Chance's Corner: Doctor Sleep

Anyone who knows Stephen King knows about The Shining in one form of another. One form is  possibly one of the scariest books ever written. The other is Stanley Kubrick's The Shining starring Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd, and Scatman Crothers, which in my opinion (not Stephen King's) is possibly one of the scariest movies ever made. As a quick overview of The Shining, Jack Torrance takes a job as winter caretaker at the Overlook Hotel in the Colorado Mountains with his wife, Wendy, and extraordinarily gifted son, Danny, in tow. It seems to be a dream come true for Jack, who is trying to escape the temptation of his alcoholic past and extreme aggression. To Danny, however, it's a nightmare. The snow grows deeper. The boiler grows hotter. The rotten and insidious past literally haunts the maze-like halls -- lusting for Danny's secret and powerful gift. The ending really depends on what you've seen versus what you've read. Now that that's out of the way...

Stephen King's Doctor Sleep, a sequel that's taken 36 years to get here, tells the continuing story of Danny Torrance (now Dan). The prologue briefly picks up right where the last one dropped off and is about as close to the original book as this story gets. There a few references here and there later on, but this isn't a revisit to the original material. The prologue is mainly the most brutal part in this entire book. It's here that we learn that Dan grows up to be a hopeless alcoholic with fits of extreme aggression (just like his Daddy Dearest). There are also sickening descriptions of vomit, feces, two counts of child molestation/rape, and one count of brutal child abuse. Why? Shock value I assume. I could have lived without it.

The ball really starts rolling when Dan reaches the town of Frazier, New Hampshire. Here he finds hope very quickly (thank God) in the AA and starts putting his waning special ability to good use at a local hospice earning him the name Doctor Sleep. Terror seems absent during this elaborate setup of Dan's recovery and the birth and age progression of another special child named Abra who seems to have a strong connecting link to Dan. In the shadows, a cult of ageless people called the True Knot, overseen by a beautiful woman known as Rose the Hat, drift across America in their RVs and suck the essence out of all the children that possess the same ability Dan has. That's about as spooky as it gets. Ooooohhhh... RVer's. I didn't get any tingles from this group.

I really started to enjoy Doctor Sleep until the last 20% of the book. It is here that King tosses the reader a plot twist and desperately tries to make it work. It doesn't. It killed the entire feel of the book to me. It killed the entire feel of The Shining. Overall, it just made everything feel like a cheap sham. I am beginning to sense an overall pattern here with King's books. He just doesn't know how to end them.