny's hand and they're all freaking out again. Jack gets a bowl over the nest just in time, as dozens of reanimated zombie wasps swarm out of the nest and plaster the inside of the glass bowl. Jack, horrified that his exorcised metaphor has come back to destroy him, gets them outside where they'll freeze to death, but the hook has been set in his brain, things are going wrong, and he's unconsciously falling back into old habits. The hotel is figuring out his weaknesses and working to exploit them. With zombie wasps. Goddammit, hotel. Why can't you use your evil powers for good sometimes?

Once the hotel has its claws in him it doesn't let go. Jack gets slowly worse, burning with the desire to lash out at things for little to no reason, getting irritated easily, wanting a drink. They take Danny to see a doctor after his episode, and even though Danny tells him everything any sane and rational person would need to know in order to diagnose a chronic case of ghosts in the gastank, good old Doctor Educated comes up with a reasonable-sounding explanation involving imagination and subconsciousness and heightened perceptiveness that convinces mommy and daddy that nothing is actually wrong. Jesus, does the kid have to pick the lottery numbers to convince you guys he's psychic?

I rant, but King is actually doing a great job of writing how a real family with a real psychic five-year-old might respond to all the oddities. Also great is Jack's slow, careful descent into madness, a bottom he hasn't reached yet but you can smell it coming. The hotel is getting creepier, Danny is getting more worried, Wendy is concerned about her husband, and Jack is slowly losing his grip on himself. He's barely hanging on. And the thing of it is, lots of normal people do these same sorts of self-destructive things, falling into bad habits, losing their temper, doing ass-idiot things for no good reason and then regretting it and then doing them again. King is twisting the supernatural around it, and I know from past experience with the book that it's going to get a lot more supernatural before it's over, but the core of the concept is grounded so firmly in reality that it strikes a chord in your bones. You read it and you think about all the stupid things you've done yourself, all the mistakes you've made and the ones you've made more than once, the times you've lost sight of what's actually important and give in to your pride or your shame or your temper instead, even though none of that is what matters at all. You see Jack falling apart and you think, that could happen to anyone. That could happen to me. King is tapping some of his own personal fears here, fears of losing control, fears of failing, he's tapping all the worst things he can see in himself and it's effective as hell, because when you take away the psychic five-year-old and the evil creepy hotel it's still something that could happen to anyone.

Wendy is getting worried about Jack so she has a conversation with Danny, an honest one in which she admits to herself that yes her son is probably psychic. She's relieved to hear that Jack isn't drinking again, but Danny also admits that he would be happier away from the Overlook. That would mean staying with Wendy's horrible mother though, and Danny likes that even less. So he thinks back to Hallorann telling him that the bad things in the hotel are like pictures that can't hurt you, so he decides to tell his mother that he'd rather they all stayed at the hotel. Just like in Carrie when the votes were counted, King gives us a tantalizing glimpse of the possibility that things could be okay if only they'd just leave the hotel behind, that they're so close, one decision from a five-year-old away from just doing it, just leaving and dealing with the consequences of the lost job, but this is just King taunting us. The possibility is snatched away.

At the same time, we get a scene where Jack is out trimming the hedge animals outside the hotel, the hedge animals Hallorann hinted he had once seen do something. Jack may not be able to properly shine, but he sees something too. In a deliciously creepy scene, reminiscent of Blink from Doctor Who, the hedge animals come to semi-life and begin to stalk dangerously toward Jack, but only moving when he's not looking directly at them. Lions, an angry dog, a bison (they are not called buffalo, dammit Stephen King do your research), they come for Jack with eerie lifelike malice, until Jack squeezes his eyes shut and refuses to believe (just like what Danny does when he sees something bad here) and the hedges reset to normal.

That night it snows a foot, and it keeps snowing, and now it's too late, now they're stuck. Just the Torrances and the Overlook. Maybe they'll learn to get along?

Danny, in a last effort to convince himself that the things in the hotel can't hurt him or anyone else, goes into Room 217, the room Hallorann warned him never to go into. Inside he finds a years-dead corpse of an old woman who killed herself in the bathtub, a corpse that opens its eyes and pulls itself naked and bloated and dead-smelling up out of the tub and shambles drippingly after him as he panics and wets himself and tries to escape. He tries his eyes-closed trick to make it go away, but it doesn't work. The hotel is something more now than Hallorann ever suspected, and the dead hands close around Danny's throat. Well, shit.