Part Five: Matters of Life and Death

Hallorann gets the message all right, a collect call straight into his brain, nearly driving him off the road in his car. He gets time off work, packs his bags, and just barely misses the first flight to Denver. Surely him being a little later won't matter, right? Right. Back at the hotel, Danny has accepted that the hotel is going to try to drive his father so crazy he will murder his family, so Wendy accepts it too and sleeps with a huge kitchen knife at hand and the door locked.

Jack meanwhile avoids blowing the entire hotel up by the skin of his teeth, almost forgetting to release the pressure from the boiler and then almost convincing himself it would be better if he just blew the hotel up. But the hotel is too deep into his brain now, and once again it gets its way. It then leads Jack on to the final piece of this doomful puzzle. It needs to make Jack drink, to give in to his own dark desires, and in that giving in he will also give in to the hotel. There's no actual alcohol in the hotel, but the hotel is powering up its ghost engines now and makes Jack believe that there is. He considers the alcohol for a long time, his brain sluggishly trying to convince him not to give in, and it's the struggle of an addict who has convinced himself to give in, who stands at the precipice and has one last chance. Jack gives in, and drinks the hotel's imaginary drinks, which gets him imaginary drunk. Now the hotel is very happy with him. Now it just wants a favour. It wants him to discipline his wife and child for being naughty, and then they can all live in the Overlook forever.

And it really feels like King is tapping into his own internal bogeymen here. Jack Torrance is essentially an alternate version of Stephen King, they have a lot of similarities, and King knows all about addiction. So what does it say that Torrance is the weak link, the one who gives in to his dark side, the one who can be manipulated, the one who might hurt his son, the one who fails and becomes a danger to everyone around him? It seems that King is acknowledging his dark side, and he doesn't have a very high opinion of it.

Wendy comes downstairs to get some food for her and Danny, and Jack attacks her, trying to strangle her. She gets the better of him my smashing an empty bottle down over his head. She and Danny drag him into the pantry and bolt the door from the outside, locking him in with the food and thinking maybe their troubles are over. But the hotel has other ideas. Later that day, as it gets dark, Jack talks to Grady, a previous caretaker who murdered his family. Grady mocks him, suggesting that maybe they should have used his wife instead, and Jack, utterly insane now, promises to kill Wendy and Danny if Grady will let him out. So Grade does, the bolt just sliding open, and Jack finds a roque mallet and a drink waiting for him outside the door. The hotel itself speaks into his head, reminding him of his promise, and Jack picks the mallet up.

There's something here about the cycle of violence, about how abusive parents can raise kids who go on to become abusive parents themselves. Jack in his madness is thinking to himself that he's the reasonable one and that his family deserves what he's going to do to them, that he has to discipline them for their own good. He thinks about his own abusive father and believes he understands him, and he thinks that if he hurts Danny then Danny will grow up to be a good strong abusive father too. Here's some of that real horror bleeding in through the supernatural stuff, because that's exactly what happens in lots of situations in the real world.

Wendy, because she didn't learn not to go downstairs by herself last time, worries that maybe Jack got out since she can't hear him anymore, so she takes her knife and creeps down the stairs. At the bottom Jack attacks her again, beating her with the mallet and breaking a couple ribs, it's kind of terrifying how absolutely lunatic and murderous he is now, but she gets him in the back with the knife. Jack, possessed by a hotel monster, decides it will take more than a huge-ass kitchen knife through his back to kill him, and gets up to chase after his wife with his roque mallet of doom. I wonder how King came up with using a roque mallet. Did the hotel he stayed at have an old-fashioned roque court? It's an odd little detail.

But he chases Wendy down the hall. She locks herself back into the room, but Danny is gone. Jack, now completely possessed by the hotel and running on some sort of malicious autopilot that gives him lunatic strength despite the fact that he should be dead, pounds his way through the door, and then into the bathroom where Wendy is hiding, but then the sound of an approaching snowmobile causes him to leave.

Because you see, all this while we've been jumping back and forth between the hotel action, which I've been describing, and Hallorann getting on a plane, flying to Colorado, landing in a storm, getting a rental car, fishtailing through the snow, renting a snowmobile, and coming up to the Overlook. I like Hallorann but I don't like this back and forth jumping when we're reaching the climax. The action at the hotel is reaching a feverish pitch as Jack tries to murder his family, and I don't really like being forcibly dragged away from it over and over for Hallorann getting closer. The timelines of the two stages don't even match up, we keep going back in time a little for Hallorann's story. I'm sure there's some sort of specific effect King is going for with the back and forth, letting you catch your breath before going back to the hotel, but it doesn't really work for me. But I forgive him because as Hallorann gets to the hotel he gets attacked by the book's best character — the hedge lion.

It's fully alive now and roars psychically in his mind and rakes him with branch-claws, but it's awesome because even as an evil hotel-embodied ghost-hedge-animal it's still a cat, and it plays with its food rather than finishing Hallorann off. This lets Hallorann get to the gas can and light the lion on fire, destroying it. I love it.

Hallorann's heroic entrance to the hotel, however, is spoiled when Jack is waiting for him in the dark and knocks him the fuck out with two swings of the mallet. So much for that. It ... was a good try? A for effort, Dick.

At this point we come to realize that it's not even Jack anymore, still lurching about with a knife in its back. It's just the Overlook now, using his body, using his memories, using his voice, powering his body, which by all rights should be dead. But it's not Jack inside anymore. The hotel in Jack's body goes up to the third floor, where Danny is hiding after Tony told him to. We also learn that Tony is definitely a part of Danny, because Danny's middle name is Anthony and Tony looks like a slightly older version of Danny. Tony is the part of him that understands things, I guess.

Anyway, Danny and the Overjack face off in a fantastic scene. As the Overjack goes to deliver the killing blow, Danny simply talks to it and it hesitates. Jack returns for a moment and tells Danny to run, but Danny refuses. The Overjack uses the mallet to destroy Jack's face, wiping out whatever of Jack is left in there, and then speaks directly to Danny in its own voice, it's a fully realized bad guy now. It's kind of chilling. But Danny realizes that the hotel has forgotten about the boiler, which creeps up in pressure that needs to be dumped off two or three times a day. It hasn't been touched since Jack nearly forgot it that morning. It's about to explode. The Overjack loses its shit and shambles its way toward the basement to try to stop the boiler, while Danny finds Wendy and Hallorann, who are both injured but alive. They escape as the boiler explodes and the hotel goes up in flames. The hedge animals scream and die. The hotel tries desperately to latch onto Hallorann's mind to make him finish the job, but Hallorann resists and the hotel dies.

We get a brief epilogue where we see that everything is going to be okay in the long run for Danny and Wendy and Hallorann, a sort of release of tension that the reader probably needs after the action at the hotel went right to the wall. The end!

Overall this was a great book, easily King's best at this point in his career. The characters were miles better and more realized than any he had written before, and with most of the story taking place in a single setting, with that setting itself being the bad guy, it made for a tight, focused story for the most part. The writing was a step up from 'Salem's Lot, with King getting into some of that in-head semi-omniscient character self-dialogue he does, and with the focus so tight on three characters it works well.

I'm still not completely digging King's endings. The ending sequence of 'Salem's Lot didn't quite work for me, hitting a long plateau before the climax. In The Shining, the rising action at the hotel is wonderful and taut, but this time King skips the story back and forth from the action to Hallorann and once to Danny, and the different sequences don't quite line up on the timeline, and I wasn't crazy about that either. But I'm not actually complaining because the actual long sequence of Jack descending into madness, the hotel taking him over, and then Jack (or the Overjack) trying to murder his family was very well executed, and there was tension throughout. King almost overdid it, in fact, pounding out the action and the scares as fast as they could come to his mind.

On my Stephen King Quality Meter, I give The Shining a solid 88/100. I was tempted to give it a little more, but I don't want to jump the gun and leave myself no room if better books come along in this readthrough. Either way, The Shining is a pretty good King book, and if anyone were trying to read the highlights of his career this is where I would tell that person to start.

As a final note, King is currently writing a sequel to The Shining, called Doctor Sleep. It's a story starring a grown-up Danny Torrance. I'm sure it'll be published by the time I reach that point in the readthrough.

Next: Rage (the first book under the Bachman pen-name)