Transcript
Speaker: Hello, book club listeners. This is your blanket spoiler warning. We will be spoiling the book, The Shining, along with any of the other books we have discussed on this podcast. This episode includes adult language because I'm probably going to cuss a lot, so don't listen at work or with small children. Also, we will be talking about alcoholism, racism, and domestic violence in this episode, so take care.
Speaker: The hotel wanted Danny, maybe all of them, but Danny for sure. The hedges had really walked. There was a dead woman in 217, a woman that was perhaps only a spirit and harmless under most circumstances, but a woman who was now an active danger. Like some malevolent clockwork toy, she had been wound up and set in motion by Danny's own odd mind and his own.
Speaker: Welcome to the Book Club Podcast. Today we are discussing The Shining by Stephen King. I'm Caroline and first, I love Stephen King. Second, I think this is one of his most precisely written and symmetrical stories. It's almost classical in how it almost sticks to one location and you know in advance it's a tragedy. I think this is actually kind of unusual for Stephen King who sometimes wanders or sometimes messes up the ending, but not in this one.
Speaker: So I'm Carly, and I first read The Shining when I was 14 years old. I think it was probably the first horror novel I've read ever, and it scared the crap out of me then. And it was a really different experience reading the book now. I have a much different perspective on it, I think. I think when I was 14, I was just scared, especially of the hedge animals. Those really got to me.
Speaker: The book begins with Jack Torrance learning about his new job, the Overlook Hotel where Jack will be winter caretaker while the hotel is snowed in for many months. Ullman, the manager, tells Jack that the previous winter caretaker, Grady, killed his wife, two daughters, and himself. Jack is told that at least 45 people have died, most recently a lady in room 217 who committed suicide.
Speaker: The summer caretaker shows Jack how to release the pressure on the boiler. If it's not released several times a day, it could blow up the hotel. Jack reflects on his previous job as an English teacher at a private prep school. He was fired after beating a student for slashing his tires. Jack is an alcoholic, and two years before, he broke his son's arm. Shortly after that, he got sober along with a friend who got him this job at the Overlook. Jack was also a promising writer. He hopes the seclusion at the hotel with no alcohol available
Speaker: will allow him to focus on writing again and repair his marriage. Jack's son Danny is five years old. He has a special ability to know what his parents are feeling and an imaginary friend Tony who tells him about things that will happen in the future. Tony shows Danny a terrifying future where Danny is running from a monster that wants to kill him. And Danny sees the word red rum on the wall but doesn't know what it means.
Speaker: Tony tells him not to go to the overlook. Danny's mother, Wendy, is worried about Jack and their marriage. She also worries about Danny's ability and links it back to him being born with a call over his head. They all arrive at the overlook and meet Dick Halloran, the cook. Dick tells Danny that they both have the shining and that people with the shining see disturbing things at the hotel, but they're not real. He tells Danny to call him psychically if Danny needs any help.
Speaker: While Jack is working on the roof, he finds a wasp's nest. He finds a bug bomb to empty the nest and gives it to Danny. That night, wasps come out and sting Danny 11 times. Jack finds a scrapbook in the basement filled with clippings about the overlook's history. He wipes his mouth compulsively while he reads, a habit he had when he was drinking. He shows other signs of drinking, headaches, bad temper, chewing, etc. Wendy and Danny go into town for the last time.
Speaker: Wendy asked Danny if he wants to leave the hotel. Danny says no because he knows it's his father's last chance. While they're gone, Jack is attacked by the topiary animals. The dog and the lions take menacing positions and chase him into the hotel. He convinces himself he was hallucinating. That night they get their first real snow and the option to leave the hotel is gone. Danny is drawn to room 217, the room that Dick Halloran told him to avoid.
Speaker: Danny enters the room and sees the woman naked and rotting in the bathtub. He panics and forgets how to open the door. He closes his eyes and tells himself that she's just a picture and can't really hurt him. But she strangles him, leaving bruises on his throat.
Speaker: At that same time, Jack and Wendy doze in different parts of the hotel. Jack was in the basement looking through old paperwork. Jack remembers his father saying, take your medicine as he beats his mother with a cane. He then walks into the office and hears his father's voice from the CB radio telling him to kill Danny and Wendy.
Speaker: He destroys the CB radio. Wendy comes to find Jack, and they both go looking for Danny, who is standing silently at the top of the stairs with bruises around his neck. Wendy thinks that Jack has hurt him. She takes Danny to their room and locks Jack out. Jack then goes into the bar and sees flashes of liquor bottles and hears snippets of laughter and conversation. He wants a drink, and here at the Overlook, that's the same as having a drink.
Speaker: Wendy decides to trust Jack and carries Danny downstairs. Danny wakes up when the two of them are arguing and tells them it was the woman in room 217 who left the bruises. He also tells them what Dick Halloran said about the shining and the scary things that people see. Wendy asks Jack to take them out of the hotel in the snowmobile the next day, and he promises he will. But Jack doesn't want to leave. He worries that once they leave, he'll find himself at the nearest bar. So instead, Jack destroys the snowmobile's battery.
Speaker: Danny continues to explore the grounds. The hedge animals in the front of the hotel come to life and stalk him. Jack hits Danny when Danny tells his parents about it. Jack increasingly hears the sound of a ghostly and otherworldly party in the ballroom. Eventually he joins the party.
Speaker: Danny sends a message through the shining to Dick for help. Dick starts traveling from Miami to Denver. Jack becomes convinced that a great future awaits him at the hotel if he can discipline Danny. Jack gets drunk in the ballroom and the next morning attacks Wendy. Wendy and Danny manage to lock Jack in the pantry.
Speaker: He escapes. The well -bred ghost of Grady, the butler, lets him out. He attacks Wendy again, this time with a rogue mallet. She is badly injured. Jack chases her back to their rooms and traps her in the bathroom. Dick Halloran arrives on a snowmobile. He is attacked by the hedge animals, but fights them off with gasoline from the snowmobile and his lighter.
Speaker: Jack takes Dick down with the roque mallet and then begins chasing Danny throughout the hotel, finally trapping him on the third floor. Danny tells him, you're not my daddy, and that whatever the hotel has promised to Jack, it's a lie. Go ahead and hit me, he says. You'll never get what you want from me. Then Jack, or the thing using Jack,
Speaker: turns the mallet on himself, beating Jack's face off and becoming something else. Then Danny screams that the boiler is about to explode and the thing rushes to try to prevent that. Dick, Wendy, and Danny escape. And then the overlooked does explode. Halloran looking back sees a dark shape issue out of the hotel and dissolve. The book ends with the three of them safely in Maine later that summer fishing from a dock.
Speaker: So my overwhelming question when reading this book was what is the hotel seeking from Danny that it doesn't get in that final confrontation? Are you asking what happens for the hotel if Danny is killed there or are you asking something different?
Speaker: Well, I think that's part of my point because Danny could have been killed, right? He was cornered. Jack or whatever is wearing Jack's face has him with the rogue mallet. But it seems like it's not enough to just kill Danny in the hotel. It seems like the hotel needs something else. And Danny intuits this and he says, you'll never get what you want from me.
Speaker: Is there some transaction that's being sought here beyond just the hotel killing Danny? That's interesting. I completely missed that. Yeah, it's puzzling. You said you thought Jack had been killed earlier. I agree. He was stabbed in a way that would have taken down a normal person, but.
Speaker: whatever seems to be Jack gets up from that continues to chase after Danny. But they have this confrontation where Danny says to him, first, you're not my dad. My dad knows better than this. My dad would also know that the hotel is lying to him and is going to cheat him because the hotel has promised him wonderful things if he disciplines Danny. And so you have this odd scene where Danny stands up for his dad to his dad or what looks like his dad. And somehow that's effective.
Speaker: Right. You know, the whole two thirds of the book, my hatred for Jack is just growing and growing. Like it's a really well layered, slow growth of a character. I think King is really clever because there's not a fine line between this is Jack.
Speaker: And this is the hotel. This is Jack under the influence of the hotel. It's not a very fine line. And so I'm just growing to hate Jack so much. And then that moment where Jack sort of fights through whatever has control, I teared up. I was like, God damn it.
Speaker: like it was a it was a real redemption moment for me it's just a moment i mean he still dies a horrible death but you do get a moment where king says that jack's real face shines through right and so part of this live so danny is calling
Speaker: the thing, the hotel, a liar. And I think that's related to, in the summary, I made the point of including the words well -bred Grady, because in Jack's first conversation with Grady, he's like, didn't you not graduate high school? Because you're talking real fancy, basically. And Grady's like, yes, the hotel made me better. Think how much better you would be.
Speaker: if you joined us. And then using that phrase well bred multiple times when Grady lets Jack out of the pantry makes me think that that's not actually Grady. And then connects back because Jack references directly Hill House. And I loved that moment. It's okay. So the Overlook was having one hell of a good time. This is Jack thinking about it.
Speaker: There was a little boy to terrorize, a man and his woman to set, one against the other, and if it played its cards right, they could end up flitting through the Overlook's halls like insubstantial shades in a Shirley Jackson novel. Whatever walked in Hill House walked alone. But you wouldn't walk alone in the Overlook. Oh no, there'd be plenty of company there. I don't think that's correct. I think Jack is wrong. That these shades...
Speaker: are the actual people. I think that the hotel has completely devoured them and just uses their image. So I think that connects to the fact that Grady is appearing well bred, even though the real Grady didn't graduate high school. And that speaks to what the lie is. Like for some reason,
Speaker: Jack had to be seduced and has to get Danny to concede something. And that's part of the devouring that the hotel does of these people. So is it maybe fair to say that in order for the hotel to devour, you have to be tempted to some degree, or at least you have to be giving in to some bad impulse?
Speaker: Maybe not a bad impulse. So Danny, at that point where he calls the thing a liar, he's saying, it's just empty boxes. It's just for show. You're not it. You're not my daddy. You're the hotel. And when you get what you want, you won't give my daddy anything because you're selfish. So Jack thought by following the narrative that the hotel gave him that his son needed to be punished.
Speaker: that he would be rewarded in some way he bought into a story and i'm guessing that the hotel wants danny to buy into the story that this is his dad punishing him because he deserves it somehow that's interesting the part you said about because he deserves it because
Speaker: Jack, buying into the story, you can see what desires are at stake there, right? He wants money and for people to be impressed by him and all the sort of usual desires, but does part of Danny want his dad to punish him? Does he want his dad to be the power in his life and he doesn't want to have to stand up to him? What is the bad version of the story for Danny that he's refusing? Maybe he could refuse to grow up, right?
Speaker: Which is kind of what he's doing in this moment where you see your parents as flawed, to put it mildly, and stand up to them. Maybe there's sometimes a temptation to not do that, to just be a child and be afraid. I don't know. I mean, he's five. That's a lot to ask of a five -year -old. As an aside, that is ridiculous that he's a five -year -old. He's clearly not. He's clearly at least like a nine -year -old, but
Speaker: Okay, setting that aside. Sure. I mean, it was interesting earlier, when Wendy finds Danny, she tells him that the hotel has got him. That's not your daddy. The hotel has got him. And it's interesting that Danny who can feel around his parents minds has to be told that like he didn't already know. But to push back, this is
Speaker: really Jack too. I mean, it's his desires. It's his ambition. It's his arrogance and anger. That's all in him. Yeah. And that's tricky. Let's talk about Jack.
Speaker: Many times in my notes I had to write, what an asshole. So you asked the question before I was finished reading, so I was able to think about it while reading, does Jack shine? And I think that's a really interesting question. So Halloran says he tried to, the way he tested Danny and found out that Danny had a very strong shine.
Speaker: He tested Wendy and he tried to test Jack and he didn't know. He said it wasn't like meeting someone who had the shine, but it also wasn't like meeting someone who definitely did not have the shine. Mixed results. Mixed results. Jack Torrance had something, something he was hiding or something he was holding in so deeply.
Speaker: that it was impossible to get to. Jack thinks that he has a broken or he has something missing, which is something I've heard Dax Shepard talk about. And Dax Shepard has a podcast, he talks very openly about his own struggles with addiction. And so that sounded I mean, I have no personal experience with addiction. So I just
Speaker: you know, just what I've heard from Dax Shepard talking about his experience, that seemed to fit really well, that there's something, a coping mechanism that he was never taught or, and it makes him feel like something is missing in himself. And there's a lot of references to the wasps. He thinks to himself that his whole life stuck his hand into the great lostness of life. I was like, all right, come on, Jack. Yeah, so a little more to flesh out the wasp analogy.
Speaker: One of the things he says about the wasps is that some seven or 8 % of car accidents, they never find the cause for a fatal car accident. And they think that for those people, there was just a wasp or a bug in the car. And it scared people or startled them so bad by stinging them that they went off the road. And that's how he feels about his life. He's not really, I mean, he's not at all taking responsibility, right? The wasps have just chosen to sting him. And how can he be blamed for
Speaker: steering the car off the road in those circumstances. Right. Yes. Yes, exactly. He's not taking responsibility, but he also is making it personal. Anything that's bad that happens to him, there's some greater power that just wants to screw him over.
Speaker: Like, it seems like he has this chip on his shoulder. That's interesting because that's sort of the inverse of The Shining. The Shining, everyone is transmitting to you. You can read their thoughts, but it seems like Jack goes through the world thinking that everyone is transmitting at him in a way, like doing things to him on purpose. He is taking everything so personally.
Speaker: I don't know, those seem connected. It might be a little bit of a stretch. No, I'm really glad you said that the inverse because there's also the whole Jack and Danny have this really strong bond that even Wendy is jealous of. I wonder if it's like Danny is a positive and Jack is negative and together they just like connect like they're just bonded together like magnets. So whatever is excess and Danny is filling in what's missing in Jack. I mean, in this description, Jack does not have
Speaker: The Shining. He has the opposite of it or something. Instead of being in other people's head, he's only in his head and can only project on other people or something. I don't know. I'm having trouble phrasing it just right. I don't think it's real. I don't think people are actually projecting at him. I think it's the character flaw that leads to him being an alcoholic. Yes, agreed. I don't think he is actually picking up on any animosity aimed at him, particularly on behalf of the world.
Speaker: So I guess my feeling about Jack is these seem like, to me, pretty average flaws. Maybe a more extreme degree, but anger, thinking you're the center of the world, that pride and arrogance and him thinking I'm not always going to be a prep school teacher or my current station is below me, I'm better than this. That all seems very human, right? Yes. I don't think I disliked him as much as you did.
Speaker: I mean, it's very human, but it's also, I mean, I think that's why it angered me so much is because there are real people out in the world think this way and it's like, get over yourself, you know? One detail that I noticed of character building that King did is that Jack refers to Wendy as my wife and Danny as my son far more often than he actually uses their names.
Speaker: Hmm. Interesting. Yeah. But so do you think he has something like the Shining? Is he unusually something?
Speaker: Yeah, I think maybe he has the shining, but his traumatic childhood meant that it got disfigured somehow. Because whatever it is, it allows the hotel to get at him. Yes, that's true. He is apparently uniquely susceptible to the hotel. Although the comparison is really only windy, right? Because everyone else who's at the hotel is there with a whole bunch of people during the summertime.
Speaker: Right. And we never get any clue why Grady went crazy. Like, we don't know if anyone in Grady's family had the Shining. Yeah. That's tricky. I don't think King is really clear about it because there are people who have an aversion. I think one of Grady's daughters had an aversion to the playground, but it still it wasn't clear she had the Shining. So, yeah, we don't know. I was wondering if the seclusion at the hotel
Speaker: or you know there's it seems like the party starts up when it gets dark outside you know like there's there's several hours of peace and then they're like wendy and danny are like holed up and jack has passed out somewhere i think that happens a couple times
Speaker: during the day, and then at night, the party starts up. So I wondered, okay, does it wait till darkness? And does that mean that also like winter time, it sleeps in the summer and kind of wakes up in the winter? That is interesting, because you would expect it to be much more active in the summer if it's an issue of just sheer numbers, right? I mean, he says specifically that the
Speaker: Danny's shining ability kind of gives energy to the hotel, but then we know from Dick Halloran that there's some percentage of people who have this.
Speaker: just out in the world at all times. And so surely, you know, this hotel has like 400 guests a summer. There's some of them who have it. Not as strong as Danny, we're told. But yeah, why isn't the hotel doing this during the summer? Or when there's more people, it's sort of like the energy is dispersed and it can feed off of multiple people. But when it's just one family, it's got a more focused attention.
Speaker: So do you see the hotels kind of vampiric, like it's absorbing something energy, I guess. Yeah, I think it is. I think that could be true. I think maybe it has some project or something that it's working on.
Speaker: and Danny is a key to it. Don't know what it would be. It certainly never explained. No, I mean, that makes sense in the context of some other Stephen King novels. True. I also think that because the history of the hotel is just so uneven. You know, it's closed for long periods and then it comes back. Seems to me that a marginally intelligent vampire would make sure the hotel stayed open. I don't know if that makes sense, but that is how I feel about it.
Speaker: I mean it doesn't have to be intelligent or maybe it gains intelligence the more souls it absorbs. Right, although he never uses the word souls which is interesting. More energy or any of these words we're using, right? Right. So you said something earlier, you wondered about Grady's daughter who maybe had the shining.
Speaker: a reference to it that might have been that. So you think this hotel is only bad news for people with The Shining or some degree of it? I don't know. I don't think we get that in the story. There's something about Derwent. I think he's the character who's based on Howard Hughes who like owns the hotel and like keeps the hotel in his control but he physically stays away from it, which I thought was really weird.
Speaker: some suggestion that he knows what's going on and he's enabling it from a distance. Yeah. Okay. I mean, to be honest, it kind of bothers me if the hotel only affects people with the shining because my reaction is like, well, I don't have the shining. So why would I care? Right. And I don't think that's true. But then again, I don't think I don't really think Jack has the shining. Oh,
Speaker: Can you say more about that? Whatever this says about my view of humanity, I think Jack is much closer to being an everyman than to being a unique villain. Obviously his anger and his alcoholism and the things he's done while drunk or under the sway of the hotel are horrible, but the motives just seem so common. And I guess the thing about Jack that I find terrifying, and to me this was the real trap of the hotel,
Speaker: is there's no alcohol at the overlook. He should have been safe. He's been sober for nearly two years. He's found a job where he can't even get it for another five or six months, and yet there's something about the overlook where it's just the desire itself. It's not even a real glass of alcohol that he raises to his lips, and that does him in. But on the other hand, he does have to raise it to his lips, so I guess that is a
Speaker: Well, he starts showing the behaviors of having, I guess the behaviors of being hung over without having the drink, which sounds like the worst of all possible worlds.
Speaker: If you're going to have a hangover, you should at least have the memory of having fun with drinking, right? Right. So it starts with wiping his lip and the irritability and the secretiveness. He gets all of the bad after effects of drinking.
Speaker: before the drink. I wonder if that's more of like, it's not his desire to drink. It's like the fear side of it. It's like, these are the things that happen if I drink. And so I can't like it's the reason he can't. So he's going through the symptoms of his having a drink and that makes him more fearful.
Speaker: of having a drink? Well, yeah, just as I was saying that, it makes me think that the way into Jack's mind is the fear, not necessarily the desire. It's like he desires to drink, but he fears drinking because of the effect it has on his life. Well, then he starts experiencing the effect of drinking before he gets to hallucinate the actual alcohol. Which would kind of remove the fear, I guess. I mean, if you're already suffering, why not have the drink? Why not have the good part? Right. The good part, you know, in quotes.
Speaker: I guess the thing, and I'm not sure this is true now thinking back over the examples, but when I read it, what stood out to me was that it seemed like the overlook shortened the distance between feeling and acting and in some ways got them all tangled up. He feels like he's hungover, but he hasn't had a drink. And then he has an imaginary drink and that gets him drunk.
Speaker: So it seems to blur those lines, but I think those are the lines that we rely on to keep our lives in order, right? Mm -hmm. Well, the other things become real, too. Like the woman actually chokes Dani. Yes, and she's supposed to be only a ghost. That's what Dick Halloran says. But she leaves physical marks. I also, for some reason, am reminded of the hedge animals and how they move when you're not looking at them.
Speaker: And then you can maybe get some, see some motion out of the corner of your eye, but you can see it when you turn and look back and you think they're in different positions. To me, that seems somehow similar. Like there's an interruption between cause and effect in some way. Cause you looking at something shouldn't stop the animals moving. And yet it does.
Speaker: Right. I mean, King described the sound when Danny is being chased by the animals and he hears the thump of the snow. Oh god, every time I hear that thump of snow, it reminds me of this book. And it's such a good physical detail of something that shouldn't be leaving a physical imprint and it is literally leaving one.
Speaker: Yeah, I think he does a very good job of taking, and maybe this is King's whole career, what by the time he started writing had been just psychological terrors and saying, no, they're real.
Speaker: Yeah. The hedge animals also, it's a feeling that you are prey. Like that's something that humans in modern United States don't have to contend with very much. Like you are being hunted and you can't see the thing that is hunting you as it approaches. Or understand it. I think that's also a big part of it for humans, right? Who rely upon their
Speaker: reason. And that's part of what makes this book so frightening. He doesn't explain everything. He doesn't explain if Jack has the Shining, why the hotel works this way, if it's vampires or some sort of hellish middle management with the project. And those lack of answers are frightening.
Speaker: I mean, that's in line with the previous books we've read that we don't get an explanation. It's something like a natural phenomenon that evil buildings exist. Yeah. And I guess in this one, we also had the same question about whether the history of terrifying things created the evil or vice versa. We don't know that here either. There is that statement at the end about the black shadow that drifts out of the hotel and dissolves once it has blown up.
Speaker: Wait, but doesn't Dick Halloran see that dissipate and then he goes into the shed? And the shed almost gets him. I thought he saw that driving away on the snowmobile. He turned and looked. Did he see that before then? Right. Okay. I remembered while reading is like, I thought that it was dead, right? I thought that the hotel was burning and fire kills everything we're told early on. And then Dick goes into the shed and Danny's like, I cannot go in there.
Speaker: And then Dick is almost taken. I thought it was really interesting that the trigger, the intrusive thought that King writes is like a slave answering to his master. And that like just gets at the racial tension. You know, like yes, Dick is an old man. He's made peace with his life. And he has sort of dealt with that anger already and has sort of moved on from that. And then the shed brings it all back.
Speaker: in a moment and he starts thinking about murdering Danny and Wendy. Okay, my question about that is would it have worked in terms of the hotel getting what it wants from Danny? Because earlier it seemed like there was some special power to Jack, the father being the one to kill Danny. But could Dick just do it? And would that get the hotel some or all of what it wants?
Speaker: That's a good question. I mean, I would guess that if the hotel can't get Danny to submit in a way that it needs, at least having Danny dead would be kind of a good consolation prize. Yeah, I mean, the hotel's evil. So it's probably just angry at Danny at this point, too, and would kill him for that reason alone.
Speaker: Yeah. Did you think that there were a lot of chapters following DeKalarin on his trip from Florida? Did you think some of that was unnecessary? Well, it was a nice break to be in his head. Absolutely. It seems like a nice person. It was interesting the degree to which it added to the tension, because you know, you know, from the first conversation he has with Danny, where he tells Danny, Hey, give me a call and I'll come and help.
Speaker: you know that's going to happen. And you know he's going to get there just in the nick of time. That's how these stories work. And yet, following his story and all the delays he gets, it gets down to the point where every hour matters and then every minute, and he's still getting delayed by a snowstorm, the hedge animals, all these things. And it was still very suspenseful. From a storytelling perspective, somehow it really worked. And I don't think it should have.
Speaker: But did you feel like it was a little much? No, I just, I enjoyed it. Like, well, I kind of was like, is this necessary? And then I don't really care because I'm enjoying it so much, which reminds me, I was listening to a podcast about addiction and dopamine. It just happened to be in my feed while we were preparing for this. And one of the things that she talked about, this is, um,
Speaker: a psychiatrist who works with people with addiction. She talked about her own addiction was reading books and she talked about the style of modern books is you always end on a cliffhanger and so you move to the next chapter and it creates this
Speaker: sort of obsessive behavior and she experienced it herself that she just like was becoming bad at her job and neglecting her family just to read more books you know and so I thought that was interesting just the whole conversation on addiction but also like the style of novel writing and like this it's sort of a gimmick to end your chapter on a cliffhanger I mean 99 Fierce Street did that you end your chapter on a cliffhanger to build suspense
Speaker: And this book does not. The chapters sort of end, and they're neat, and they're decent stopping points. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a suspenseful book. Well, I mean, the whole thing, from the way it's set up at the beginning, where you know where it's headed, I mean, I would argue that it doesn't need cliffhangers in each chapter because the whole thing is. But it's a very slow build. I really enjoyed just like, let's take our time.
Speaker: We spend a lot of time in Jack's head, and it's a very subtle build of how he's sort of descending into a puppet of the hotel. And you don't get that subtle build without all of just the text to get you there. Yeah. And it's subtle, and it's not perfectly linear either. Jack's, I guess, descent into madness, because it occurs in these forms
Speaker: at first of these intrusive thoughts so he says he'll just keep having these thoughts about killing Danny but they don't feel like his that's not as big a deal or he'll get angry and he'll maybe think about it a little more seriously like how he would do it but then they have for example a lovely thanksgiving together and all of the events of this happen on
Speaker: you know, December 2nd or some day early in December. So that was right before everything got really bad. The character building is slow and gradual, which I think makes it more horrifying and also more realistic. In a given 24 -hour period, they have their low point where they can be their angriest or their most cynical. But then they come out of it and they're like, how can I possibly think of killing my son with a rogue mallet?
Speaker: Yeah, and I don't think it's an intelligent strategy of the hotel. It feels more like a natural phenomenon. One thing that was clear in the chapters with Dick is that he encounters people with a shine and he thinks to himself like, that's two people in one day. And normally, I only find three or four in a year. And I wondered if King was giving us a view of the world that has some balance, like there are sort of
Speaker: random drops of evil, like the hotel, and they can collect more evil and build and get stronger. But then there are also random drops of good. And sometimes those things can be attracted to each other, too. Yes, I think that's likely very true. I mean, it sort of happens in the ending where the hotel blows up. How do they leave? They find a snowmobile that is working? No, they use Dicks Snowmobile. Oh, yeah, right. They leave on Dicks, all three of them, and it's going very slow.
Speaker: But then they get like 15 or 20 minutes out and someone is coming, a team of people is coming up from the town on snowmobiles to help them and with first aid. And I read that and I thought, that is really quick. And it made me wonder if there was someone down in town who had some sort of clue that something was going to happen and got things ready just in case or something like that. So you said that it was a very different experience reading this book.
Speaker: now as opposed to when you were 14. What was different? I think as a 14 -year -old, I was just excited by the supernatural scary things. And I kind of had the idea of Jack being an alcoholic and that sort of being the way in, the way that the hotel got in. But I mean, it was just much richer. I just am able to, as an adult, understanding where Wendy and Danny, Wendy and Jack were coming from.
Speaker: As a kid, I didn't question why Wendy stayed married to Jack. Like as an adult, I'm like, a man breaks your son's arm and you get the hell out of there. But I also know enough history to know that it wasn't easy for a woman of Wendy's means to get out of marriage. She may not have been able to have a bank account in her own name. I mean, based on when this book came out, and therefore probably when it was written, no, she couldn't have a bank account or a credit card.
Speaker: She does think about leaving him. She'd have to go live with her mom, and that would be its own set of problems, apparently. Yeah, I think he does a good job of closing off exits in a number of ways, not just at the hotel, but in a way that felt
Speaker: very real and very adult, and that I also did not appreciate as a child. I mean, the reason he stays, well, insofar as he's being rational, that he wants to stay at the hotel all winter is he needs this job. They'll be homeless if he doesn't have it. Maybe if he can stay here and write this play and sell it, they can step into something better at the end.
Speaker: Right. And so we've talked about with haunted houses, that feeling of being trapped in a haunted house story. Normally, it's you've bought the house and the characters bought the house and like, sacrifice all their savings for the house and so they can't get out. And in this case, it's not a house, but it is his financial stability.
Speaker: a similar sort of entrapment ultimately, right? Yeah, no, that's really interesting. I guess I hadn't thought before of like, just the financial stability and what's terrifying about that. I think because I read this also in high school or something and it
Speaker: did not make a particularly big impression on me then, though I absolutely loved it this time around. And I think it's for this reason, as an adult, I appreciate the horror of limited choices. When you are an adult and you feel like you should have made or created better choices, I think the first time I read it, this structure of knowing in advance what's going to happen, right? I mean, he lays it out in the first six pages.
Speaker: haunted hotel, previous undertaker killed his family, uh, real bad stuff going to happen. You can't get out. Nobody can come help you. Right? So you know, and yet it is still this sickening descent. And I think there's something to me, there's something about being an adult that makes that worse. Cause you see how they got there and why they can't leave.
Speaker: Uh, I mean with Jack, every time I'm reading a chapter from his perspective, I'm like, Jack, just get over yourself. Like it's okay to work a menial job if you can do that without killing your son. Like, come on, right? Like he has his pride, right? Which is so stupid. I hate it. You have a really nice juxtaposition with Dick who
Speaker: has no legal filial obligation to Danny. It's just, here's a kid. He told the kid everything would be okay. They have a connection. And it's just the right thing to do to look out for someone and to look out for a kid. And he
Speaker: Even though it's not really his responsibility to go save them, he does it even though he knows that he could die, you know, he risks it all because it's the right thing to do. And he puts his own desires to the side because he's a good person. And he knows it's the right thing to do. And it's just like this is the opposite of Jack, like Jack,
Speaker: doesn't know what the right thing to do is. When he gets a glimpse of it, it makes him mad. And instead of the doing the right thing, he lashes out because it's unfair and he doesn't want to do it. What do you mean he gets a glimpse of it and he gets mad?
Speaker: He has glimpses in the opening quote that you read. He has a realization the hotel wanted Danny. And he finally admits that he saw the hedges walk. It wasn't a hallucination. And he saw the dead woman in 217. And he understood what was going on. And there's that whole chapter in the shed where he's like going back and forth on that. Like, I should get the snowmobile ready to go. No, I shouldn't. Yes, I should. And he goes back and forth. I thought that was a really fascinating chapter.
Speaker: because he glimpses what's really going on. And then he can't face what he thinks of as failure. But I think that's the problem I have with him is like, it's not failure to keep your son and wife alive. You're going to kill them. If you stay here, that's the failure. But he doesn't believe that about himself. In his most rational moments, you're asking him to also believe that he's going to kill his family because he's in a haunted hotel, right?
Speaker: Right. I mean, he did that before. We're asking him to make a rational decision about them being in a haunted hotel where he's going to be possessed to kill his wife and son. Sure. But he did that before they even got to the hotel. I think it was when he's describing the whole incident with a student and he beats his student and he blacked out when he beat him and he was sober. That was a terrifying moment. Like the idea that like, oh, he was sober and he lost his temper and lost control in that way.
Speaker: And I think it was in that chapter where he's like, he still sees himself as like the nice guy. Like, I'm just a nice guy. No, you're not. Look at what you did. You did this sober and he can't face reality. And if you can't like, and I think that's, that's why this is used to call it a tragedy. I think that's a great term for this. It's a tragedy. It's his tragic flaw that he constantly avoids.
Speaker: responsibility constantly avoids responsibility and constantly thinks of himself as better than he is right but he let danny live at the end and he was i feel like he was fully redeemed in that moment yikes that moment was intense i mean he beats his his face off with the roque mallet he actually finally does something to save his son and puts his son first instead of himself
Speaker: Oh, is that how you interpreted that? I don't know. No, I interpreted beating his face. I interpret that as the hotel taking control of the body to kill the last vestige of Jack. But before that, when Jack takes control and speaks up and says, remember, I love you, Danny, that's the moment of Jack fighting for his son above his own well -being, finally. And then I guess Jack is really lost after that because the hotel has no use for him and beats Jack's face off of
Speaker: the body it's wearing.
Speaker: Yeah, and it's destroyed. I mean, I just wanted to make sure we got back to your opening question. The hotel is not an, I don't think the hotel is an intelligent evil. I think it's a grasping. Malevolence or something. Yeah. Agreed with you on that. Maybe it is like vampires after all, you have to invite them in in order for them to really get access to you. And Jack did that a thousand different ways with his various flaws, but there was something Danny,
Speaker: Didn't do and so didn't get in and didn't get what I wanted now is it hard to imagine a five -year -old or the nine -year -old that that should have been written as you know having some sort of tragic flaw or Temptation that like to even be capable of that. I don't know. I mean children are just people I
Speaker: Yeah. And Danny, even though he was told not to go to room 217, he does go that first time. He's an obedient child. We don't get a lot of him disobeying his parents. But in that moment, he disobeys his father to get the key. And he disobeys Dick, who told him to stay away. And I thought that was kind of interesting and out of character. So Houdel tried. Is there anything else you want to go over before we talk about genre?
Speaker: Yeah, I feel like this is a very neatly packaged story. He answered all of my questions, I think. There's this long quote at the end that Halloran says to Danny, and he says, you're a good boy. You agree for your daddy. When you feel you have to cry over what happened to him, you go into a closet or under covers and cry until it's out of you again.
Speaker: And then you pull your act together, and you just go on. And I was like, Jack needed to hear that when he was a child. Jack needed to hear that when he was five. And maybe this wouldn't have happened if Jack had heard that and lived by that. That's what Jack needed to hear. And here's Dick telling it to Danny. And so I thought that was a nice happy ending. Danny's going to be OK. And then in my copy, there's a section for a sequel, which I didn't know that there was a sequel. But there is, and now I have to go read it.
Speaker: So yes, the sequel is Dr. Sleep. It came out in 2013 or something. So what is that, like 35 years after the original? I did go and read it actually, and it was enjoyable, but not going to talk about it here. But my personal rule is that if the sequel comes out more than say 20 years after the original, it's not really part of the story.
Speaker: Interesting. So genre themes. It's a haunted hotel and not a house. That didn't seem to make much difference, actually. Well, I think the descriptions of the empty hotel were really creeping me out. Like as an adult, that would creep me out. There's something wrong about being in a space that's meant for a lot of people, but it's only you.
Speaker: You know what, actually, I take it back that that's true. And what that makes me think of is what you pointed out earlier, those scenes with Jack in the ballroom, he's talking to a whole bunch of people. And I wonder if for someone like Jack, who wants to be admired, you know, he wants to have status, maybe a hotel, you know, would work more easily on him than a home somewhere, you know, a person who is more focused on the home and has
Speaker: I don't know, more issues related to the home. Haunted Home does it for them. But if you want status and care a lot about how people think of you, you need, you don't need, but it would be effective for you to be surrounded by a multitude of ghosts. Yeah, that's interesting. Hill House was a large place and we had Bly Manor in Turn of the Screw. So I don't think the size is it, but I think you nailed it that having a crowd was necessary for Jack. That's interesting.
Speaker: or maybe that difference between feeling private versus feeling public, something like that would have different effects on different people. That's interesting in light of the fact that in some ways there's more isolation, more physical isolation for this haunted hotel. The winter has closed in, you cannot leave for five months. That's more isolation than
Speaker: any of the other haunted house stories we've read. But in some ways it's less isolation because they keep talking about the history of the hotel. It's connected to all these famous presidents and people, travelers from all over the world. So its history is certainly less narrow, less private for sure. That makes a lot of sense. I was confused about why Jack learning about the history
Speaker: was so tied to his demise, basically. But that makes a lot of sense, this idea of being connected and important. And then, yeah, if he could write a book about it, then he gets to put some of that notoriety on himself. He would get to piggyback on its fame, essentially. And I found that to be absolutely delusional. He's imagining that he's going to write a book revealing the sordid history of this hotel.
Speaker: Who cares? Would you read a history of some hotel that had mob connections? I thought that was a symptom of his growing madness, that that sounded like a good story idea to him. Yeah, good point. Another thing that this really made me think about, there's this quote. It's Windy thinking about Danny and she says,
Speaker: She thought that to children, adult motives and actions must seem as bulking and ominous as dangerous animals seen in the shadows of a dark forest. They were jerked about like puppets, having only the vaguest notions why.
Speaker: And so I think that quote is true about a lot of haunted house stories. They're not necessarily this one where it's very much told from a children's perspective. You're just in the house and bad things are happening. You know, in the first one we read 99 fear street. Yes, there's some explanation of parents can't leave because they put all their money down on the house. But I think kids just kind of accept.
Speaker: their setting because that's what they have to do. They're dropped in anywhere. Whereas what made this more horrifying to me as an adult is that I am an adult and I think I get have agency and get to choose how I end up.
Speaker: But this book, both the tragedy of it that you see it coming and it still happens and just where Jack is in his life seems more horrifying because it's not vague. You know exactly why you're in the position you're in. And that's like the worst part about being an adult. I know why I'm here. I know what got me to this position. Oh, I think that's very true.
Speaker: That's why we have therapy. I'm going to bring up therapy in every single haunted house book, because every single character needs it. We all do. Like in 99 Fear Street, I think we talked about that. There wasn't as much explanation of the history. It was like a couple of sentences, not much explanation of why. It was very much a children's story. You're enmeshed in it, and you're dealing with it, and you take a lot of those things for granted. This is an adult's haunted house story. Right, yeah.
Speaker: Any final thoughts? I think this may be my favorite Stephen King book. You know, I've I reread it recently. I reread the stand recently. And those books I had all read in high school, I think I should read some more modern Stephen King, but it just made me really appreciate like, oh, this is why he's the greatest great American living writer. Can I say that? Is that fair? I don't know that I would go that far. I would say the greatest living American storyteller
Speaker: which is slightly different to me because I do not think his prose stylings are amazing. But in terms of characterization, yes, he's amazing at that. In terms of just a story that matters to the reader, he's amazing at that. I think this is one of his most tightly plotted books. So yeah, I think it might be his best. What about your final thoughts? I mean, the image that is going to haunt me is
Speaker: The image of him taking a drink of imaginary alcohol and it making him drunk, this idea that the desire in some places, and maybe those are haunted places, is enough to do you in.
Speaker: So that first time he's imagining the drinks and he calls the bartender Lloyd, and then later on Lloyd appears as a manifestation. And I was like, was Lloyd a real bartender that Jack picked up on the name somehow? Or was the hotel just presenting what Jack expected to see somehow? The idea with desire seems to indicate the latter, that he imagined the drink, he imagined Lloyd, and the hotel manifested.
Speaker: Listeners, what did you think of The Shining? Do you agree that this is Stephen King's most tightly plotted book? Let us know by recording a voice memo and emailing it to openingquestion at gmail .com. You can also complete the feedback form on our website at bookclubpod .com.
Speaker: Send your responses before November 13th so that we can include them in our feedback episode at the end of the season. Our next book discussion will be On the House on Habigal Lane by Keelan Patrick Burke. Read with us. You can get your copy by using the affiliate link in our show notes. We'll release that episode next week.
Speaker: The Book Club Podcast is produced by Carly Jackson and Caroline Gorman. Music and audio editing by Alex Marcus. Thanks for listening.
