A review by will_cherico
The Shining by Stephen King

5.0

Around the time I started rereading this, The Shining was trending on Twitter (I'm not calling it X) because of Stephen King's negative comments regarding the movie. While I think the film is one of the greatest horror movies ever made, rereading the actual text has reminded me just how tragic this story is and how much more I like its Jack Torrance. This book takes a long time for something tangible to happen - around 300 pages, as a matter of fact - and the time before that is used for incredibly impactful character building. The book works as well as it does because Jack, Danny, and Wendy are such interesting characters. There are so many instances in the book that feel like a moment where Jack will truly change, and it makes his transformation so much more monstrous and upsetting. You can tell it's a deeply personal and relatable character to Stephen King, and the openness and honesty Jack has with himself about where he's gone wrong in his life feels so sobering (pun not intended) and introspective in a way that I've only seen in fiction a few times. Wendy gets a lot more to do than she does in the movie, and her role as the "normal" one living with a shining boy and an insane husband makes her crucial to getting into the story. And then there's Danny, a perfect representation of the quiet intelligence and magic Stephen King understands children to have. The last 200 pages of this book get your heart thudding like not many others can, in large part because of the first 400. Classic Stephen King might just be scarier the second time around.