Doctor Sleep (2013)

Doctor Sleep (2013)

Author: Stephen King  |  Page Count: 485

"When you couldn’t sleep, when you were afraid to look around because of what you might see, time elongated and grew sharp teeth."

A very belated sequel to King's The Shining (1977) novel. While many of the author's current fans probably weren't born when the first book came out, it's assumed that anyone reading Doctor Sleep will have read the previous book, and I'll be proceeding under the same assumption, so there will be at least one major SPOILER for The Shining hereafter.

For anyone that actually wanted a sequel, thirty-six years is a long time to wait. A similar amount of time has passed for the book's main protagonist, Danny Torrance. Despite his experience as a boy, Danny has taken on some of the more vile traits of his father, including his self-destructive alcoholism.

But for much of the novel Danny is a hospice worker in a small town in New Hampshire, attending to the terminally ill. It's a role in which his peculiar ability, his 'shining', can play a productive part.

So far so good, but Doctor Sleep is a very different kind of book to its predecessor. The previous novel had malevolent entities in a contained space, whereas Doctor Sleep has very different entities in the wider world, travelling around in camper vans. When the two things are compared it's like the difference between ghosts and vampires - many people believe in ghosts, but you'd have to go further afield to find someone that legitimately believes in blood-sucking vampires. In short, The Shining was relatively grounded, but Doctor Sleep is unconvincing silliness.

It took me months to get from the opening paragraph to the closing one. I sat it aside twice and read over half a dozen other things in the interim. That's categorically not how a novel ought to be experienced, but, to be frank, I only finished Doctor Sleep because I dislike abandoning a text once I've started it. I didn't enjoy it, for the most part, besides some fine character work.

In addition to my own unwise stoppings, as a UK resident who's unfamiliar with many American colloquial terms (not found in my dictionary) there were times when I had to stop reading and open a web browser to find out what King was referring to. It wasn't often, but enough to be annoying because my reading time is a kind of escape from the ubiquitous internet of things.

King has expressed many times his dislike for Stanley Kubrick's 1980 filmed version of The Shining, and it seems to me that he uses the novel to further reinforce that standpoint. What I mean is that many of the Overlook Hotel past happenings referenced in Doctor Sleep are things that Kubrick left out of his film. Therefore, anyone hoping to go from the film to novel will encounter a number of plot contradictions, due to Kubrick's changes. If you really want to read Doctor Sleep but can't spare the time to read The Shining first — because, let's face it, time is precious and short — then at the very least watch the miniseries of the same name directed by Mick Garris, which is more faithful to the original novel (and has a teleplay by King himself).