38. The Truth Behind Stephen King’s The Shining

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3:38She made herself speak calmly, her eyes never leaving his. Her voice was low and husky, almost a whisper. It hurt to talk. Listen to me, Danny. It wasn't your daddy trying to hurt me, and I didn't want to hurt him. The hotel has gotten into him, Danny. The overlook has gotten into your daddy. Do you understand me? Some kind of knowledge came slowly back into Danny's eyes.

4:07Dominic Sandbrook: The bad stuff. There was none of it here before, was there? No. The hotel put it here. The... She broke off in a fit of coughing and spat out more blood. Her throat already felt puffed to twice its size. The hotel made him drink it. Do you hear those people he was talking to this morning? Yes, the hotel people. I heard them too. And that means the hotel is getting stronger. It wants to hurt all of us. But I think, I hope that it can only do that through your daddy. He was the only one it could catch. Are you understanding me, Danny? It's desperately important that you understand. The hotel car daddy I know you love your daddy I do too We have to remember that the hotel is trying to hurt him As much as it is us So what a chilling moment that was So that was The Shining Written by Stephen King and published in January 1977 One of the best known horror novels of the last 50 years A huge bestseller in the 1970s and the inspiration for Stanley Kubrick's film, which came out in 1980 and starred Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duval.

5:26Dominic Sandbrook: And the film, which actually Tabby has not seen, so you are coming to this untainted by knowledge of the film. The film has become such a cult classic that even people who have never read a word of Stephen King will have a sense of the basic story because, of course, people have seen clips on YouTube, they'll have seen memes, all of these kinds of things. So, Tabby, the story, I mean, even you knew the story before you started reading the book, I imagine. Yeah, well, I knew the story without having even watched it from knowing of the film. I mean, it's an interesting question. I would say that The Shining is the most famous of Stephen King's many, many successful novels.

6:06Do you think it would be as famous if it had not been for the film?

6:09Dominic Sandbrook: No, no, no, definitely not. I mean, when you think of Stephen King, you think of Misery, Carrie, The Shining, Pet Sematary, I don't know. I mean, all of these things have been made into TV miniseries or films. So it's very hard to separate them out. So the plot of the novel, which is actually quite different from the film. Yeah. It's the story of a young family. There's the would-be writer Jack Torrance, his long-suffering wife, Wendy, and their five-year-old son, Danny. And they're hired to look after this vast, empty hotel, the Overlook, high in the mountains of Colorado during the winter season, when so off-season no one else is there.

6:47Jack is a recovering alcoholic and he has serious anger management issues and a family history of domestic violence. Wendy has been so alarmed by his behaviour in the past that she has come close to divorcing him. Meanwhile, their son, Danny, there's something special about him. He has an unusual sense of knowing, an unusual maturity. And what it is is he has the power of second sight, which another character the hotel's head chef describes as a shining the shining almost as soon as they move into the overlook strange things start happening everything starts going wrong jack becomes obsessed with the gory gruesome dark history of the hotel wendy is worried that he has begun drinking again and danny starts having these visions of blood-drenched bedrooms and corpses in beds and bathtubs and a man with a mallet pursuing him down corridors.

7:48This one word splattered across a mirror that we'll come to.

7:53Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, red rum, red rum. Now, if you've seen the film, people remember Danny when he's sort of possessed in some way and he's going kind of red rum, red rum with his finger. But actually, the film and the book are quite different. So the red rum is in both the novel and the film. but some of the best known elements of the shining in the popular imagination are only in the film. So Jack typing all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy again and again and again, the single line. That's in the film, it's not in the book. Jack smashing through a door, shouting, Here's Johnny! Such an iconic film. I couldn't believe it wasn't in the book.

8:31I kept waiting for it.

8:32Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, not in there. I mean, Jack Nicholson actually came up with the line, I believe, on set, a sort of parody of the talk show host, Johnny Carson. Danny's seeing these incredibly creepy twin girls kind of at the end of the corridor as he's kind of peddling along the corridor. Again, in the film, not in the book. And the ending of the story, the resolution, is completely different. And actually even the death toll is different. And I think the themes of the book are quite different from the film. So if you've seen the film of The Shining, sort of very charismatic central performance from Jack Nicholson.

9:06Dominic Sandbrook: Jack Nicholson is always, you know, he specializes in playing unstable characters. The film is basically a charismatic, unstable character who gets madder and madder as the book goes on. That's the film. In the book, first of all, the supernatural element is much stronger. There are lots of allusions to Edgar Allan Poe. There are lots of ghostly goings on. There are lots of visions and visitations and things that are not in the film. The book is much more sympathetic to the two main characters, I think. So Jack is much more fleshed out. He has a backstory. And Wendy, who in the film is not really much of a character at all, although it's, I think, a brilliant performance by Shelley Duval in the book, there are more layers to her.

9:49Dominic Sandbrook: And we're in her head much more than we are in the film. She's a very active character in the book. She's a very active character. And finally, the book is not just about the supernatural element of the horror, of the madness. It's also about their family life, Jack's alcoholism, his history of domestic abuse, and the sort of pressures on the nuclear family in 1970s America. So we're going to get into all this. And we'll get into Stephen King himself, of course, who must be one of the most read, most best-selling, best-known American writers of the last 50 years or so. I have to make a confession to the audience.

10:26Dominic Sandbrook: I had never read word of Stephen King before about two weeks ago when I started reading this book. So this is my first time. What about you? I'm totally the same. I don't like scary books on the whole. Right. But let's talk about Stephen King. So he's one of the best selling writers in modern times. Estimates usually agree he sold about 400 million. Yeah. Which is unbelievable. Unbelievable. And so many film adaptations of his books. so Carrie, Stand By Me The Shawshank Redemption more recently Pet Sematary and It and of course The Shining I mean he's prolific he's won a huge number of awards including a Lifetime Achievement Medal in 2003 at the National Book Awards and a Congressional National Medal for the Arts Stephen King's associated with one state above all which is Maine you've never been to Maine have you Tabby it's absolutely lovely it's like the sort of it would appeal to you I think because it's kind of like the Cornwall of North America.

11:25Dominic Sandbrook: So it's kind of rugged coastline, nice coast. Shilets. People in quarter ships. It's very much your territory. This is where Stephen King was born in 1947, and his dad was a Hoover salesman, a vacuum cleaner salesman, and I have to say not a great role model. His mother, Stephen King's mum, once said to him, Stephen, your father was the only vacuum cleaner salesman that Electrolux ever had who sold vacuum cleaners to widows at two o 'clock in the morning. You look puzzled by this, but I believe that he was... It's because he was unfaithful. I believe he was using his vacuum cleaning equipment selling as an excuse.

12:01She wasn't lauding his talents as a salesman, presumably. No, other talents.

12:06Dominic Sandbrook: I've got to sell a Hoover to Mrs. So-and-so down the road. I'm going to be back in a couple of hours. She's like, what, at midnight? Yeah. Great to tell your son that as well. Yeah. Well, he walked out when Stephen King was two. He went out one day. This is quite Tabitha's eye, right? He went out one day to buy cigarettes and never came back. We're all waiting, honestly. This could be my last episode. You'll never know. So his mum, who's called Ruth, she brought up Stephen and his brother David on her own. They moved at least six times, I think before he was about 11, and they relied on her relatives for help.

12:40Dominic Sandbrook: So a sort of slightly troubled family background, and you can see how that might inform some of the themes of The Shining. Like so many of the writers on this show, he's very bookish. He said, I read everything from Nancy Drew to Psycho. So quite American, but a huge influence is Lord of the Flies. And I think you can see shades of that maybe slightly bleak view of what human nature is capable of in a lot of King's stories. so he wrote the introduction to a Faber edition in 2011 and he in that he wrote that as a boy he once asked a woman driving a mobile library do you have any stories about how kids really are and she gave him Golding's books so pessimistic and he loved it he remembers it as the first book with hands strong ones that reached out of the pages seized me by the throat such like aggressive of visceral descriptive prose.

13:33That's very much his style, isn't it? Yeah, totally. It said to me, this is not just entertainment, it's life or death. Crikey.

13:41Dominic Sandbrook: And actually, I looked at a list of his favourite books. He's very book club friendly because his favourite books are things like 1984, The Lord of the Rings, Bleak House, Blood Meridian, Master and Commander. I mean, he should really be listening to this show. I suppose he would say he doesn't need to because he doesn't need our opinions. Because he read them. Yeah. Yeah, but you know, we can have a chat. Got to get him on one day. He could send in his thoughts to our newsletter, free newsletter book club notes. It comes out every Saturday and you can sign up. Stephen, if you're listening, you can sign up at thebookclubhq.com.

14:13Dominic Sandbrook: He went to the University of Maine on a scholarship. He wrote his first story, I Was a Teenage Grave Robber, in a comics fanzine. I'm hooked. Yeah, it's a good title. And then he had a first paid story published, the glass floor in the magazine startling mystery stories in 1967 when he was at the university of maine he joined this writing workshop and this was a huge influence on him both professionally and personally so his professor was called bert hartland and bert hartland was a big influence on him he said he was the greatest english teacher i ever had it was he who first showed me the way to the pool which he called the language pool the myth pool where we can all go down to drink I love this I love this too I have trod the path that leads there often in the years since And I can think of no better place to spend one's days The water is still sweet and the fish still swim Yeah, I was struck by that because I've always been amazed At how many stories Stephen King has in him He's not someone that seems to have ever had writer's block He's never dried up He just has an extraordinarily active imagination Say what you will about his writing Yes But it was at this workshop that there was another pivotal moment in Stephen King's life.

15:25He met another student with whom he fell in love and to whom he got married. And she had a truly fantastic name, a name you should recommend her instantly to all listeners. Her name was Tabitha.

15:40Dominic Sandbrook: So you're so excited about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so he graduates from university in 1970 and then he trained as a high school teacher, but he couldn't find a job. So he worked at an industrial laundry and sold short stories to obscure little magazines. Eventually he gets a job teaching English at Hampton in Maine. He's still trying to write. He's living with Tabitha and they have two small children and they're living in a trailer. All of this is quite the shining, I would say, the opening section. The aspiring writer. The aspiring writer. Not struggling to make ends meet. Yeah, a family on their haunches, all that.

16:13Dominic Sandbrook: Slightly shrieky wife called Tabitha. Absolutely brilliant, supportive wife called Tabitha. Yeah. Because then in around 1972, he has the breakthrough. He has two ideas. Firstly, he imagines a girl having her first period in the shower at school and other teenagers being cruel to her. Second, he'd been struck by this article that he read in Life magazine about telekinesis. So he thinks I'll combine the two into a story. So early on, that kind of combination of the sanguinary and the supernatural. he hates the result actually he thinks it's rubbish he throws it in the bin but tabitha saint that she is she retrieves it she says it's brilliant she wants to know what happens um so he agrees to keep writing it partly to please her yeah partly because he's run out of other ideas i wonder if he just needed confidence more than anything he has so many ideas in his career everybody needs clearly needs a tabitha to give them that confidence everybody needs a Tabitha.

17:13But this is the book that becomes Carrie. He sends it to Doubleday. They agree to buy the hardback for$2 ,500, about 10 times that today. Then there's this gigantic deal for the paid back rights. He gets$200 ,000. Transformative, life-changing. He's made it as a professional writer. Carrie was published in 1974. It gets strong reviews and it sells well. It's seen as one of a handful of novels in the late 1960s and the early 1970s that establishes the horror genre. We discussed this a little bit in our American Psycho episode. So for instance, Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, and he follows it up with Salem's Lot, which I'd actually love to read.

17:53Another horror novel about a small town in Maine where the residents are all vampires.

17:58Dominic Sandbrook: So his third novel is The Shining, published 1977. And the origins of this book are a great story in and of themselves. So in autumn 1974, King has made it. He's got money. He and his wife decide to get away from Maine for a bit because they've been in Maine all this time and they've been looking after his mother who has been dying of cancer and they need a break. And King said, I wanted to spend a year away from Maine and I thought I'd like to give my next book a different background. So away from New England. And he claimed later that he opened an atlas and just pointed randomly at a point in America and his finger was on Boulder, Colorado.

18:40Dominic Sandbrook: I've been to Colorado. It's an extremely nice state. It seems highly implausible to me that he just happens to point to a lovely college town in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains. Maybe it's his shining. Maybe it's the muses throwing him a bone. Maybe it's something supernatural. So they've moved to Boulder, which is lovely. And one day that autumn, they decide they're going to drive up to this place called Estes Park, which is the gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park. And there's a very grand hotel, very well known there, called the Stanley Hotel, where they check in. And the Stanley Hotel was founded in 1909 as a health resort, as a sanatorium for rich people from the East Coast coming out West.

19:21Dominic Sandbrook: They've got tuberculosis or whatever, and they want to break in the mountains. And the hotel, the Stanley Hotel, had a sort of checkered history, a lot of bad luck. Every winter, it had to close because the weather was so bad. So for that reason, it's never really been the money spinner that its progenitors hoped. And the Stanley Hotel is obviously the overlook in this book, even though, for legal reasons, every copy of The Shining begins with Stephen King saying, it's not based on any one hotel. It is based on this hotel because he's told loads of stories and interviews over the years. Some of them perhaps slightly embellished, but they're great stories.

20:01Dominic Sandbrook: So to quote, when we arrived, they were only just getting ready to close for the season. And we found ourselves the only guests in the place with all these long, empty corridors. Anyway, he and Tabby, they would have dinner in this huge grand dining room, just the two of them. And there was like taped classical music playing on the loudspeaker and there and of all the tables theirs was the only one set for dinner and Stephen King said except for our table all the chairs were up on the tables so the music's echoing down the hall and I mean it was like God had put me there to hear that and to see those things and by the time I went to bed that night I had the whole book in my mind but a different story that he told in a different interview he said when Tabitha went to bed I walked alone around the hotel and I was the only person there and I went into the bar and the bartender was still there and he was a man called Grady and he gave me a drink and then and I quote that night I dreamed of my three-year-old son running through the corridors looking back over his shoulder his eyes wide screaming he was being chased by a fire hose I woke up with a tremendous jerk sweating all over with an inch of falling out of bed I and then a brilliant this is a this is very uh Tabitha I mean, this is my daily routine.

21:19Dominic Sandbrook: I got up, lit a cigarette, sat in a chair looking out the window at the Rockies. And by the time the cigarette was done, I had the bones of the book firmly set in my mind. That's how all of our podcasts come to me. Really? Yeah. Sit in a chair, look out over Archway. And the next thing I know, boom, I've got an episode. Boom. You've worked out your amusing joke for the episode. So this is the setting. but the themes of the book are also rooted in King's own experience obviously it would be reductive and inaccurate to say oh well Jack Torrance is King also quite offensive but there's definitely some King in him for one thing the experience of being struggling writers King at the beginning of his career but then most importantly Jack's drinking in King's memoir on writing He says he wrote The Shining without even realising I was writing about myself.

22:19He was drinking very heavily in the mid-1970s. And Tabitha once confronted him about this drinking decades later in a stark fashion. She emptied a bag of his drug debris and booze bottles, etc., ashtrays, whatever, in front of their kids. Wow. That would do it, I think. And then there's the second thing. And this is Jack's aggression towards his son, Danny. in an interview in the mid-1980s he said as a young father with two children i was horrified by my occasional feelings of real antagonism towards my children when you ever stop once you ever go to bed so when i wrote this book i wrote a lot of that down and tried to get it out of my system but it was also a confession so yeah i mean i don't think he's confessing to be no he's not he's god no make that clear he's not confessing to domestic abuse or violence or anything he's admitting to that urge.

23:14Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, to losing your temper. I mean, there's no parent alive who hasn't lost their temper with their child at some point. And I think that tells us something about how Stephen King understands the genre that he's working, which is horror. So there are some writers for whom horror is just pure melodrama. It's, you know, there's monsters, there are ghosts. It's a scary story, you know, and that's it. There's no meaning. King is very adamant in interviews. He's given loads of interviews that the supernatural stuff must stand for something, must be about something. Well, this is quite well established.

23:48We discussed this when we did Dracula on our miniseries and the rest is history. We discussed it in American Psycho, how maybe not in terms of an individual's inner torment or whatever, but horror often reflects, it's a projection of the societal concerns, fears, anxieties of a given period or a given age.

24:07Dominic Sandbrook: Completely it is, completely. and I found an interview that King gave to The Guardian in 2013 and he was looking back at writing The Shining specifically and he said for me when I'm writing horror you know it is an exciting thing in literary thing in and of itself but it often stands for real fears so the fear of you know dying the fear of having cancer the fear of having a car accident or as he put it the parent who punches instead of kissing. He says, if such terrible occurrences were acts of darkness, they might actually be easier to cope with. But instead of being dark, they have their own terrible brilliance, and none shine so bright as the acts of cruelty we sometimes perpetuate in our own families.

24:50Dominic Sandbrook: And he said, if you look at them, it's as if you look at them directly and you're blinded. They're too much for you to cope. So you use a ghost story or a horror story as a sort of filter, as a lens through which to view some of these issues. The truth is, he wrote, that monsters are real and ghosts are real too. They live inside us and sometimes they win. And I like that way of putting it. I mean, obviously you can write about these things without the filter, but the idea that you're effectively writing about the cruelty within a family through the lens of a horror story and actually in quite a bleak way.

25:25I mean, that's also quite Lord of the Flies, really, isn't it?

25:27Dominic Sandbrook: Very Lord of the Flies. It's the monster within us and sometimes the monster wins. Yeah. That's exactly. William Golding would have completely endorsed that verdict. Yeah. I mean, it's no wonder he's so prolific because he writes it very, very quickly. He wrote 3 ,000 words a day. So his first draft takes him only about three months. Remarkable. But Tabby, I mean, how many words a day do you write when you're doing the notes? You write thousands and thousands. 20 ,000. Yeah. But I mean, I'm not. That's the incredible thing about writers, say, in comparison to what we do. we are walking tracks that have been like laid out for us you know we're not coming up with things totally original you know i mean i am but you speak for yourself you've been doing this for too long

26:13you're washed up yeah thanks anyway anyway um so the shining's published by double day in january 1977. Another huge hit, though not all the reviews love it. So notably, Richard Lingerman in the New York Times calls King a writer of fairly engaging and preposterous claptrap.

26:33Dominic Sandbrook: Oh, hush. He gives him some marks for setting pace and thrills, but he deducts marks for the writing and actually mocks King for using cliches. For instance, Wendy's breath is taken away. Jack holds on for dear life. not to be snotty or anything but I definitely spotted a couple of cliches oh Tavi's been very snotty Stephen if you're listening Tavi's been really horrible I really enjoyed this Steve but anyway he also said it's a pity because his sheer rookie's energy, this is King's is engaging and in the relationship of Jack and Wendy and I so agree with this there is a core of psychological truth that might have been crafted into a subtle psychological chiller I so agree with that.

27:19I really think one of the most interesting things about The Shining is the relationship between Jack and Wendy.

27:25Dominic Sandbrook: I agree completely. I totally agree. And actually, when I was reading this book, we'll come to the second half when we talk about, you know, get into the structure of the book and the characters. I did think within this book there was an alternative book that could have been written which would be much more oblique much more subtle and careful and understated and would have I think perhaps been a better book but not as successful and obviously King is working a different genre I'm not dissing he's choosing to do a very melodramatic grotesque gory kind of book and And that's fine because that's what he set out to do.

28:03Dominic Sandbrook: But you could have told this story differently. Yeah. I mean, obviously, as you say, it probably wouldn't have been as successful a book because this is very successful. And King goes on to be one of the bestselling writers of the 1980s and the 1990s. The issue is, which we've alluded to, is it any good? And I actually think it's kind of interesting because this is often something that is raised about books that thrill horror. even in the movie industry horrors very rarely win awards or accolades there are exceptions there's a snobbery around it because it has such an obvious visceral reaction it's not a lingerer it's part of the reason that Sinners with Michael B.

28:45Jordan, the Ryan Coogler when that got an Oscar people were like great, horror is finally being taken seriously and I think maybe that's part of the reason people overlook Stephen King or dismiss him as a bit of a Dan Brown So when he's given the medal at the National Book Awards in 2003, our old friend Harold Bloom, I bet not a fan, in his perpetually sunny way, says, it's an extraordinary decision, another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life. I've described King in the past as a writer of Penny Dreadfuls, but perhaps even that is too kind. He is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, book by book basis.

29:25Dominic Sandbrook: Harsh. that said returning to my earlier point there are writers and critics who do defend king and say that he's underrated for instance the novelist david foster wallace he says he's one of the first people to talk about real americans and how they live to capture real american dialogue and all its foul-mouthed grandeur i'm not sure that's i'm not sure that's fair i mean we just record an episode about capture in the rye yeah i think there's lots of books i i don't disagree that King can be very good on how people speak and ordinary people speak to each other and how they relate. But I don't think he's the first person ever to have done this.

30:00No, I agree. I agree. And then the essayist, Cynthia Ozick. Never mind all the bestsellers and all the stereotypes. This man is a genuine true-born writer. And that was a revelation. I actually do think he's a true-born writer. He is not Tom Clancy. He writes sentences and he has a literary focus and his writing is filled with literary history.

30:19Dominic Sandbrook: Well, his writing is filled with literary history. It is. That point is definitely well made. So whether The Shining is perfectly written, I'm not sure. And King himself has actually in interviews said, you know, it's a young man's book. I'd write it differently today or whatever. He is not just a hack who is pouring out bestselling literature. I mean, King, as we've said, studied literature. He was in this writer's workshop. And there are literary allusions in this book. There are a lot of literary allusions. So to give you just three, allusions to gothic literature in particular, which obviously King is really interested in.

30:49Dominic Sandbrook: right through the book allusions to Edgar Allan Poe so the epigraph is from the Mask of the Red Death which is the short story published in 1842 probably the most famous story Edgar Allan Poe ever wrote the motif of this kind of sinister masked ball runs right through the book lines from Edgar Allan Poe's short story keep kind of bobbing to the surface in this in this way which we'll talk went in the second half. Then Edgar Allan Poe himself was inspired by the gothic stories of the 18th century writer Horace Walpole. Wendy herself, the character Wendy, mentions Horace Walpole. She says to Jack, they talk about dining in an empty hotel, the scene that happened to Stephen King and Tabitha.

31:33Dominic Sandbrook: And she says, it's like being in a Horace Walpole novel. So it's a novel that's aware of its own kind of literary history, I guess. And then also when Danny is drawn to room 217 which Halloran who is the chef the hotel chef who had first told Danny about The Shining and he has specifically told Danny to avoid room 217. Danny thinks of a story Daddy had read to him once when he was drunk and this is the story of Bluebeard who when his wife discovers that he has murdered all of his previous wives this image is burned into Danny's mind the severed heads of Bluebeard's seven previous wives were in the room each one on its own pedestal the eyes turned up to whites, the mouths unhinged and gaping in silent screams.

32:16Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, so a good example of Jack's perhaps slightly unusual parenting style. Always a bit unhinged, yeah. But anyway, the point is, I guess, that Stephen King is a much more literary novelist, or a novelist with greater literary aspirations, shall we say, than people have sometimes given him credit for. You know, he's not Jane Austen, he's not Gustav Flaubert, but at the same time, he's definitely not Dan Brown. I mean, he's somebody who is much more reflective about his craft and so on. And his book is a cut above i think it's reasonable to say it's a cut above your sort of airport thriller or something you're just sort of generic airport yeah yeah forgotten in a couple of years and this was what brought his book to the attention of stanley kubrick of the film director so in 1976 kubrick had made a film called barry linden which was an adaptation of a book by thackeray it didn't make any money nobody wanted to see it so kubrick got the proofs of the shining from the publishers.

33:10Dominic Sandbrook: And he'd read a lot of horror books and he hadn't finished them. He said they're useless. This is the one book that he finished. He said, I like the plot. I like the ideas, the structure. They are much more imaginative than usual in the horror genre. So Kubrick bought the rights and he said, I don't want Stephen King to write the screenplay. I'm going to get another novelist to write the screenplay. And he got this woman called Diane Johnson. And Diane Johnson was both a published novelist and she taught Gothic literature at Berkeley. This is an incredible fact. So this is why we've gone on this little tangent.

33:40Dominic Sandbrook: Diane Johnson, if people listen to our previous podcast about the bell jar, they will know that Sylvia Plath won this competition to go with 20 young women to work on Mademoiselle magazine in New York City in 1953. And that's the first section of the bell jar. Diane Johnson was one of these women. There you go. One of the women whose lives Sylvia Plath destroyed. because remember we said that so uncannily accurate was her portrayal of that time and many of the women were very upset yeah they had food poisoning and whatnot diane johnson was one of these women she now all these years later 20 years on is confronted with the shining she has to adapt it and she actually thinks it's rubbish diane johnson is not a fan of the book she said it's scary it's effective and it works but it is quite pretentious and i quote a very bad book which is extraordinary but of course that is why she has no qualms whatsoever about rewriting it and dropping huge chunks of the book to basically turn it into the screenplay of the film and the great irony of this whole story is if we're totally honest would we be doing the shining on this show were it not for the film we probably wouldn't because it wouldn't be so well known i I mean, it just wouldn't have the traction in the public mind that it has.

34:59Dominic Sandbrook: And yet, the irony of this, Stephen King absolutely hated the film of The Shining. He said it was maddening, perverse, and disappointing. He's given multiple interviews about it. He's incredibly dismissive about Stanley Kubrick's work. He says, basically, Stanley Kubrick knew nothing about the horror genre at all. He made his film. He butchered my characters. He butchered my story. And it's the curse of Stephen King's life that everybody else thinks the film of The Shining is great. And loves it. That would be gutting, actually, wouldn't it? Yeah, if it's your characters and your story. Let's take a break.

35:30And when we come back, we will check into the Overlook Hotel. We will make our way to room 217 and the dark secrets, the lurk within. And we'll find out exactly what is going on with the Torrance family.

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37:39Welcome back to The Book Club, everybody. Now, would you like to check into a remote and sinister establishment haunted by memories of terrible cruelty and premonitions of dreadful suffering?

37:52Dominic Sandbrook: Yes, I would. We, Dominic and I, are the caretakers of just such an institution. So let us lure you in to our weekly newsletter, Book Club Notes. It's entirely free. It comes in every Saturday. So many fun bits and pieces. You can give your own feedback. The kind of feedback that chills our blood, if not yours. You can give your own views on the book. You'll get some extra tidbits from Dominic and I. It's huge. So do make that deal with the devil. Now to business. let's get into the shining itself so introduce us to our to our first two characters so we meet the key characters in the first two chapters the first chapter we meet jack torrance he's being interviewed by a man called mr allman for the job as the caretaker of the overlook and then the second chapter is about wendy and danny and they're at home in boulder waiting to find out if he's got the job basically and in these two chapters if you go through them king sets up some of the book's themes and he gives you hints of the darkness that's going to consume this family.

38:52Dominic Sandbrook: So the very first line of the book, the very first exchange, Jack is seething at what he sees as the condescension of Mr. Ullman. There is a sense of Jack's anger and his temper. I think this is really well done because it strings the bow or something. I don't know, it's the sense of something strung far too tight that is being stretched and stretched and stretched throughout from this point and you know that it's going to snap. Yeah, that Jack is irascible. He is not easygoing. He could perhaps be a little bit difficult. You get this from the very beginning of the book, but in an understated way.

39:28Dominic Sandbrook: It's not like the guy interviewing from a job and Jack rises from his chair and like pummels him to death or something. No. It's just that Jack is annoyed and offended by this bloke in a way that you would be. Yeah. And King quite cleverly sort of increases that as the book continues. Yeah. There's a reference to his alcoholism, but a veiled reference. So Ullman is talking to him about how they had a previous caretaker and stuff and jack says well i won't be drinking i haven't drunk for 14 months so the implication obviously that he was once an alcoholic we have references fleeting references not fully explained to some sort of violence involving jack yeah so an attack on a student called george hatfield we'll come to this a little bit later and of a reference veiled but so not clear at this point something happened with danny that meant that danny's arm was then in a cast then we're in chapter two, Wendy, when we meet her, she's very unhappy.

40:20Dominic Sandbrook: She's almost crying. And actually at the end of the chapter, she breaks down in floods of tears. So it's obvious to us, something is not right with them, their marriage, you know, with her mental states and so on. Danny, the little boy, when they're talking, this is just at the beginning, they're talking about how he's lonely and how he doesn't have many friends and there's a solitariness to him and he doesn't have anybody everybody to play with but also in that first chapter jack is talking to the guy interviewing him and he says of his son oh danny is an extraordinary boy and obviously danny is an extraordinary boy because he has all these sort of powers so that's all set up in the first half but also set up is the hotel's own history of violence and specifically very tellingly the violence of a father towards his family so the previous caretaker or an earlier caretaker recently was a bloke called Delbert Grady.

41:11Dominic Sandbrook: He drank, he went mad, he killed his girls with a hatchet, he killed his wife with a shotgun and then he killed himself. And actually, as we'll see, we actually meet Delbert Grady, but he's become weirdly changed into a kind of English butler or something. Yeah, he's like a Bond villain. Jack, perhaps slightly dismissively, it's a sign of Jack's arrogance. He says to the interviewer, well, Grady didn't go to, he didn't graduate from high school, did he? And that was your mistake, you see, because he's an idiot. A stupid man is more prone to cabin fever. He's got nothing to do but bitch at his wife and nag at the kids and drink.

41:47Dominic Sandbrook: He'll get edgier and edgier and finally boom, boom, boom. But Jack is, you know, Jack is foolish there because actually what he's describing in this so-called stupid man is exactly, we can see this coming. It's exactly what's going to happen to him. In the film, of course, he's Jack Nicholson. And I think you have to get Jack Nicholson out of your head And when you read this, I mean, Jack Nicholson gives a very typically charismatic and quite manic performance. And it's brilliant. But the Jack Torrance in the book is more humdrum and is more ordinary. And the important thing about him is it's not that he's unstable and mad and all of this.

42:27Dominic Sandbrook: It's actually what becomes important is that he has all this baggage because of his backstory. Now, in the film, Jack Torrance has no backstory at all. He has no baggage. He has no kind of psychology. Whereas in the book, in The Shining, Jack's backstory is the heart of the whole book. So it's not that him being a writer is actually slightly irrelevant, I think. He's not even writing a book. He's writing a play. We don't know anything about it. And it's never really fleshed out. No, exactly right. It's what actually is the motor of the book is Jack wrestling with his own demons. And the question that runs through the book, and Stephen King has talked about this loads in interviews, is, is the violence and horror of the book, does it come from the hotel and the kind of ghosts and all of that sort of stuff?

43:16Dominic Sandbrook: Or does Jack bring it to the hotel? Is it in him? And there's a tension between those two things that runs through it. I mean, I think it's a combination because we find out that the Jack of the book comes from a small town in New Hampshire. He's the son of a male hospital nurse. And there are veiled hints right from the beginning that he's had a troubled past. So this is what he's bringing with him to the hotel. And as we'll find out, makes him more vulnerable to the hotel. And it becomes more explicit about a quarter of the way through the book. Something in particular sets, you know, triggers these memories.

43:51and he's on the roof and he's trying to get rid of a wasp's nest. I found these little triggers, there are a couple of them throughout, phrases that recur from his past that then suddenly leap into the present. I found that a little bit heavy-handed as with the wasp nest. Anyway, and he remembers, this is his sort of inner dialogue, inner thoughts, his temper all his life. He had been trying unsuccessfully to control it. He could remember himself at seven, spanked by a neighbour lady for playing with matches. he'd gone out and held a rock at a passing car his father had seen that and he descended on little Jackie roaring he had reddened Jack's behind and then blacked his eye and when his father had gone into the house muttering to see what was on television Jack had come upon a stray dog and kicked it into the gutter but another thing that comes out here is his father's punishment his father's violence so it's like a cycle of anger and violence passed generationally

44:49Dominic Sandbrook: And then Jack passing it on to the dog, right? Exactly. But this is all compounded by Jack's drinking. That said, I would say that for vast portions of the book, King is actually very sympathetic towards Jack and his struggle and his efforts to stay sober and do the right thing for his family. So he says Jack was an emotional alcoholic just as surely as he had been a physical one. The two of them were no doubt tied together somewhere deep inside him where you'd just as soon not look. Yeah, but that line, I think sometimes the style is quite revealing, quite interesting. So that's being told to us by an external narrator.

45:27Dominic Sandbrook: So there's a narrator, you know, we're in Jack's head, but there's an ambiguity there. Is this the narrator's verdict on Jack or is this simply Jack's verdict on himself and Jack kind of making excuses for himself? I think the line between, is it Jack speaking to himself? Is it the hotel speaking? Is it this external narrator? it's very hazy I actually think that's quite a good thing though because it means that it's impossible to trace absolutely or pinpoint the moment that Jack goes from man to monster Yes, agree completely and I've actually so having read the book I then went back and sort of effectively re-read it kind of flicking through it to sort of work out the structure and it is very hard to point to a single moment when Jack loses touch with reality and when he goes from being our protagonist with whom we feel sympathy to our antagonist, towards whom we feel horror.

46:19Dominic Sandbrook: Because I think we are meant to feel sympathy for him throughout. But as the book goes on, there are more and more hints, both of his violence in the past and also hints of the violence that there is to come. So there's a moment when Danny is having one of his kind of episodes, where he's having the kind of second sight and he's kind of, you know, hallucinating or whatever. And he's locked himself in the bathroom. And Jack is banging on the door. And Jack shouts to him, like, open up, open up. And he says, you'll get a spanking if you don't open up. The threat of violence. And we see this from Wendy's perspective as well.

46:56Dominic Sandbrook: So Wendy says to herself, he's losing his temper, she thought, and was more afraid. He hadn't touched Danny in anger since that evening two years ago. But at this moment, he sounded angry enough to do it. And this is a reference to an episode when Jack was drunk and he came back. And he found that Danny tipped something over his papers. Danny had gone into the cellar and opened some case with his old writing in all the play or something. And Jack came in and basically grabbed him and broke his arm. Yeah, and God, it's so visceral. They hear in memory in the present over and over the snap of his arm.

47:39Awful. and then we discover something else about him the reason he lost his job as a teacher and you know has been reduced to working as a hotel caretaker so he taught at an exclusive prep school stovington so this is very captured in the rye territory but clearly had a bit of his chip on his shoulder we could already see that when he spoke about you know oh it was his mistake to go to college because boom boom boom and all that um and he had an issue with one boy in particular George Hatfield, tall and shaggly blonde and almost insolently beautiful boy. So Jack is clearly envious of him and sees him as sort of this young Robert Redford.

48:16And he says he thinks that George won't have trouble scoring.

48:20Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, so he's almost sexually jealous of George. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's the chip again. And so Jack dropped George from the debate team because he stuttered. And then when he found George hacking his tyres up with a hunting knife, Jack had waded in, his fists held up in front of him, and it had seemed that he had been grinning. And then he had to be dragged off by the French mistress screaming, stop it, you're going to kill him. So incredible violence simmering just beneath the surface. Exactly, exactly. So in other words, even before they get to the hotel, Jack is bringing the violence with him.

48:55Dominic Sandbrook: So Jack does bring, the evil is partly within Jack, no question about that. But the evil is also in the hotel as well. I mean, Stephen King is very adamant about this. One of the things he doesn't like about Kubrick's film is he thinks that in the film, Jack just goes mad and the supernatural stuff is kind of in his head, whereas King wants it to be very clear that the supernatural stuff is real and it's in the hotel. If there's blame to be handed out, in Kubrick's version it sounds like it's 100 % all Jack. in this it's like 70 % the hotel preying on a man whose demons are bigger than those of most other people make him weak actually Jack is weaker so we should say something about the other characters so first of all there's Wendy Stephen King is very proud of Wendy as a creation and he has said one reason I hate the film is the film makes her this screaming sobbing wreck fun fact for people who maybe don't know much about the film that she's such a screaming sobbing wreck is that Shelley Duvall, the actress, Sally Kubrick will make her do hundreds, literally more than a hundred takes, so that she actually was a sobbing, exhausted wreck in real life.

50:07Yeah.

50:08Dominic Sandbrook: And her performance, when she cracks, when the film is really kicking off, and she is sobbing and she's distraught, I mean, it's a really visceral performance because you've basically got an actress who's been on her feet for 20 hours or something. She was quite damaged by it, wasn't she? Yeah, she found it really traumatising, I think. Stephen King doesn't like the Wendy in the film. He says she's too misogynistic. She's just there to scream and be stupid. That is not the woman I wrote about. Now, the woman he wrote about is definitely brave and Wendy is resourceful and she's gutsy and she's resilient.

50:42Dominic Sandbrook: Is there more to her than that? For me, I don't really think there is. I think she's just a housewife who fights back, basically. I think there is a bit more, actually, because, yeah, I mean, she does have real metal. she's also imperfect though I think it's interesting how quickly she and you actually slightly resent her for it in the first half of the book how quickly she turns on Jack and blames Jack for things one incident in particular yeah um and also the fact that we do get her backstory and the complicated relationship that she has with her feelings for Jack and had right at the beginning the one element of her personality that I think isn't isn't at all like developed and seems a bit pointless as he tries to build this whole thing about how she's got a very complex relationship with her mother and she's becoming her mother.

51:29It doesn't really go anywhere. He's trying to make it a mother, Jack and his father thing. I thought that was pointless, but I actually think Wendy is a good character.

51:37Dominic Sandbrook: What about Danny? What did we make of Danny? Danny's such an intriguing character, I think. So it's his psychic power that gives the book its title, you know, The Shining. I like that concept. I was intrigued by it. This is potentially a bit of a problem. He's five, but his mind is arguably that of a 12-year-old. It's so mature for his age. And reviewers have often commented on this, that Danny seems weirdly wise, with an improbably wide vocabulary, far in advance of a five-year-old. That said, you could argue, well, we know that he's brilliant and unusual and extraordinary. So he's ahead of his time.

52:13Dominic Sandbrook: I think it's so telling, though, that in the film, the film's Danny appears feels to us younger than the Danny in the book he's not given so much articulus and the reason is Kubrick employed a real six-year-old who simply would not have been able to say all the things that Danny says in the book fine that's valid but then you say that Kubrick doesn't lean into the supernatural element of it you know therefore the shining the concept of the shining isn't doesn't have as much weight as it would in the book Danny is an unusual boy, more advanced than he should be because he has The Shining. And that's a huge part of his personality.

52:49He can understand things intrinsically. But I also think that sometimes his attempts to bring him back down to his age are a little bit weak.

52:59Dominic Sandbrook: Okay. When he suddenly will be like, oh, I don't understand that. Or I can't read that. Or he suddenly is a little boy again. They don't quite fit together, the two sides of his personality. I like the way that the shining, the power of the shining is brought in though. Me too. And the way that Danny's mind flits from future to past to present and sort of back again. And actually, I like the way that his, so he's obviously got an imaginary friend, hasn't he, called Tony. Oh, I was so creeped out by Tony for the first half of the book. You're led to think that Tony's a bad guy, aren't you? Yes, I thought maybe in Stephen King's kind of universe, he was like the creature from It.

53:37Dominic Sandbrook: yes i can see that danny what i like about danny what i like about the way he's written king has this technique in this book that i do think works quite well which is that our sort of present day narrative is interrupted by random sentences in italics which are like shards of the past or kind of glimpses of the future and it's a little bit like reading you know william fulton of the sound and the fury or something which is jumping between different time periods and some lines are in italics and some aren't. And he does this with Wendy and with Jack as well. And they will be telling you something and then that will summon a memory of something or an illusion, a literary illusion, maybe a line from Edgar Allan Poe.

54:21Dominic Sandbrook: It's like it's bobbed up into their consciousness and then bobbed back down again. It really accelerates things as well because it becomes more frenetic the more that you're jumping between all these different time periods. The other thing I think that's done really well with Danny is the way that he senses the tensions and the, I don't know, dysfunctionalities in his parents' marriage. But he understands it in the way that a child would understand it. He just knows that mummy's not happy and daddy's not happy. You know, I think that's well done. Yeah, exactly. Some of his premonitions are very frightening and it gives the book its sense of growing tension, the foreboding.

54:59So in as early as chapter four, before they even get to the hotel, Danny's outside he's playing with this imaginary friend Tony and then he has this vision he was in a room filled with strange furniture a room that was dark snow splattered against the windows like thrown sand outside there was a hollow booming noise like a dreadful door being thrown wide footfalls across the room was a mirror and deep down in its silver bubble a single word appeared in green fire and that word was red rum I found that so chilling and then and then there's another vision he hears smashing glass approaching destruction a hoarse voice the voice of a madman made the more terrible by its familiarity come out come out take your medicine yeah

55:46Dominic Sandbrook: and so quite obvious maybe though it's obvious I think it probably is obvious we sort of know what's coming don't we I mean I think it's very difficult for us as readers to approach this as readers might have approached it in 1977 because the film is so embedded in the popular imagination that you know what's going to happen to Jack Torrance and what's going to happen to this family. I mean, some of the visions are very gory, aren't they? Gosh, he likes grisly descriptions, Stephen King. They're being shown around the hotel early on. They go into the presidential suite and Jack and Wendy are looking out the windows and saying, oh, the rock is very nice.

56:23Dominic Sandbrook: And Danny's looking into the bedroom and he sees it covered with blood and bits of people's brains. Yeah, bits of people's brains on the wallpaper, clotted with great splashes of dried blood, flecked with tiny bits of greyish white tissue, a surrealistic etching of a man's face, drawn back in terror and pain, the mouth yawning and half the head pulverised. Well, this is what makes it a horror book rather than just a ghost story. Yeah. So I was thinking, you know, you think of the great ghost stories, The Turn of the Screw by Henry James or the M.R. James ghost stories. It's always what's unsaid and it's always, you know, and there's an ambiguity.

56:57Dominic Sandbrook: Stephen King, I mean, there are bits that are unsaid and ambiguous, but if there's an opportunity to tell you that somebody's brains were splattered against the wall, he will absolutely do it. But then that's something he does well, I think, bringing us to the fourth main character of the book, and that's the Overlook Hotel itself, is the growing materiality of the hotel's malice. So in the film, the Hotel and Kubrick's film was built on a set, but it was based on a real hotel. and Tabby this is this is incredible this is a hotel that we have been to it's a hotel in Yosemite in California the Awani Hotel yeah we didn't stay in it too scary way too scary we did a this was on a Restless History tour to America and we looked around this very odd hotel huge ceilings shiny wood and our lovely tour guide Dylan told us it was the hotel from The Shining and I'd forgotten until today.

57:59Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah. So in the book, the book I think does a very good job of evoking the hotel. But evoking this kind of hotel that you get in a kind of American national park, there's like a huge hotel, as you said, like polished wood, thick carpets. You get a real sense of the sort of the spookiness of the deserted hotel, the long corridors, the echoing ballroom, the empty bar, all of this. And there's a sense from the beginning of the hotel as a living entity. So when the chef Halloran sees them go inside, he says goodbye to them. this line it was as if the overlook had swallowed them yeah and there are there are some ways in which i mean you say that the materiality of the hotel's malice there are some ways in which this is well done so i think that the king said he had a dream about his child being chased by a fire hose i like this because there's a bit where danny is upstairs and he sees this fire hose fall off the wall and he has this and there's a sort of snake aspect to it yeah yeah and he finds it scary now Now, we might not find it scary as adults, but you can imagine how a five-year-old...

58:59I suppose so.

59:00Dominic Sandbrook: What about the creatures made of hedge? The hedge animals? What, the adorable hedge creatures? The hedge creatures. This, again, I found faintly ridiculous. So it's these hedge animals, and Danny and Jack start noticing that they're sort of not where they were before, and the dog has its paw raised at one point and stuff like that. That's kind of vaguely creepy. So, but then... So, well, I'll read. the lion on the left had advanced all the way to the fence now its muzzle was touching their boards it seemed to be grinning at him now the buffalo had moved circling to the right behind and around the rabbit i have to say if anything it's sort of i mean it's charming it's endearing it's com i find that and also say what are they going to do are they going to like a twig's going to digest you what's happening there well there's a bit where one of them i can't remember if it's jack or danny imagines what it would be like and how awful it would be if the hedge creatures caught What's up with him?

59:51Dominic Sandbrook: I'm like, I think there's worse things that could happen to you than being basically embraced by a rabbit that's made of hedge. What a confusing menagerie. Buffalo, I mean, rabbit, lion. When they're sort of chasing this stampede of animals, sort of chasing Danny towards the hotel, that is quite scary because he's trying to, you know, march against the snow and he's exhausted and they're coming closer and closer. Perhaps sensibly they didn't try to put the hedge animals in the film. I mean, it would be sort of like Narnia. Also, I think slightly missing from the film, though, is this, I think that you get a tremendous sense of the suffocating weight of the hotel's history.

1:00:30Dominic Sandbrook: So there's this bit where Jack goes down to the basement, he's going through a scrapbook and he's looking at all the photos and it's very sinister. All the mobsters and all the criminals and all the sort of the weird, creepy guys who've stayed there. And this line, it seems that he could almost feel the weight of the overlook bearing down on him from above. all the rooms, all the people. And there are more and more, I mean, there's a bit where he turns the page and he gets an invitation to a mask ball from 1945. And at that point, he imagines himself the mask of the Red Death, the Edgar Allan Poe story, and then the owner of the hotel shouting, unmask, unmask, and everybody taking their masks off.

1:01:08Dominic Sandbrook: And then the line, the Red Death held sway over all, kind of comes into his head. Red Death, murder, red rum. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. The most frightening scene in the whole book for me comes about halfway through and it marks the point really where the hotel is kind of alive. And it's when Danny finally plucks up the or rather can no longer resist the magnetic pull of room 217. And he goes in and there's, you know, doubling cleverly used, sort of sees himself in the mirror looking at him. is it him is it his friend tony and he goes into the bathroom and he pulls the shower curtain back and the woman in the tub had been dead for a long time she was bloated and purple her gas-filled belly rising out of the cold ice-rimmed water like some fleshy island her eyes were fixed on danny's glassy and huge like marbles she was grinning her purple lips pulled back in a grimace her breasts lulled her pubic hair floated her hands were frozen on the knurled porcelain sides of the tub like crab claws and danny's thinking in his head it's fine it's fine halloran said that these things are like these these creatures these ghosts they're like they're like pictures in a book they can't hurt you they can't come out of the book but then she gets up and she follows him and danny's trying to get out trying to escape trying to open the door but it won't open and and so he closes his eyes as halloran told him to so that they all go away so that the woman goes away.

1:02:38He can't get hurt. And then this gloriously melodramatic final paragraph. Time passed and he was just beginning to relax, just beginning to realise that the door must be unlocked and he could go. When the year's damp, bloated, fish-smelling hands closed softly around his throat and he was turned implacably around to stare into that dead and purple face.

1:03:01Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, it's a very memorable scene, isn't it? I mean, I overuse the sentence, but literal chills. but then you see i like what happens next because you turn the page it's the it's a section break it's about halfway through the book and it's a section break a new chapter and we're not with danny at all we are with jack and jack is dreaming isn't he he's kind of fallen asleep he's dozing and it's now that we get the big reveal about his father's domestic abuse i think it's so telling this happens at this moment so it's when the hotel has finally come to life and it's attacking them that we get the reveal about the demons within Jack.

1:03:39Dominic Sandbrook: And Jack is dreaming about his father. And there's this scene, you and I were only talking about this the other day, the scene when his father attacked his mother over Sunday lunch. And he beat her with a cane. And there's like gravy going everywhere and stuff. Again, it's that very physical, it's very physical material details. The fact that he has this image of her glasses in the mashed potato. Yeah. In this interview with The Guardian and then the 2010s, Stephen King said this scene was the turning point of his entire literary career. He said it was my crossroads moment where I decided to blur the line between the supernatural and the psychotic.

1:04:22Dominic Sandbrook: So what he wanted to do was he said, I was going to write about Jack having been abused by his father, domestic abuse. Rather than making his father just a villain or something, I wanted to show that Jack still loved his father and how complicated Jack's feelings were. And he said in this interview, I think this made Jack a more realistic and therefore a more frightening figure, that what is motivating Jack, what's eating at him, is not just fear of his father, but also this kind of love for his, frustrated love for his father at the same time, which is, of course, how people in this situation often feel.

1:04:54And it also means that even when he's, as he's really falling into madness, there's still this element of love for Danny that rears its head, you know. Even when he'll think things like, he won't just think kill, kill, destroy. He'll think it's important that the boy take his medicine, you know, it's important that he learn. And it does make him more sinister. That said, it's not like the overlook in the book is in any way just a metaphor, is it? And this is what King, you say, was so cross with Kubrick about for downplaying that supernatural element and implying that it's all in Jack's head and it's one psychological deep dive into the unravelling of a man.

1:05:36Dominic Sandbrook: It's a combination of the two things, isn't it? Yeah, but the horrors in the hotel are real. For instance, there's this scene where Jack is totally gone. He attacks Wendy. Wendy defends herself. She and Danny manage to get him into the fridge, you know, big storeroom and lock him in. And the hotel unlocks him. You know, there are so many things that the fact that the old woman in the bath physically touches Danny. Yeah, he has marks on his neck. Yeah, exactly. And you can see that this means a lot to King because in his sequel, Doctor Sleep, the supernatural element of the book is developed, whereas a lot of the psychological stuff is less so.

1:06:22Dominic Sandbrook: But I like the fact that the psychological and the supernatural, there's a tension between them. So to go back to that scene, he's been dreaming about his father. And then it's as though he sleepwalks into the office of the hotel where the radio is, the two-way radio, the only way of communicating with the outside world. And he hears his father's voice coming from the radio. You have to kill him, Jackie, and her too, because a real artist must suffer because each man kills the thing he loves, because they'll always be conspiring against you, trying to hold you back. Cane him for it, Jackie. Cane him with an inch of his life.

1:06:52Dominic Sandbrook: I'll go with you while you give him his medicine. I know you can do it. Of course you can. You must kill him. Part of this is the demon within Jack, which is his father. But also I think King wants us to think part of this is real and it is the hotel and this is a supernatural thing that is happening. And this is the moment when Jack cracks and he screams at the radio and he smashes the radio up. And, of course, by doing that, he's destroyed their only link with the outside world. And then there's a snowmobile. He ends up sabotaging the snowmobile as well. And from this point, the pace really begins to escalate, doesn't it?

1:07:22Yeah, exactly. So Wendy finds Jack. He's incoherent, sobbing. they try to find Danny we haven't heard from Danny since he was attacked by the woman in the bath they search for him they find him on the landing with marks from his throat he can't speak Wendy assumes straight away that Jack did it she says don't touch him I'll kill you if you lay your hands on him again and then everything gets totally out of control you know Jack goes into this bar he's ordering imaginary drinks which turn out to be real because Wendy can smell gin everywhere he can hear voices around him it's like he's in a party senses the presence of people from the past from the masked ball you know he says there are these nice lines all the booths were empty the sound of laughter had died like a stir of autumn leaves jack said the empty lounge for a tick of time his eyes wide and dark in the very center of him a cold certainty was forming and the certainty was that he was losing his mind and then there were two devastating acts of betrayal perpetrated by jack so first of all he goes to room 217 to see if there actually is a dead woman and this comes just after this moment of actually quite nice familial reconciliation where they all talk about the fact that they know something bad is happening in the hotel and they come together you know wendy's no longer thinks that jack did it and he does realize that there is some sort of supernatural presence there for instance the bath mat out there's drips on the carpet but he pretends to wendy and danny that there was nothing there.

1:08:50He denies it.

1:08:52Dominic Sandbrook: He hasn't got the courage. He can't admit that there's something supernatural because doesn't he see a shape behind the shower curtain? Yeah, it's very creepy. And he just denies it to himself. Yeah, it's very creepy. It's like Edmund coming out of the wardrobe and telling everyone Lucy was making it all up. And then, as you say, he sabotages their only other link to the outside world and the only way of escaping the hotel. And this is the snowmobile. and I actually thought this scene went on too long. Jack's deciding whether to do it or not to do it but by this point the voice of the hotel is really entrenched in his mind but this time it's driven by his sense of fear and humiliation.

1:09:29He thinks, well, if we leave the hotel I'll go broke and I will have failed as the breadwinner and also I'll never finish my play.

1:09:36Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, and he imagines himself washing cars or whatever or being a sort of washing dishes and his pride stops him doing that. So actually the hotel, insofar as the hotel is a supernatural entity, it's playing on Jack's kind of everyday, very human weaknesses, isn't it? And that's also the moment when he first has this vision of killing Wendy. Very, again, a very visceral description. This is a horrible scene. Yeah, talking about like, he'd have his thumbs on her windpipe and she would be naked. I mean, it's quite sexual in a weird way. And I thought that was sort of interesting because his relationship with Wendy does remain sexual for much of the book.

1:10:15You know, they are a married couple. But again, it's that sexuality twisted into something violent and dark.

1:10:21Dominic Sandbrook: Exactly. And I think this is actually much more layered in the book than in the film. In the film, basically, Jack Nicholson goes mad. And he goes mad in a very, very, you know, sort of telegenic way. It's Johnny. Yeah, exactly. But in the book, it's darker, I think. It's slower. it's more mixed up with Jack's memories of his father beating him and all of this stuff. Now we get to the final quarter of the book. For me, there's a big weakness here. I know you and I don't really agree on this. I think I don't like the stuff with the cook. So the cook Halloran, he's been summoned by Danny's powers.

1:10:58Dominic Sandbrook: He's coming back. But in the book, there was a huge amount of stuff about traffic jams at the airport and checking, check-in desks. Like literally Stephen talks you through talks you through like the baggage tags or something yeah yeah or there's this long bit just before he gets Danny's telepathic message where he's like talks you through what he's going to cook for dinner that night and his friendship with some bloke I agree it does go on far too long but what I do think is great and my favourite scene in the book actually it's also a brilliant scene in the film is when Jack is now gone he's lost the plot he goes back into the bar he's desperate for a drink there's this very very nicely done sense of all the eras of the hotel's history colliding.

1:11:40Dominic Sandbrook: All the hotel's eras were together now, all but this current one, the Torrance era, and this would be together with the rest very sooner. That was good. That was very good. And so now, as you said, the alcohol has become real. The bartender has become real. And the bartender, Lloyd, who's very sinister, he's described as having the skin of a corpse and very white face. He says, you know, we don't want your money, Mr. Torrance, you know, the orders from the manager. The manager is very interested in your boy, Danny. And then we meet this waiter, this English waiter, again, very sinister in the film, who turns out somehow to be the caretaker, Delbert Grady, who had killed his family.

1:12:21Dominic Sandbrook: And Jack says, you're the caretaker who killed your daughters, aren't you? And Delbert Grady says, no, you're the caretaker, sir. You've always been the caretaker. I should know, sir. I've always been here. The same manager hired us both at the same time. So Jack's goal now, now that he's fully insane, is basically he's like, oh, yes, no, I aspire to be the caretaker. That's a job I want to win, basically. Yes, and he will win. He needs to prove he's a managerial timber. And by doing that, he needs to correct his family who are insolent and have spoken out. So Grady says, my own girls did not care for the overlook.

1:13:04Dominic Sandbrook: And I corrected them. I corrected them most harshly. And when my wife tried to stop me from doing my duty, I corrected her. And I do think this is of its time. So this is an early 70s book, feminism, women's liberation movements. King is of a, he was in the anti-war movement, anti-Vietnam war movement when he was a student. Raised by a single mother as well. He's of that world. So this is obviously like a criticism of the patriarchal nuclear family. The idea that they're the father who is correcting his children and his wife. This is what Jack is being encouraged to do. And then Jack promises that he will deal with Danny.

1:13:47He will handle him. He will correct him. And then the end of the scene is the clock strikes. And this character shouts, unmask, unmask. and at this moment the narration focuses in on the clockwork figures who Danny had earlier seen not really understanding having sex but this time it's a man because they're kind of back to front and this time it's a man with a small boy and the man has a steel mallet and it's smashing down on the boy's head again and again and blood gushes through the dome and there's bits of bone and brain. It's horribly gory.

1:14:25Dominic Sandbrook: It is. Now, we shouldn't completely spoil the final chapters of the book. Just to say, though, the theme of domestic abuse is still woven into the final chapters. So when Jack is now drunk, he's mad, he's confronting his family and he's shouting. But what he's shouting at Wendy are the things that people shout when they are, you know, when a couple are falling apart. When a couple are falling apart. You've turned my son against me. That was your plan all along. You've always been jealous, haven't you? He tries to strangle Wendy. he shouts, I will show you who's boss around here, which again is that sort of criticism of his sort of sense of, you described his masculinity.

1:15:04Dominic Sandbrook: That's really important to Jack that he is the boss. But also because of the father he hated and loved. Yeah. And he's actually like, you know, it's all of that coming through. He's reenacting the way his father treated his mother. And all the time, Danny at this scene is shouting, Daddy, stop, you're hurting mummy. And then there's that thing that, as you mentioned, She manages to lock Jack in the pantry. He is released by Delbert Grady. Delbert Grady is real at this point. You know, this is not all a metaphor. Like he is let out by Delbert Grady, who is needling him. You let them lock you in, a woman half your size and a little boy, you know, playing on Jack's fears.

1:15:44Dominic Sandbrook: And there's actually the hotel speaks to him, doesn't it? Keep your promise, Mr. Torrance. But it's confusing because it's a different voice to Grady, who I think maybe we'd come to see as kind of embodying the hotel. But no, it's something else. It's something, it's a far more vast supernatural entity. And then Jack promises that to bring him Danny. And he says that he'll give the hotel a sacred vow that he will kill Wendy. He does. And then the final scene hammers it all home. And this is when Jack corners Wendy in their apartment and he's screaming at her. and King says there was nothing of the real Jack out there anymore.

1:16:25She was hearing the lunatic raving voice of the Overlook itself.

1:16:28Dominic Sandbrook: In the introductory reading that we did, Wendy is saying to Danny, this is not your daddy. She's also a mother though, trying to make Danny understand that it's actually not his dad that's doing this. He can still love his father and hate the monster. One thing I did find very powerful in these final scenes is that Danny still consistently calls Jack Daddy or my daddy or whatever and I think I mean maybe this is just my sentimental parental side but I did find this very actually quite moving that we see a lot of this the sort of climax of the book through Danny's eyes and he still see his heart is heartbroken that his daddy that this has happened to his daddy this is completely absent from the film we don't get any sense of this in the film at all really because it'd be very hard to do in the film I think I mean that's not a criticism of the film But by showing us through Danny's eyes, King really does bring home this sense of a child watching his family disintegrate around him and how heartbreaking that would be.

1:17:33But it also buys Jack a little bit of redemption at the very end. And actually the narrative voice stops calling him Jack or Daddy. It starts calling him the thing or whatever. So he is actually totally differentiated. Obviously, we don't want to spoil the ending. Yeah. it's very very different from the film so you better read the book I guess and I better watch the film

1:17:54Dominic Sandbrook: are you going to have the courage to watch the film Tabby surely I don't know I don't know I feel like I just have to I mean it's a cult classic isn't it you do I think I just have to man up you so do yeah just grow grow up our final verdict and I suggest that we score this in implausibly mobile hedge rabbits if you have a better idea overheating boilers or whatever implausible menageries menageries i think i'm gonna give it a 6.5 i just thought it was so much fun i really enjoyed reading it i had so much fun reading it it definitely didn't shatter and remake my world as i know it but then you know books don't always have to sometimes they can just be really fun i read it on holiday it was a great holiday read it is though i think a tiny bit obvious i think it could have leaned a little bit more into the whole is this real is is this a psychological journey into humanity's heart of darkness or is it literally happening?

1:18:52Everything is very literal. And I think the middle section was a bit long. But a fantastic page turner would recommend.

1:18:59Dominic Sandbrook: Okay, I'm going to give it six. Now that sounds harsh. I don't mean it to be harsh. Basically, I'm just not a massive fan of horror as a genre, so it didn't convert me. The writing is sometimes very good and sometimes not. I think it's just uneven. It's a young man's book. I'm not dissing Stephen King for that. There are bits that are clumsy and cliche, but then there are bits that are very well written and really, really well observed. I think there's loads of good stuff in here. I think a lot of the psychology is very good, actually. I think the gothic melodrama element and the goriness, which of course is why it's so successful, but for me, slightly sort of suffocates and obscures the more subtle story within.

1:19:42Dominic Sandbrook: And when that New York Times reviewer back in 1977, probably review that annoyed Stephen King in the time said, you know, it's there's almost like it's almost like there's another book in here struggling to get out. I agree with that, actually. I think if Stephen King were a different kind of writer, he would be less successful. So it's not for me to judge him. But I think he might have written a book that was 200 pages short. Because this is what, 400 pages or something? 200 pages shorter and more subtle and actually probably for me it would be more scary because it would be like the turn of the screw or something would I recommend it to people?

1:20:19Dominic Sandbrook: I would recommend it to people I think it did drag but I think it was fun it was nice I mean I just read The Bell Jar or something so it was like a massive change what's coming up Tabby? a massive palate cleanser next I mean you could not think of a more different book honestly night and day so Master and Commander by Patrick O 'Brien To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee Money by Martin Amos Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John Le Carre Tessa Durbervilles by Thomas Hardy Dune by Frank Herbert and Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling and also actually just one tiny using The Shining I'll look even further into the future we're also doing A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess and that will be our third book adapted by Kubrick on the show What was the first one?

1:21:06Lolita

1:21:07Dominic Sandbrook: oh lolita of course wow he had good taste very good taste superb all right have a good holiday bye everybody thank you bye

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