Book review: Stephen King's Doctor Sleep
The much-anticipated sequel to 'The Shining' loses its way with dull redemption theme
Doctor Sleep
by Stephen King
Scribner
2.5 stars
Sequels are notoriously tricky beasts. For every The Empire Strikes Back there is a Jaws 2. And just when you thought it was dangerous to watch Jaws 2, there is a Phantom Menace to make even that plastic sharky disaster look not so bad after all. So when Stephen King announced that he was writing a sequel to The Shining titled Doctor Sleep, many of his followers oscillated between the thrill of excited anticipation and that of anxiety.
After all, this is Stephen King's The Shining, one of three or four genre-defining novels that contend to be literary horror's masterpiece. A portrait of the artist as a de-generating psychopath, it narrates how Jack Torrance falls prey to alcoholism, isolation, his frustrated literary ambitions and something darker in that haunted building. King turns ideas of hospitality, family and luxury on their head to form a story so unnervingly good that not even Stanley Kubrick could mess it up.
This is a novel driven by character arc rather than gripping suspense or well-crafted plot
Millions of King's readers have since dreamed of discovering what happened to Danny Torrance and his mother, Wendy, once they survived the Overlook Hotel. What ratchets the hype still further is that Doctor Sleep arrives during a golden age for King's fans. Whether he is advancing his ever-increasing literary ambitions with Lisey's Story or the brilliant 11.22.63, or kicking it old school with Cell, it seems there is nothing he can't do.
The stakes could not be higher, so it's depressing to report that sequels might be an exception to that rule. Like its brothers in bathos, Jaws 2 and The Phantom Menace, Doctor Sleep could probably never live up to the optimism surrounding its release. But the anti-climax is made more poignant by the novel's opening which promises so much.
As Danny grows up, he finds other ways to repress the painful memories of his childhood and the insights imposed upon him by his eerie second sight. Tragically, he follows in his father's footsteps - not by becoming a writer, but by becoming an alcoholic. King describes the degradations of the habitual drunk with stomach-churning vividness. Having vomited into a blocked toilet bowl, Danny looks in horror at a "turd, probably his own, rising towards the pee-slashed rim … on a sea of half-digested bar-snacks".
This material squalor comes with its emotional and psychic counterparts. Whatever moral sense Danny inherited from his mother is compromised by his addiction. Having been conned into spending his pay on cocaine by the latest of his one-night stands, he exacts revenge by stealing a few dollars clearly intended to feed her young son. The sight of the boy mistaking the white powder for candy not only chimes with Danny's raw past, it pursues him throughout his future in the novel.