Nonfiction Collection by Stephen King

Author:Stephen King [King, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

ON ALCOHOLISM AND RETURNING TO THE SHINING

Stephen King

From an article in The Guardian, September 21, 2013

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. Still, he says, when people say, “Steve, your books are uneven”, he’s confident “there’s good stuff in all of ‘em”. Now and then, a story lingers in his mind long after it’s published. When fans ask what happened to Charlie McGee in Firestarter, for example, King isn’t interested. But when they ask what happened to Danny Torrance, the boy from The Shining, he always found himself wondering. Specifically: what the story would have looked like if Danny’s father mad “white-knuckle alcoholic” Jack Torrance had “found AA. And I thought, well, let’s find out.”

At 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. 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. 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. 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. “Really?” King says when I mention my unease, and grins. “Good.”

Doctor Sleep, his 56th novel, revisits Danny in adulthood, when he has become an alcoholic drifter haunted by the memory of his raging father. 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. 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. 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. “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.

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. And without labouring the point, it has good allegorical bones: the sick buzz one gets from consuming the grisliest news stories. It also captures the reality of a recovering alcoholic, a state with which King is intimately familiar.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.