It is scary, of course: a woman with a tusk instead of teeth pops up periodically to hang at second-floor window level and startle the bejesus out of you. 'When the disaster was big enough,' King writes, 'agony and violent death had an enriching quality.' They get a big kick out of 9/11. When Abra, a telepathic child, pushes into his consciousness asking for help, Danny gets sucked back into the terrain of his childhood, battling a bunch of centuries-old serial killers disguised as RV-driving pensioners (it is sometimes easy to overlook how slyly funny King is) who literally feed off the pain of others. In the sequel, Wendy, the mother, is dead from lung cancer and Danny is alone, working in a hospice in a small town, where his paranormal talents help people towards a peaceful death.

The Shining had such resonance – in part because of Kubrick's film, which King disliked – that one returns to the characters with a sense of deep familiarity. 'Good.'ĭoctor Sleep, his 56th novel, revisits Danny in adulthood, when he has become an alcoholic drifter haunted by the memory of his raging father. 'Really?' King says when I mention my unease, and grins. Rather than spend the night in a remote B&B near his house, as his publisher suggests, I stay in Portland, 100 miles away, in a hotel where there are lights and cars going by, and people to hear you scream. It is at the end of a long, deserted road, surrounded by woodland and in a GPS dead zone this, after a week of rereading King novels, is unrelaxing. We are at a house in Maine that his assistant, opening the door, drily refers to as 'spare' it's one of several King properties in the area, on a lake, and designated vaguely as a summer house. And I thought, well, let's find out.'Īt 65, King is a big, shaggy presence, towering despite his slightly stooped shoulders and with an air of affable amusement at the vastness of his success and all that comes with it. Specifically: what the story would have looked like if Danny's father – mad 'white-knuckle alcoholic' Jack Torrance – had 'found AA. But when they ask what happened to Danny Torrance, the boy from The Shining, he always found himself wondering. When fans ask what happened to Charlie McGee in Firestarter, for example, King isn't interested. Now and then, a story lingers in his mind long after it's published. Still, he says, when people say, 'Steve, your books are uneven', he's confident 'there's good stuff in all of 'em'. Stephen King has written a lot of books – at 56 novels, he's closing in on Agatha Christie – some of which have been great, some of which less so.

The shining by stephen king