Part Four: Snowbound

Before we learn the fate of Danny the strangled and mangled, we get to see Jack losing his mind again as he falls asleep and sleepwalks while dreaming of his dead father, who once beat his mother half to death. You get the feeling that his own father's issues have trickled down to Jack, the drinking, the temper, and you have to believe Jack doesn't want those issues to keep trickling down to Danny. I don't think they will, but Jack is on the verge of completely losing it, and the hotel tricks him into hearing his father's voice in the radio, encouraging him to beat Danny, and Jack smashes the radio to pieces. No more way to contact the outside world. Hooray!

They discover Danny, who is alive but catatonic, wet bruises around his neck. Wendy freaks and thinks Jack did it while sleepwalking. Jack, hurt by this, retreats to the empty bar and imagines himself drinking, going crazier and crazier, and it's very effective, it feels convincingly like an actual person slowly going actually crazy, for whatever reason. Danny comes to and exonerates his dad, which is good news, but the bad news is that this means he was physically assaulted by a creepy-as-fuck ghost.

Jack goes up to check the room and at first there's nothing there, but then as he's leaving the room we get treated to yet another deliciously creepy scene as the shower curtains close behind him, as he turns and knows, can almost see, that there's something in the bathtub now, a dead old lady, and yet she moves. Scared utterly shitless, he escapes the room and locks the door as whatever is in there thumps out of the tub and scrambles to the door after him, rattling the handle as it tries to get out and say hello, maybe invite him in for tea and dead fish smell. Jack thinks he's going mad, unaware that he's already batshit insane, so he goes back downstairs and tells his family there was nothing in the room. That night he gets the urge to murder his wife and dreams of killing his son with a roque mallet, so I'm glad there was nothing in that room.

King gives us another tantalizing glance at a path to freedom, as Wendy convinces Jack to take them back down to town on the hotel's snowmobile. Jack (or the hotel) comes up with all sorts of reasons in his head why this would be a bad idea for the family, they'd be broke, he'd have to take shitty work in town to make ends meet, they have nowhere to go, without this job and this hotel they're finished. Then he has an agonizing moment of clarity as he's checking the snowmobile, where he sees that the hotel is manipulating him and that it wants his son, that Danny's strange powers are waking up all the bad memories that have stained the place over the years, but they can break free, they can take this snowmobile and break free and deal with the consequences later. But then he hesitates, and the hotel gets its claws back on him, and the doubts return. As Jack slips back into madness he tears out an essential snowmobile component and hurls it into the deep snowdrifts, stranding them at the Overlook for good.

And it occurs to me that the Overlook is similar to the Marsten House from 'Salem's Lot. In that novel King expressed the idea of buildings absorbing all the things that happen in them, until the buildings themselves can be good or evil. The Marsten House was an evil house where evil things had been done, and so is the Overlook. All the bad things that had happened in it have given the house an automagical sort of evil soul, a stain, a malicious sort of manipulative, grasping spirit that seeks now to add to its own tale of misery, and in Danny it's found the perfect sounding board, and in Jack the perfect patsy, the weak link, the one whose weaknesses can be twisted and yanked until he loses his mind and does whatever the building wants. And the scary part is that even though Jack is being messed with and messed up, all the flaws that are being exploited, all the scary things that are coming out, they're all still part of him, things that are inside him, things he can normally keep well under control. We all have little things like that, and maybe the Overlook could do this to any one of us.

The hotel gives them a little bit of peace and quiet, but King skips that and gets right back to the scary stuff. Here I feel he makes the first misstep in the book, where Danny goes out to the playground and into a concrete tube piece and feels that there's a dead boy in there with him. Right after this the hedges come to live again and try to stalk him through the snow, and that scene in the tube in the playground felt like too much, too soon, the author not patient enough to let the scene play out until the hedges moved, which would have been enough. Instead that gratuitous ghost-in-the-tube scene leading right into the hedges. Too much. Oh well, the hedges are still goddamn awesome, and a hedge-lion almost gets Danny, cuts the back of his leg just as he reaches the hotel porch. I love the hedge animals, they're a great concept.

Jack refuses to believe it even though he saw them move once too. Then the elevators start moving in the night with no one in them, and a ghostly party from 1945 is taking place in the hotel, everything that's ever happened in the hotel is taking place, all the memories that leaked into the walls. Tony comes back and warns Danny that redrum is coming in only one more day, and Danny finally sees that it means murder. He screams in his head for Dick Hallorann, who is down in Florida, but who just might be able to hear him.