38. The Truth Behind Stephen King’s The Shining

How did Stephen King's stay in a ghostly hotel in Colorado inspire The Shining? Is Stanley Kubrick's iconic movie a faithful adaptation? And, is King a good writer? Join Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett as they delve into the fascinating story behind the writing of The Shining, and the world it was born of. Download the Klarna app to stay on top of your money, so you can think about, well, anything else. Klarna balance account required to receive cashback points. Limitations, terms, and conditions apply. Exclusions apply. Learn more at https://www.klarna.com/uk/buyer-protection-description/. For analysis, book recommendations and more, sign up to our newsletter, Book Club Notes, introduced weekly by Tabby or Dominic. Sign up at: https://www.thebookclubhq.com/ Email us: ⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠@thebookclubpodhq⁠⁠ X: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ YouTube: ⁠⁠@TheBookClubPodHQ⁠⁠ Senior Producer: Nicole Maslen Assistant Producer: Alfie Norris Social Producer: Harry Balden Video Editor: Lorcan Moullier Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  This episode is brought to you by Klarna.

• 0:03Speaker 01

  When I finish the final chapter, I often find that I have more questions at the end than I started with.

• 0:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  What happens next? Why did the story end there? But you know, Tabby, it's hard to make time to ponder big questions like that because I'm always getting bogged down in kind of boring day to day admin.

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• 0:29Dominic Sandbrook?

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• 0:41Speaker 01

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• 0:47Dominic Sandbrook?

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• 1:03Dominic Sandbrook?

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• 1:44Dominic Sandbrook?

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• 1:57Speaker 01

  She made herself speak calmly, her eyes never leaving his.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  Her voice was low and husky, almost a whisper. It hurt to talk. Listen to me, Danny. It wasn't your daddy trying to hurt me and I didn't want to hurt him. The hotel has gotten into him, Danny. The overlook has gotten into your daddy. Do you understand me? Some kind of knowledge came slowly back into Danny's eyes.

• 3:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  The bad stuff. There was none of it here before, was there?

• 3:11Speaker 01

  No, the hotel put it here. The... She broke off in a fit of coughing and spat out more blood. Her throat already felt puffed to twice its size. The hotel made him drink it. Do you hear those people he was talking to this morning?

• 3:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, the hotel people.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  I heard them too, and that means the hotel is getting stronger. It wants to hurt all of us, but I think, I hope that it can only do that through your daddy. He was the only one it could catch. Are you understanding me, Danny? It's desperately important that you understand.

• 3:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  The hotel caught daddy.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  I know you love your daddy. I do too. We have to remember that the hotel is trying to hurt him as much as it is us.

• 4:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  So what a chilling moment that was. So that was The Shining, written by Stephen King and published in January 1977. One of the best known horror novels of the last 50 years, a huge bestseller in the 1970s and with the inspiration for Stanley Kubrick's film, which came out in 1980 and starred Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall. And the film, which actually Tabby has not seen, so you are coming to this untainted by knowledge of the film.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  The film has become such a cult classic that even people who have never read a word of Stephen King will have a sense of the basic story because of course people have seen clips on YouTube. They'll have seen memes, all of these kinds of things. So Tabby, the story, I mean, even you knew the story before you started reading the book, I imagine.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I knew the story from, without having even watched it, from knowing of the film. And I mean, it's an interesting question. Do you, I would say that The Shining is the most famous of Stephen King's many, many successful novels. Do you think it would be as famous if it had not been for the film?

• 5:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, no, no, definitely not. I mean, so when you think of Stephen King, you think of Misery, Carrie, The Shining, Pet Sematary, I don't know. I mean, all of these things have been made into TV mini-series or films. So it's very hard to separate them out.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  So the plot of the novel, which is actually quite different from the film.

• 5:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  It's the story of a young family. There's the would be writer, Jack Torrance, his long suffering wife Wendy, and their five-year-old son Danny, and they're hired to look after this vast, empty hotel, the overlook, high in the mountains of Colorado during the winter season when, so off-season, no one else is there. Jack is a recovering alcoholic and he has serious anger management issues and a family history of domestic violence. Wendy has been so alarmed by his behaviour in the past that she has come close to divorcing him. Meanwhile, their son Danny, there's something special about him. He has an unusual sense of knowing, an unusual maturity.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  And what it is, is he has the power of second sight, which another character, the hotel's head chef, describes as a shining, the shining. Almost as soon as they move into the overlook, strange things start happening. Everything starts going wrong. Jack becomes obsessed with the gory, gruesome, dark history of the hotel. Wendy is worried that he has begun drinking again and Danny starts having these visions of blood-drenched bedrooms and corpses in beds and bathtubs and a man with a mallet pursuing him down corridors. This one word splattered across a mirror that we will come to.

• 6:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, red rum, red rum. Now, if you've seen the film, people remember Danny when he's sort of possessed in somewhere and he's going kind of red rum, red rum with his finger. But actually, the film and the book are quite different. So the red rum is in both the novel and the film, but some of the best known elements of The Shining in the popular imagination are only in the film. So Jack typing, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy again and again and again, the single line. That's in the film, it's not in the book. Jack smashing through a door, shouting, here's Johnny.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  Such an iconic film. I couldn't believe it wasn't in the book. I kept waiting for it.

• 7:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, not in that. I mean, Jack Nicholson actually came up with the line, I believe, on set, a sort of parody of the talk show host Johnny Carson. Danny's seeing these incredibly creepy twin girls kind of at the end of the corridor as he's kind of pedaling along the corridor. Again, in the film, not in the book. And the ending of the story, the resolution, is completely different.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  And actually, even the death toll is different. And I think the themes of the book are quite different from the film. So if you've seen The Film of the Shining, sort of very charismatic central performance from Jack Nicholson. Jack Nicholson is always, you know, he specializes in playing unstable characters. The film is basically a charismatic, unstable character who gets madder and madder as the book goes on. That's the film. In the book, first of all, the supernatural element is much stronger.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  There are lots of allusions to Edgar Allan Poe. There are lots of kind of ghostly goings on. There are lots of sort of visions and visitations and things that are not in the film. The book is much more sympathetic to the two main characters, I think. So Jack is much more fleshed out. He has a backstory. And Wendy, who in the film is not really much of a character at all, although it's, I think, a brilliant performance by Shelley Duvall. In the book, there are more layers to her and we're more in her head much more than we are in the film.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  She's a very active character in the book.

• 8:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  She's a very active character. And finally, the, um, the book is not just about the supernatural element or the horror, the madness. It's also about their family life, Jack's alcoholism, his history of domestic abuse and the sort of pressures on the nuclear family in 1970s America. So we're going to get into all this. And we'll get into Stephen King himself, of course, who must be one of the most read, most best-selling, best-known American writers. Of the last 50 years, I'd say. I have to make a confession to the audience. I had never read a word of Stephen King before about two weeks ago when I started reading this book. So this was my first time. What about you?

• 9:33Speaker 01

  I'm totally the same. I don't like scary books on the whole.

• 9:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  But let's talk about Stephen King. So he's one of the best selling writers of modern times. Estimates usually agree, he sold about 400 million.

• 9:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  Which is

• 9:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Unbelievable.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  Unbelievable. And so many film adaptations of his books. So Carrie, Stand By Me, The Shawshank Redemption, more recently Pet Sematary and It, and of course, The Shining. I mean, he is prolific. He's won a huge number of awards, including a lifetime achievement medal in 2003 at the National Book Awards and a Congressional National Medal for the Arts.

• 10:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  Stephen King is associated with one state above all, which is Maine. You've never been to Maine, have you, Tabby?

• 10:17Speaker 01

  No.

• 10:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's absolutely lovely. It's like the sort of, it would appeal to you, I think, because it's kind of like the Cornwall of, of North America. So it's kind of rugged coastline, nice coves.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  She lays.

• 10:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  People in quartersips. It's very much your territory. This is where Stephen King was born in 1947, and his dad was a Hoover salesman, a vacuum cleaner salesman. And I have to say, not a great role model. His mother, Stephen King's mum, once said to him, Stephen, your father was the only vacuum cleaner salesman that Electrolux ever had, who sold vacuum cleaners to widows at two o'clock in the morning. You look puzzled by this, but I believe that he was

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Because he was unfaithful.

• 10:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  I believe he was using his vacuum cleaning

• 10:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  equipment selling as an excuse for

• 11:01Speaker 01

  She wasn't lauding his talents as a salesman, presumably. No, other talents.

• 11:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  I've got to sell a Hoover to Mrs. So and so down the road. I'm going to be back in a couple of hours. She's like, what, at midnight?

• 11:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. Great to tell your son that as well.

• 11:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. Well, he walked out when Stephen King was two. He went out one day, this is quite Tabitha's side, right? He went out one day to buy cigarettes and never came back.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  We're all waiting, honestly. This could be my last episode. You'll never know.

• 11:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  So his mum, who's called Ruth, she brought up Stephen and his brother David on her own. They moved at least six times, I think before he was about 11, and they relied on her relatives for help. So a sort of slightly troubled family background, and you can see how that might inform some of the themes of The Shining.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  Like so many of the writers on this show, he's very bookish. He said, I read everything from Nancy Drew to Psycho. So quite American, but a huge influence is Lord of the Flies. And I think you can see shades of that maybe slightly bleak view of what human nature is capable of in a lot of King's stories. So he wrote the introduction to a Faber edition in 2011, and he, in that, he wrote that as a boy, he once asked a woman driving a mobile library, do you have any stories about how kids really are? And she gave him Golding's books, so pessimistic, and he loved it. He remembers it as the first book with hands, strong ones that reached out to the pages, seized me by the throat. Such like aggressive, visceral

• 12:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  Descriptive prose.

• 12:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's very much his style, isn't it?

• 12:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. It said to me, this is not just entertainment, it's life or death. Crikey.

• 12:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  And actually, I looked at a list of his favourite books. He's very book club friendly, because his favourite books are things like 1984, The Lord of the Rings, Bleak House, Blood Meridian, Master and Commander. I mean, he should really be listening to this show. I suppose he would say he doesn't need to, because he doesn't need our opinions.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  Because he read them.

• 13:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you know, we can have a chat. Got to get him on, got to get him on one day.

• 13:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  He could send in his thoughts to our newsletter, our free newsletter, Book Club Notes. It comes out every Saturday and you can sign up. Stephen, if you're listening, you can sign up at thebookclubhq.com. He went to the University of Maine on a scholarship. He wrote his first story, I Was a Teenage Grave Robber, in a comics fan scene.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm hooked.

• 13:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, good title. And then he had a first page story published, The Glass Floor, in the magazine Starkling Mystery Stories in 1967. When he was at the University of Maine, he joined this writing workshop, and this was a huge influence on him, both professionally and personally. So his professor was called Bert Hartland, and Bert Hartland was a big influence on him. He said, he was the greatest English teacher I ever had. It was he who first showed me the way to the pool, which he called the language pool, the myth pool, where we can all go down to drink. I love this.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  I love this too.

• 13:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  I've trod the path that leads there often in the years since, and I can think of no better place to spend one's days. The water is still sweet and the fish still swim.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was struck by that because I've always been amazed at how many stories Stephen King has in him. He's not someone that seems to have ever had, you know, writer's block. He's never dried up. He just has an extraordinarily active imagination, say what you will about his writing.

• 14:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  But it was at this workshop that there was another pivotal moment in Stephen King's life. He met another student with whom he fell in love and to whom he got married, and she had a truly fantastic name, a name which should recommend her instantly to all listeners. Her name was Tabitha.

• 14:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  You're so, you're so excited about that, Tabby.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so they, he graduates from university in 1970, and then he trained as a high school teacher, but he couldn't find a job. So he worked at an industrial laundry and sold short stories to obscure little magazines. Then she gets a job teaching English at Hampton in Maine. He's still trying to write. He's living with Tabitha, and they have two small children and they're living in a trailer. All of this is quite The Shining, I would say, the opening section.

• 15:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  The aspiring writer, not struggling to make ends meet.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, family on their haunches, all that.

• 15:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  Slightly shrieky wife called Tabitha.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  Absolutely brilliant supportive wife called Tabitha.

• 15:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  Because then, in around 1972, he has the breakthrough. He has two ideas. Firstly, he imagines a girl having her first period in the shower at school, and other teenagers being cruel to her. Second, he'd been struck by this article that he read in Life magazine about telekinesis. So he thinks, I'll combine the two into a, into a story. So early on, that kind of combination of the sanguinary and, and the supernatural. He hates the result, actually. He thinks it's rubbish. He throws it in the bin. But Tabitha, saint that she is, she retrieves it. She says it's brilliant. She wants to know what happens. So he agrees to keep writing it, partly to please her.

• 16:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  Partly because he's run out of other ideas. I wonder if he just needed confidence more than anything. He has so many ideas in his career.

• 16:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  Everybody needs, clearly needs a Tabitha to give them that confidence.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Everybody needs a Tabitha. But this is the book that becomes Carrie. He sends it to Double Day. They agree to buy the hardback for $2,500, about 10 times that today. Then there's this gigantic deal for the paperback rights. He gets $200,000. Transformative, life-changing. He's made it as a professional writer. Carrie was published in 1974. It gets strong reviews and it sells well, seen as one of a handful of novels in the late 1960s and the early 1970s that establishes the horror genre. We discussed this a little bit in our American Psycho episode. So for instance, Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, and he follows it up with Salem's Lot, which I'd actually love to read.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  Another horror novel about a small town in Maine where the residents are all vampires.

• 16:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  So his third novel is The Shining, published 1977. And the origins of this book are a great story in and of themselves. So in autumn 1974, you know, King has made it. He's got, he's got money. He and his wife decide to get away from Maine for a bit, because they've been in Maine all this time, and they've been looking after his mother, who has been dying of cancer. And they need a break. And King said, I wanted to spend a year away from Maine, and I thought I'd like to give my next book a different background. So away from New England. And he claimed later that he opened an atlas and just pointed randomly at a point in America. And his finger was on Boulder, Colorado. I've been to Colorado. It's extremely nice state.

• 17:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  It seems highly implausible to me that he just happens to point to a lovely college town in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  Well, maybe it's his shining. Maybe it's the muses throwing him a bone.

• 17:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  Maybe it's his, maybe it's something supernatural. So they moved to Boulder, which is lovely. And one day that autumn, they decide they're going to drive up to this place called Estes Park, which is the gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park. And there's a very grand hotel, very well known there called the Stanley Hotel, where they check in. And the Stanley Hotel was founded in 1909 as a health resort, as a sanatorium for rich people from the East Coast coming out west. They've got tuberculosis or whatever, and they want to break in the mountains. And the hotel, the Stanley Hotel, had always, you know, had a sort of checkered history, a lot of bad luck. Every winter it had to close because the weather was so bad. So for that reason, it's never really been the money spinner

• 18:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  that its progenitors hoped. And the Stanley Hotel is obviously the overlook in this book, even though for legal reasons, every copy of The Shining begins with Stephen King saying, it's not based on any one hotel. It is based on this hotel, because he's told loads of stories in interviews over the years. Some of them perhaps slightly embellished, but they're great stories. So to quote, when we arrived, they were only just getting ready to close for the season. And we found ourselves the only guests in the place with all these long, empty corridors. Anyway, he and Tabby had, they would have dinner in this huge grand dining room, just the two of them. And there was like taped classical music playing on the loudspeaker and there, and of all the tables, theirs was the only one set for dinner.

• 19:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  And Stephen King said, except for our table, all the chairs were up on the tables. So the music's echoing down the hall, and I mean, it was like God had put me there to hear that, to see those things. And by the time I went to bed that night, I had the whole book in my mind. But a different story that he told in a different interview, he said, when Tabitha went to bed, I walked alone around the hotel. And I was the only person there, and I went into the bar, and the bartender was still there, and he was a man called Grady. And he gave me a drink. And then, and I quote, "That night I dreamed of my three-year-old son running through the corridors, looking back over his shoulder, his eyes wide, screaming. He was being chased by a fire hose. I woke up with a tremendous jerk sweating all over

• 20:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  with an inch falling out of bed." And then a brilliant, this is, this is very, Tabitha Syrett.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  I mean, this is my daily routine.

• 20:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  I got up, let a cigarette, sat in a chair, looking out the window at the Rockies. And by the time the cigarette was done, I had the bones of the book firmly set in my mind.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  That's how all of, all of our podcasts come to me.

• 20:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  Really?

• 20:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. Sit in a chair, look out over archway, and the next thing I know, boom, I've got an episode.

• 20:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Boom. You've worked out your, your amusing joke for the episode.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  So this is the setting.

• 20:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  But the themes of the book are also rooted in, in King's own experience. Obviously, it would be reductive and inaccurate to say, oh, well, Jack Torrance is King. Also quite offensive. But there's definitely some King in him. For one thing, the experience of being struggling writers, King at the beginning of his career. But then, most importantly, Jack's drinking. In King's memoir on writing, he says he wrote The Shining without even realising I was writing about myself. He was drinking very heavily in the mid 1970s, and Tabitha once confronted him about this drinking decades later. In a stark fashion,

• 21:30Speaker 01

  she emptied a bag of his drug debris and booze bottles, et cetera, ashtrays, whatever, in front of their kids.

• 21:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Wow.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  That would do it, I think. And then there's the second thing, and this is Jack's aggression towards his son, Danny. In an interview in the mid 1980s, he said, "As a young father with two children, I was horrified by my occasional feelings of real antagonism towards my children. When you ever stop, when you ever go to bed, it's when I wrote this book, I wrote a lot of that down and tried to get it out of my system. But it was also a confession. So..."

• 22:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. I mean, I don't think he's confessing to being...

• 22:06Speaker 01

  No, he's not. He's, God, no, make that clear. He's not confessing to domestic abuse or violence or anything. He's, he's admitting to that urge.

• 22:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, to, to losing your temper. I mean, there's no parent alive who hasn't lost their temper with their, their child at some point. And I think that tells us something about how Stephen King understands the genre that he's working, which is horror. So there are some writers for whom horror is just pure melodrama. It's, you know, there's monsters, there are ghosts, it's a scary story, you know, and that's it. There's no meaning. King is very adamant in interviews, he's given loads of interviews, that the supernatural stuff must stand for something, must, must be about something.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  Well, this is, I mean, this is quite, you know, well established. We discussed this when we did Dracula on our mini-series and the rest of its history. We discussed it in American Psycho, how maybe not in terms of an individual's inner torment or whatever, but horror is often reflects, it's a projection of the societal concerns, fears, anxieties of a given period or a given age.

• 23:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  Completely, it is, completely. And I, I found an interview that King gave to The Guardian in 2013, and he was looking back at writing The Shining specifically. And he said, "For me, when I'm writing horror, you know, it is an exciting thing, a literary thing in and of itself, but it often stands for real fears. So the fear of, you know, dying, the fear of having cancer, the fear of having a car accident, or, as he put it, the parent who punches instead of kissing." He says, "If such terrible occurrences were acts of darkness, they might actually be easier to cope with. But instead of being dark, they have their own terrible brilliance, and none shine so bright as the acts of cruelty we sometimes perpetuate in our own families." And he said, you know, if you look at them,

• 23:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  it's like, it's as if you look at them directly and you're blinded, they're too much for you to cope. So you use a ghost story or a horror story as a sort of filter, as a lens through which to view some of these issues. "The truth is," he wrote, "that monsters are real and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes they win." And I, I like that way of putting it. I mean, obviously, you can write about these things without the filter, but the idea that you're effectively writing about the cruelty within a family through the lens of a horror story, and actually, in quite a bleak way.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  I mean, that's, that's also quite Lord of the Flies, really, isn't it?

• 24:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  Very Lord of the Flies. The monster within us, and sometimes the monster wins.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's exactly, William Golding would have completely endorsed that verdict, yeah.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  I mean, it's no wonder he's so prolific, because he writes it very, very quickly. He wrote 3,000 words a day. So his first draft takes him only about three months. Remarkable.

• 24:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  But Tabby, I mean, how many words a day do you write when you're doing the notes? You write thousands and thousands.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  Twenty thousand. Yeah. But I mean, I'm not, that's, that's the incredible thing about writers, say, in comparison to what we do. We are walking tracks that have been like laid out for us, you know, we're not coming up with things totally original, you know?

• 25:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  Unbelievable.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  I mean, I am, but you've been doing this for too long.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  You're washed up.

• 25:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, thanks.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  Anyway, anyway. So The Shining's published by Doubleday in January 1977, another huge hit, though not all the reviews love it. So notably, Richard Lingeman in The New York Times calls King "a writer of fairly engaging and preposterous claptrap."

• 25:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, harsh.

• 25:34Speaker 01

  He gives him some marks for setting pace and thrills, but he deducts marks for the writing and actually mocks King for using cliches. For instance, Wendy's breath is taken away, Jack holds on for dear life.

• 25:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  Not to be snotty or anything, but I definitely spotted a couple of cliches.

• 25:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Ah, Tabby's been very snotty. Stephen, if you're listening...

• 25:55Speaker 01

  No, no, no, I really enjoyed this, Steve. But anyway, he also said, "It's a pity, because his sheer rookie's energy," this is King's, "is engaging and in the relationship of Jack and Wendy." And I so agree with this. There is a core of psychological truth that might have been crafted into a subtle psychological chiller. I so agree with that. I really think one of the most interesting things about The Shining is the relationship between Jack and Wendy.

• 26:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  I agree completely. I totally agree. And actually, when I was reading this book, we'll come to it in the second half, when we talk about, you know, we get, get into the structure of the book and the characters. I did think, within this book, there was an alternative book that could have been written, which would be much more oblique, much more subtle and careful and understated, and would have, I think, perhaps been a better book, but not as successful. And obviously, King is working in a different genre. I'm not dissing, he's choosing to do a very melodramatic, grotesque, gory kind of book, and that's fine, because that's what he's set out to do. But you could have told this story differently.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, obviously, as you say, it probably wouldn't have been as successful a book, because this is very successful. And King goes on to be one of the bestselling writers of the 1980s and the 1990s. The issue is, which we've alluded to, is it any good? And I actually think it's kind of interesting, because this is often something that is raised about books that thrill, horror. Even in, even in the movie industry, horrors very rarely win awards or accolades. You know, there are exceptions, but there are exceptions for a read. There's a snobbery around it, because it, because it has such an obvious visceral reaction. It's not a lingering, you know? It's part of the reason that, you know, Sinners with Michael B. Jordan, the Ryan Coogler, the reason that got, you know,

• 27:47Speaker 01

  when that got an Oscar, people were like, great, horror's finally being taken seriously. And I think maybe that's part of the reason people overlook Stephen King or dismiss him as a bit of a Dan Brown.

• 27:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  So when he's given the Medal at the National Book Awards in 2003, our old friend Harold Bloom...

• 28:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  I bet, not a fan.

• 28:04Speaker 01

  In his perpetually sunny way, says, "It's an extraordinary decision, another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life. I've described King in the past as a writer of petty dreadfuls, but perhaps even that is too kind. He is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis."

• 28:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  Harsh.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  That said, returning to my earlier point, there are writers and critics who do defend King and say that he's underrated. For instance, the novelist David Foster Wallace, he says, "He's one of the first people to talk about real Americans and how they live, to capture real American dialogue in all its foul-mouthed grandeur."

• 28:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  I'm not sure that's...

• 28:44Speaker 01

  I'm not sure that's fair. I mean, we just recorded an episode about capture and the rye.

• 28:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. I think there's lots of books. I, I don't disagree that King can be very good on how people speak and ordinary people speak to each other and how they relate. But I don't think he's the first person ever to have done this.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  No, I, I agree. I agree. And then the essayist Cynthia Ozik, "Never mind all the bestsellers and all the stereotypes. This man is a genuine, true-born writer, and that was a revelation." I actually do think he's a true-born writer. He is not Tom Clancy. He writes sentences and he has a literary focus and his writing is filled with literary history.

• 29:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, his writing is filled with literary history. That point is definitely well made. So whether The Shining is perfectly written, I'm not sure. And King himself said, has actually in interviews said, you know, "It's a young man's book. I'd write it differently today," or whatever. That, he is not just a hack who is pouring out bestselling literature. I mean, King, as we've said, studied literature. He was in this writer's workshop. And there are literary allusions in this book. There are a lot of literary allusions. So to give you just three, allusions to Gothic literature in particular, which obviously King is really interested in. Right through the book allusions to Edgar Allan Poe. So the epigraph is from The Mask of the Red Death, which is the short story published in 1842, probably the most famous story Edgar Allan Poe ever wrote.

• 30:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  The motif of this kind of sinister masked ball runs right through the book. Lines from Edgar Allan Poe's short story keep kind of bobbing to the surface in this in this way, which we'll talk about in the second half. Then Edgar Allan Poe himself was inspired by the Gothic stories of the 18th century writer Horace Walpole. Wendy herself, the character Wendy, mentions Horace Walpole. She says to Jack, they talk about dining in an empty hotel, the scene that happened to Stephen King in Tabitha, and she says, it's like being in a Horace Walpole novel. So it's a it's a novel that's aware of its own kind of literary history, I guess.

• 30:41Speaker 01

  And then also when Danny is drawn to room 217, which Halloran, who is the chef, the hotel chef, who had first told Danny about The Shining. And he is specifically told Danny to avoid room 217. Danny thinks of a story Daddy had read to him once when he was drunk. And this is the story of Bluebeard, who, when his wife discovers that he has murdered all of his previous wives, this image is burned into Danny's mind. The severed heads of Bluebeard's seven previous wives were in the room, each one on its own pedestal, the eyes turned up to whites, the mouths unhinged and gaping in silent screams.

• 31:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, so a good example of Jack's perhaps slightly unusual parenting style.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  Who's a bit unhinged, yeah.

• 31:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  But anyway, the point is, I guess, that Stephen King is a much more literary novelist or a novelist with greater literary aspirations, shall we say, than people have sometimes given him credit for. You know, he's not Jane Austen, he's not Gustav Flaubert, but at the same time, he's definitely not Dan Brown. I mean, he is somebody who is much more reflective about his craft and so on. And his book is a cut above, I think it's reasonable to say, it's a cut above your sort of airport thriller or some your sort of generic airport thriller that will be forgotten in a couple of years. And this was what brought his book to the attention of Stanley Kubrick, of the film director. So in 1976, Kubrick had made a film called Barry Lyndon, which was an adaptation of a book by Thackeray. It didn't make any money, nobody wanted to see it.

• 32:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  So Kubrick got the proofs of The Shining from the publishers. And he'd read a lot of horror books and he hadn't finished them. He said, they're useless. This is the one book that he finished. He said, I like the plot, I like the ideas, the structure, they are much more imaginative than usual in the horror genre. So Kubrick bought the rights and he said, I don't want Stephen King to write the screenplay. I'm going to get another novelist to write the screenplay. And he got this woman called Diane Johnson. And Diane Johnson was both a published novelist and she taught Gothic literature at Berkeley. This is an incredible fact. So this is why we've gone on this little tangent. Diane Johnson, if people listen to our previous podcast about the Bell Jar, they will know that Sylvia Plath won this competition to go with 20 young women to work on Mademoiselle

• 32:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  magazine in New York City in 1953. And that's the first, that's the first section of the Bell Jar. Diane Johnson was one of these women.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  There you go, one of the women who Sylvia Plath, you know, whose lives Sylvia Plath destroyed. Because remember, we said that so uncannily accurate was her portrayal of that time and many of the women were very upset.

• 33:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, they had food poisoning and whatnot. Diane Johnson was one of these women. She now, all these years later, 20 years on, is confronted with The Shining and she has to adapt it. And she actually thinks it's rubbish. Diane Johnson is not a fan of the book. She said, it's scary, it's effective and it works, but it is quite pretentious and I quote, a very bad book, which is extraordinary. But of course, that is why she has no qualms whatsoever about rewriting it and dropping huge chunks of the book to basically turn it into the screenplay of the film. And the great irony of this whole story is if we're totally honest, would we be doing The Shining on this show were it not for the film? We probably wouldn't because it wouldn't be so well known.

• 33:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, it just wouldn't have the traction in the public mind that it has. And yet, the irony of this, Stephen King absolutely hated the film of The Shining. He said it was maddening, perverse and disappointing. He's given multiple interviews about it. He's incredibly dismissive about Stanley Kubrick's work. He says basically Stanley Kubrick knew nothing about the horror genre at all. He made his film, he butchered my characters, he butchered my story. And it's the curse of Stephen King's life that everybody else thinks the film of The Shining is great and loves it.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  That would be gutting actually, wouldn't it?

• 34:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, if it's your characters and your story.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  Let's take a break and when we come back, we will check into the Overlook Hotel. We will make our way to the to room 217 and the dark secrets, the lurk within. And we'll find out exactly what is going on with the Torrance family.

• 34:52Speaker 02

  There we are getting a statement from Number 10 on that flight with 350 passengers on board.

• 35:01Speaker 03

  The great game, strategic struggle between Britain and Russia.

• 35:09Speaker 04

  We assess a prime minister with high confidence it was Russian. Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.

• 35:17Speaker 03

  They took down a British passenger jet containing 350. Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself, you want to play or not? You're the prime minister. You've done nothing.

• 35:33Speaker 03

  We would need to understand the policy context. All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today and disseminated into an operation order or frago.

• 35:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  A frago that says to kill the president of Russia.

• 35:49Speaker 03

  Yes.

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• 36:18Speaker 06

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• 36:35Speaker 01

  Hi, everyone, it's Catty Kay here from The Rest is Politics US. The midterms are almost here. It's the biggest political moment of the year and Anthony Scaramucci and I will be right there with you, making sense of every twist and turn as the results come in.

• 36:49Speaker 06

  Yo, that's right, we're going to be live on YouTube covering the midterms as we get the results. Will Donald Trump be a lame duck for the next two years or walk away with a mandate to do whatever he wants? We're about to find out.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  So join us from midnight to 3am Eastern Time on November the 4th. We'll be live reacting to all of the results as they come in.

• 37:10Speaker 06

  So make sure you're subscribed to The Rest is Politics US on YouTube and turn on notifications, please. You won't want to miss this.

• 37:23Speaker 01

  Welcome back to the book club, everybody. Now, would you like to check into a remote and sinister establishment haunted by memories of terrible cruelty and premonitions of dreadful suffering?

• 37:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, I would.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  We, Dominic and I, are the caretakers of just such an institution. So let us lure you in to our weekly newsletter, Book Club Notes. It's entirely free. It comes in every Saturday. So many fun bits and pieces. You can give your own feedback, the kind of feedback that chills our blood, if not yours. You can give your own views on the book, you'll get some extra tidbits from Dominic and I. It's huge. So do make that deal with the devil. Now to business, let's get into The Shining itself. So introduce us to our to our first two characters.

• 38:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  So we meet the key characters in the first two chapters. The first chapter, we meet Jack Torrance. He's been interviewed by a man called Mr. Ullman for the job as the caretaker of the Overlook. And then the second chapter is about Wendy and Danny and they're at home in Boulder, waiting to find out if he's got the job, basically. And in these two chapters, if you go through them, King sets up some of the book's themes and he gives you hints of the darkness that's going to consume this family. So the very first line of the book, the very first exchange, Jack is seething at what he sees as the condescension of Mr. Ullman. There is a sense of Jack's anger and his temper.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  I think this is really well done because it strings the bow or something, I don't know. It's the sense of something strung far too tight that is being stretched and stretched and stretched throughout from this point, and you know that it's going to snap.

• 39:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, that Jack is irascible. He is not easygoing. He could perhaps be a little bit difficult. You get this from the very beginning of the book, but in an understated way. It's not like the guy interviewing from a job and Jack rises from his chair and like pummels him to death or something. It's just that Jack is annoyed and offended by this bloke in a way that you would be. And King quite cleverly sort of increases that as the book continues. There's a reference to his alcoholism, but a veiled reference. So Ullman is talking to him about how they had a previous caretaker and stuff. And Jack says, well, I won't be drinking. I haven't drunk for 14 months. So the implication, obviously, that he was once an alcoholic. We have references, fleeting references, not fully explained to some sort of violence involving Jack.

• 39:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  So an attack on a student called George Hatfield, we'll come to this a little bit later, and of a reference veiled, but so not clear at this point, something happened with Danny that meant that Danny's arm was then in a cast. Then we're in chapter two, Wendy, when we meet her, she's very unhappy, she's almost crying. And actually, at the end of the chapter, she breaks down in floods of tears. So it's obvious to us, something is not right with them, their marriage, you know, with her mental states and so on. Danny, the little boy, when they're talking, this is just at the beginning, they're talking about how he's lonely and how he doesn't have many friends and he's, there's a solitary ness to him and he doesn't have anybody to play with.

• 40:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  But also in that first chapter, Jack is talking to the guy interviewing him and he says of his son, oh, Danny is an extraordinary boy. And obviously Danny is an extraordinary boy because he has all these sort of powers. So that's all set up in the first half, but also set up is the hotel's own history of violence and specifically, very tellingly, the violence of a father towards his family. So the previous caretaker or an earlier caretaker recently was a bloke called Delbert Grady. He drank, he went mad, he killed his girls with a hatchet, he killed his wife with a shotgun, and then he killed himself. And actually, as we'll see, we actually meet Delbert Grady, but he's become weirdly changed into a kind of English butler or something, hasn't he?

• 41:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's like a Bond villain.

• 41:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Jack, perhaps slightly dismissively, it's a sign of Jack's arrogance. He says to the interviewer, "Well, Grady didn't go to, he didn't graduate from high school, did he? And that was your mistake, you see, because he's an idiot. A stupid man is more prone to cabin fever. He's got nothing to do but bitch at his wife and nag at the kids and drink. He'll get edgier and edgier and finally boom, boom, boom." But Jack is, you know, Jack is foolish there because actually what he's describing in this so-called stupid man is exactly, we can see this coming. It's exactly what's going to happen to him. In the film, of course, he's Jack Nicholson. And I think you have to get Jack Nicholson out of your head when you read this. I mean, Jack Nicholson gives

• 41:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  a very typically charismatic and quite manic performance and is brilliant. But the Jack Torrance in the book is more humdrum and is more ordinary. And the important thing about him is it's not that he's unstable and mad and all of this. It's actually, what becomes important is that he has lumbered, he has all this baggage because of his backstory. Now, in the film, Jack Torrance has no backstory at all. He has no baggage. He has no kind of psychology. Whereas in the book, in The Shining, Jack's backstory is the heart of the whole book. So it's not that, him being a writer is actually slightly irrelevant, I think.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  He's not even writing a book. He's writing a play. We don't know anything about it and it's never really flashed out.

• 42:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, exactly right. It's what actually is the motor of the book is Jack wrestling with his own demons. And the question that runs through the book, and Stephen King has talked about this loads in interviews, is, is the violence and horror of the book, does it come from the hotel and the kind of ghosts and all of that sort of stuff? Or does it, does Jack bring it to the hotel? Is it in him? And there's a tension between those two things that runs through it.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  I mean, I think it's a combination because we find out that the Jack of the book comes from a small town in New Hampshire. He's the son of a male hospital nurse. And there are veiled hints right from the beginning that he's had a troubled past. So this is what he's bringing with him to the hotel and, as we'll find out, makes him more vulnerable to the hotel. And it becomes more explicit about a quarter of the way through the book. Something in particular sets, you know, triggers these memories. And he's on the roof and he's trying to get rid of a wasp's nest. I found these little triggers, there are a couple of them throughout, phrases that recur from his past that then suddenly leap into the present. I found that a little bit heavy-handed, as with the wasp nest. Anyway.

• 43:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  And he remembers, this is his sort of inner dialogue, inner thoughts, his temper all his life. He'd been trying unsuccessfully to control it. He could remember himself at seven, spanked by a neighbour lady for playing with matches. He'd gone out and held a rock at a passing car. His father had seen that and he descended on little Jackie roaring. He had reddened Jack's behind and then blacked his eye. And when his father had gone into the house muttering to see what was on television, Jack had come upon a stray dog and kicked it into the gutter. But another thing that comes out here is his father's punishment, his father's violence. So it's like a cycle of anger and violence passed generationally.

• 44:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  And then Jack passing it on to the dog, right?

• 44:35Speaker 01

  Exactly. But, but, but this is all compounded by Jack's drinking. That said, I would say that for vast portions of the book, Kenya's actually very sympathetic towards Jack and his struggle and his efforts to stay sober and do the right thing for his family. So he says Jack was an emotional alcoholic, just as surely as he'd been a physical one. The two of them were no doubt tied together somewhere deep inside him, where you'd just as soon not look.

• 45:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, but that line, I think, is, I think some of that, sometimes the style is quite revealing, quite interesting. So that's been told to us by an external narrator. So there's a narrator, you know, we're in Jack's head, but there's an ambiguity there. Is this the narrator's verdict on Jack? Or is this simply Jack's verdict on himself? And Jack kind of making excuses for himself?

• 45:21Speaker 01

  I think the line between, are we, is it Jack speaking to himself? Is it the hotel speaking? Is it this external narrator? It's very hazy. I actually think that's quite a good thing, though, because it means that it's impossible to trace absolutely or pinpoint the moment that Jack goes from man to monster.

• 45:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, agree completely. And I've actually, so having read the book, I then went back and sort of effectively reread it, kind of flicking through it to sort of work out the structure. And it, and it is very hard to point to a single moment when Jack loses touch with the reality and when he goes from being our protagonist with whom we feel sympathy to our antagonist, foot towards whom we feel horror. Because I think we are meant to feel sympathy for him throughout. But as, as the book goes on, there are more and more hints, both of his violence in the past, and also hints of the violence that there is to come. So there's a moment when Danny is having one of his kind of episodes, where he's having the kind of second sight and he's kind of, you know, hallucinating or whatever.

• 46:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  And he's locked himself in the bathroom. And Jack is banging on the door. And Jack shouts to him, like, "Open up, open up." And he says, "You'll get a spanking if you don't open up." The threat of violence. And we, and we see this from Wendy's perspective as well. So Wendy says to herself, "He's losing his temper," she thought, "and was more afraid. He hadn't touched Danny in anger since that evening two years ago, but at this moment, he sounded angry enough to do it." And this is a reference to an episode when Jack was drunk and he came back, he'd been drinking, and he found that Danny, Danny like tipped something over his papers.

• 47:01Speaker 01

  Danny had gone into, into the cellar to, and had opened some case with his old writing and all the play or something. Yeah.

• 47:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  And Jack came in and basically grabbed him and broke his arm.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. And God, it's so visceral, the, the, you know, they hear in memory in the present, over and over the snap of his arm. Awful. And then we discover something else about him. The reason that he lost his job as a teacher and, you know, has been reduced to work as a hotel caretaker. So he taught at an exclusive prep school, Stovington. So this is very Captain and the Rye territory. But clearly had a bit of his chip on his shoulder. We could already see that when he spoke about, you know, oh, it was his mistake to go to college because boom, boom, boom, and all that. And he had an issue with one boy in particular, George Hatfield, tall and shaggy blonde and almost insolently beautiful

• 47:53Speaker 01

  boy. So Jack is clearly envious of him and sees him as sort of this young Robert Redford. And he says he thinks that George won't have trouble scoring.

• 48:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. So he's almost sexually jealous of George.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. It's the chip again. And so Jack dropped George from the debate team because he stuttered. And then when he found George hacking his tyres up with a hunting knife, Jack had waded in, his fists held up in front of him. And it had seemed that he had been grinning. And then he had to be dragged off by the French mistress screaming, "Stop it, you're going to kill him." So incredible violence simmering just beneath the surface.

• 48:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly, exactly. So in other words, even before they get to the hotel, Jack is bringing the violence with him. So Jack does bring, the evil is partly within Jack, no question about that. But the evil is also in the hotel as well. I mean, Stephen King is very adamant about this. One of the things he doesn't like about Kubrick's film is he thinks that in the film, Jack just goes mad and the, and the supernatural stuff is kind of in his head. Whereas King wants it to be very clear that the supernatural stuff is real and it's in the hotel.

• 49:03Speaker 01

  If there's blame to be handed out, in Kubrick's version, it sounds like it's a hundred percent all Jack. In this, it's, it's like 70% the hotel, preying on a man whose demons are bigger than those of most other people.

• 49:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  Make him weak, actually. Jack is weaker. So we should say something about the other characters. So first of all, there's Wendy. Stephen King is very proud of Wendy as a creation. And he has said, "One reason I hate the film is the film makes her this screaming, sobbing wreck." Fun fact for people who maybe don't know much about the film, that she's such a screaming, sobbing wreck, is that Shelley Duvall, the actress, Sally Kubrick will make her do hundreds, literally more than a hundred takes, so that she actually was screaming, sobbing, exhausted wreck in real life.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  And her performance, when she cracks, when she's, you know, when the, the film is really kicking off and she is sobbing and she's distraught. I mean, it's a really visceral performance because you've basically got an actress who's been on her feet for 20 hours or something.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  She was quite damaged by it, wasn't she?

• 50:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, she found it really traumatizing, I think. Stephen King doesn't like the Wendy in the film. He says, "She's too misogynistic. She's just there to scream and be stupid. That is not the woman I wrote about." Now, the woman he wrote about is definitely brave and she, Wendy is resourceful and she's gutsy and she's resilient.

• 50:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Is there more to her than that? For me, I don't really think there is. I think she's just a housewife who fights back, basically.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  I think there is a bit more, actually, because, yeah, I mean, she does have real metal. She's also imperfect, though. I think it's interesting how quickly she, and you actually slightly resent her for it in the first half of the book, how quickly she turns on Jack and blames Jack for things, one incident in particular.

• 50:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's a fair point, yeah.

• 50:50Speaker 01

  And also the fact that we do get her backstory and the complicated relationship that she has with her feelings for Jack and had right at the beginning. The one element of her personality that I think isn't, isn't at all like developed and seems a bit pointless is he tries to build this whole thing about how she's got a very complex relationship with her mother and, you know, she's becoming her mother. It doesn't really go anywhere. He's trying to make it a mother, Jack and his father thing. I thought that was pointless, but I actually think Wendy is a good character.

• 51:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  What about Danny? What did you make of Danny?

• 51:23Speaker 01

  Danny's such an intriguing character, I think. So it's his psychic power that gives the book its title, you know, The Shining. I like that concept. I was intrigued by it. This is potentially a bit of a problem. He's five, but his mind is arguably that of a 12-year-old. It's so mature for his age. And reviewers have often commented on this, that Danny seems weirdly wise with an improbably wide vocabulary, far in advance of a five-year-old. That said, you could argue, well, we know that he's brilliant and unusual and extraordinary. So he's a, you know, ahead of his time.

• 51:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think it's so telling, though, that in the film, the film's Danny appears, feels to us younger than the Danny in the book. He's not given so much articulism. The reason is Kubrick employed a real six-year-old who simply would not have been able to say all the things that Danny says in the book.

• 52:14Speaker 01

  Fine, that's valid. But then you say that Kubrick doesn't lean into the supernatural element of it, you know, therefore The Shining, the concept of The Shining isn't, doesn't have as much weight as it would in the book. Danny is an unusual boy, more advanced than he should be because he has The Shining, and that's a huge part of his personality. He can understand things intrinsically. But I also think that sometimes his attempts to make him, to bring him back down to his age are a little bit weak.

• 52:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay.

• 52:44Speaker 01

  When he suddenly will be like, oh, I don't understand that, or I can't read that, or he suddenly is a little boy again.

• 52:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  They don't quite fit together, the two sides of his personality. I like the way that The Shining, the power of The Shining is brought in, though.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  Me too.

• 52:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  And the way that Danny, Danny's mind flits from future to past to present and sort of back again. And actually, I like the way that his, so he's obviously got an imaginary friend, hasn't he, called Tony?

• 53:09Speaker 01

  Oh, I was so creeped out by Tony for the first half of the book.

• 53:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  You're led to think that Tony's a bad guy, aren't you?

• 53:15Speaker 01

  Yes, I thought, I thought maybe in, in Stephen King's kind of universe, he was like the creature from It.

• 53:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, I can see that. Danny, what I like about Danny, what I like about the way he's written, King has this technique in this book that I do think works quite well, which is that our sort of present-day narrative is interrupted by random sentences in italics, which are like shards of the past or kind of glimpses of the future. And it's a little bit like reading, you know, William Fulton of The Sound and the Fury or something, which is jumping between different time periods. And some lines are in italics and some aren't. And he does this with Wendy and with Jack as well. But, and they will be telling you something and then that will summon a memory of something or an illusion, a literary illusion, maybe a line from Edgar Allan Poe, or it's like it's bobbed up into their consciousness

• 54:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  and then bobbed back down again.

• 54:09Speaker 01

  It really accelerates things as well because it becomes more frenetic, the more that you're jumping between all these different time periods. The other thing I think that's done really well with Danny is the way that he senses the tensions and the, I don't know, dysfunctionalities in his parents' marriage. But he understands it in the way that a child would understand it. He just knows that mummy's not happy or daddy's not happy, you know. I think that's well done.

• 54:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 54:36Speaker 01

  But some of his premonitions are very frightening and it gives the book its sense of growing tension, the foreboding. So in his earliest chapter four, before they even get to the hotel, Danny's outside, he's playing with this imaginary friend, Tony, and then he has this vision. He was in a room filled with strange furniture, a room that was dark, snow splattered against the windows like thrown sand. Outside, there was a hollow booming noise, like a dreadful door being thrown wide, footfalls. Across the room was a mirror, and deep down in its silver bubble, a single word appeared in green fire, and that word was red rum. I found that so chilling.

• 55:17Speaker 01

  And then, and then there's another vision. He hears smashing glass approaching destruction, a hoarse voice, the voice of a madman made the more terrible by its familiarity. Come out, come out, take your medicine.

• 55:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, and so.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  Quite obvious, maybe, though?

• 55:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's obvious. I think it probably is obvious. We sort of know what's coming, don't we? I mean, I think it's very difficult for us as readers to approach this, as readers might have approached it in 1977, because the film is so embedded in the popular imagination that you know what's going to happen to Jack Torrance and what's going to happen to this family. I mean, some of the visions are very gory, aren't they?

• 55:55Speaker 01

  Gosh, he likes grisly, grisly descriptions, Stephen King.

• 55:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  They're being shown around the hotel early on. They go into the presidential suite and Jack and Wendy are looking out the windows and saying, oh, the rock is very nice. And Danny's like looking into the bedroom and he sees it covered with like blood and bits of people's brains.

• 56:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, bits of people's brains on the wallpaper, clustered with great splashes of dried blood, flecked with tiny bits of greyish white tissue, a surrealistic etching of a man's face, drawn back in terror and pain, the mouth yawning and half the head pulverised.

• 56:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, this is what makes it a horror book rather than just a ghost story.

• 56:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  So I was thinking, if, you know, you think of the great ghost stories, The Turn of the Screw by Henry James or the M R James ghost stories, it's always what's unsaid and it's always, you know, and there's an ambiguity. Stephen King, I mean, there are bits that are unsaid and ambiguous, but he, if, if there's an opportunity to tell you that somebody's brains were splattered against the wall.

• 56:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, he'll do it.

• 56:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  He will absolutely do it.

• 56:51Speaker 01

  But then that's actually, that's something he does well, I think, you know, bringing us to the fourth main character of the book, and that's the Overlook Hotel itself, is the growing materiality of the hotel's malice.

• 57:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  So in the film, the hotel in Kubrick's film was built on a set, but it was based on a real hotel. And Tabby?

• 57:14Speaker 01

  This is, this is incredible.

• 57:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  This is a hotel that we have been to. It's a hotel in Yosemite in California, the Owani Hotel.

• 57:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  We didn't stay in it, too scary.

• 57:25Speaker 01

  Way too scary. We did a, this was on a Restless History tour to America, and we looked around this very odd hotel, huge ceilings, shiny wood, and our lovely tour guide, Dylan, told us it was the hotel from The Shining, and I'd forgotten until today.

• 57:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. So in the book, the, the book, I think, does a very good job of evoking the hotel. But evoking this kind of hotel that you get in a kind of American National Park, there's like a huge hotel, as you said, like polished wood, thick carpets. You get a real sense of the sort of the spookiness of the deserted hotel, the long corridors, the echoing ballroom, the empty bar, all of this. And there's a sense in the beginning of the hotel as a living entity. So when the chef, Halloran, sees them go inside, he says goodbye to them, this line, it was as if the overlook had swallowed them.

• 58:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  And there are, there are some ways in which, I mean, you say about the materiality of the hotel's malice. There are some ways in which this is well done. So I think that the, King said he had a dream about his child being chased by a fire hose. I like this because there's a bit where Danny is upstairs and he sees this fire hose fall off the wall and he has this, and there's a sort of snake aspect to it.

• 58:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 58:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  And he finds it scary. Now, we might not find it scary as adults, but you can imagine how a five-year-old.

• 58:43Speaker 01

  I suppose so.

• 58:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  What about the, the, the creatures made of hedge, the hedge animals?

• 58:48Speaker 01

  What, the adorable hedge creatures? Yeah, this, this again, I found faintly ridiculous. So it's these hedge animals and Danny and Jack start noticing that they're sort of not where they were before. And the dog has its paw raised at one point and stuff like that. That's kind of vaguely creepy. So, but then, so well, it's a read, the lion on the left had advanced all the way to the fence now. Its muzzle was touching the boards. It seemed to be grinning at him. Now the buffalo had moved, circling to the right, behind and around the rabbit. I have to say, if anything, it's sort of, I mean, it's charming, it's endearing.

• 59:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's com- I find that comical.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  And also it's like, what, what are they going to do? Are they going to, like, a twig's going to digest you? What's happening here?

• 59:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, there's a bit where one of them, I can't remember if it's Jack or Danny, imagines what it would be like and how awful it would be if the hedge creatures caught up with him. And like, I think there's worse things that could happen to you than being basically embraced by a rabbit that's made of hedge.

• 59:41Speaker 01

  What a confusing menagerie. Buffalo, I mean, rabbit, lion.

• 59:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 59:48Speaker 01

  When they're sort of chasing this stampede of animals, sort of chasing Danny towards the hotel. That is quite scary because he's trying to, you know, march against the snow and he's exhausted and they're coming closer and closer.

• 59:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Perhaps sensibly, they didn't try to put the hedge animals in the film.

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  I mean, that would, it would be sort of like Narnia.

• 1:00:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  Also, I think slightly missing from the film, though, is this, I think that you get a tremendous sense of the suffocating weight of the hotel's history. So there's this bit where Jack goes down to the basements. He's going through a scrapbook and he's looking at all the photos and it's very sinister. All the mobsters and all the criminals and all the sort of, the weird creepy guys who've stayed there. And this line, it seems that he could almost feel the weight of the overlook bearing down on him from above, all the rooms, all the people. And there are more and more, I mean, there's a bit where he turns the page and he gets an invitation to a masked ball from 1945. And at that point, he imagines himself the mask of the Red Death, the Edgar Allan Poe story, and then the owner of the

• 1:00:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  hotel shouting, unmask, unmask, and everybody taking their masks off. And then the line, the Red Death held sway over all, kind of comes into his head.

• 1:00:59Speaker 01

  Red death, murder, red rum.

• 1:01:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 1:01:03Speaker 01

  The most frightening scene in the whole book for me comes about halfway through and it marks the point really where the hotel is kind of alive. And it's when Danny finally plucks up the, or rather can no longer resist the magnetic pull of room 217. And he goes in and there's, you know. Doubling cleverly used, sees himself in the mirror, looking at him, is it him, is it his friend Tony? And he goes into the bathroom and he pulls the shower curtain back and. The woman in the tub had been dead for a long time. She was bloated and purple, her gas-filled belly rising out of the cold. Ice-rimmed water like some fleshy island. Her eyes were fixed on Danny's glassy and huge like marbles.

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  She was grinning, her purple lips pulled back in a grimace, her breasts lolled, her pubic hair floated. Her hands were frozen on the knurled porcelain sides of the tub like crab claws. And Danny's thinking in his head, it's fine, it's fine. Halloran said that these things are like these creatures, these ghosts, they're like pictures in a book. They can't hurt you, they can't come out of the book. But then she gets up and she follows him. And Danny's trying to get out, trying to escape, trying to open the door, but it won't open. And so he closes his eyes as Halloran told him to, so that they all go away, so that the woman goes away, he can't get hurt. And then this gloriously melodramatic final paragraph.

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  Time passed and he was just beginning to relax, just beginning to realise that the door must be unlocked and he could go. When the year, ugh, when the years damp, bloated, fish-smelling hands close softly around his throat. And he was turned implacably around to stare into that dead and purple face.

• 1:02:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, it's a very memorable scene, isn't it?

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  I mean, I overused the sentence, but literal chills.

• 1:02:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  But then, you see, I like what happens next because you turn the page, it's a section break, it's about halfway through the book. And it's a section break, a new chapter, and we're not with Danny at all. We are with Jack. And Jack is dreaming, isn't he? He's kind of fallen asleep, he's dozing. And it's now that we get the big reveal about his father's domestic abuse. I think it's so telling this happens at this moment. So it's when the hotel has finally come to life and it's attacking them. That we get the reveal about the demons within Jack and Jack is dreaming about his father. And there's this scene, you and I were only talking about this the other day, the scene when his father attacked his mother.

• 1:03:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Over Sunday lunch and he beat her with a cane and there's like gravy going everywhere and stuff.

• 1:03:39Speaker 01

  Again, it's that very physical, it's very physical, material details. The fact that he has this image of her glasses in the mashed potato.

• 1:03:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, in this interview with The Guardian, at the 2010s. Stephen King said, this scene was the turning point of his entire literary career. He said, it was my crossroads moment where I decided to blur the line between the supernatural and the psychotic. So what he wanted to do was, he said, I was going to write about Jack having been abused by his father, domestic abuse. Rather than making his father just a villain or something, I wanted to show that Jack still loved his father. And that how complicated Jack's feelings were. And he said in this interview, I think this made Jack a more realistic and therefore more frightening figure. That what is motivating Jack, what's eating at him is not just fear of his father, but also this kind of love for his frustrated love for his father.

• 1:04:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  At the same time, which is of course, you know, how people in this situation often feel.

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  And it also means that even when he's, as he's really falling into madness, there's still this element of love for Danny. That rears its head, you know, even when he'll think things like, he won't just think, kill, kill, destroy. He'll think, it's important that the boy take his medicine, you know, it's important that he learn. And it does make him more sinister. That said, it's not like the overlook in the book is in any way just a metaphor, is it? Because, and this is what King, you say, was so cross with Kubrick about, for Dan playing that supernatural element. And implying that it's all in Jack's head and it's one psychological deep dive into the unraveling of a man.

• 1:05:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  There's a combination of the two things, isn't it?

• 1:05:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, but the horrors in the hotel are real. For instance, there's this scene where. Jack is totally gone. He attacks Wendy, Wendy defends herself, she and Danny managed to get him into the fridge.

• 1:05:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  You know, big storeroom and lock him in and the hotel unlocks him. You know, there are so many things, the fact that the old woman in the bath physically touches Danny.

• 1:05:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, he has marks on his neck.

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And you can see that this means a lot to King because in his sequel, Doctor Sleep. This, the supernatural element of the book is developed, whereas a lot of the psychological stuff is less so.

• 1:06:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  But I like the fact that the psychological and the supernatural, this tension between them. So to go back to that scene. He's been dreaming about his father. And then it's as though he sleepwalks into the office of the hotel where the radio is, the two-way radio, the only way of communicating with the outside world. And he hears his father's voice coming from the radio. You have to kill him, Jackie, and her too, because a real artist must suffer, because each man kills the thing he loves. Because they'll always be conspiring against you, trying to hold you back. Cain him for it, Jackie, Cain him with an inch of his life. I'll go with you while you give him his medicine. I know you can do it, of course you can. You must kill him. Part of this is the demon within Jack, which is his father. But also I think King wants us to think part of this is real and it is the hotel and this is a supernatural thing that is happening.

• 1:06:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  And this is the moment when Jack cracks and he screams at the radio and he smashes the radio up. And of course, by doing that, he's destroyed their only link with the outside world. And then there's the snowmobile, he ends up sabotaging the snowmobile as well. And from this point, the pace really begins to escalate, doesn't it?

• 1:07:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So Wendy finds Jack, he's incoherent sobbing, they try to find Danny. We haven't heard from Danny since he was attacked by the woman in the bath. They search for him, they find him on the landing with marks on his throat, he can't speak. Wendy assumes straight away that Jack did it. She says, don't touch him, I'll kill you if you lay your hands on him again. And then everything gets totally out of control. You know, Jack goes into this bar. He's ordering imaginary drinks which turn out to be real because Wendy can smell gin everywhere. He can hear voices around him, it's like he's in a party, senses the presence of people from the past, from the mast ball. You know, he says, there are these nice lines, all the booths were empty, the sound of laughter had died like a stir of autumn leaves.

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  Jack stared at the empty lounge for a tick of time, his eyes wide and dark. In the very centre of him, a cold certainty was forming and the certainty was that he was losing his mind. And then there are two devastating acts of betrayal perpetrated by Jack. So first of all, he goes to room 217 to see if there actually is a dead woman. And this comes just after this moment of actually quite a nice familial reconciliation where they all. Talk about the fact that they know something bad is happening in the hotel and they come together, you know, Wendy's. No longer thinks that Jack did it and he does realise that there is some sort of supernatural presence there. For instance, the bath mat out, there's drips on the carpet.

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  But he pretends to Wendy and Danny that there was nothing there. He denies it.

• 1:08:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  He hasn't got the courage. He can't admit that there's something supernatural because doesn't he see a shape behind the shower curtain?

• 1:08:43Speaker 01

  It's very creepy.

• 1:08:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Denies it to himself. Yeah.

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. It's like Edmund coming out of the wardrobe and telling everyone Lucy was making it all up. And then, as you say, he sabotages their only other link to the outside world and the only way of escaping the hotel. And this is the snowmobile.

• 1:08:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:59Speaker 01

  And I actually thought this scene went on too long. Jack's deciding whether to do it or not to do it. But by this point, the voice of the hotel is really entrenched in his mind. But this time it's driven by his sense of fear and humiliation. He thinks, well, if we leave the hotel, I'll go broke. And I will have failed as the breadwinner. And also, you know, I'll never finish my play.

• 1:09:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, and he imagines himself washing cars or whatever, or, you know, being a sort of washing dishes. And his pride stops him doing that. So actually the hotel. And so far as the hotel is a supernatural entity, it's playing on Jack's kind of everyday, very human weaknesses, isn't it? And that's also the moment when he first has this vision of killing Wendy.

• 1:09:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Very, again, a very visceral description. Yeah, talking about like he'd have his thumbs on her windpipe and she would be naked.

• 1:09:51Speaker 01

  I mean, it's quite sexual in a weird way. And I thought that was sort of interesting because his relationship with Wendy does remain sexual for much of the book. You know, they are a married couple, but again, it's that sexuality twisted into something violent and dark.

• 1:10:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. And I think this is actually much more layered in the book than in the film. In the film, basically Jack Nicholson goes mad and he goes mad in a very, very, you know, sort of telegenic way.

• 1:10:15Speaker 01

  It's Johnny.

• 1:10:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, exactly. But in the book, it's darker, I think, it's slower. It's more mixed up with Jack's memories of his father beating him and all of this stuff. Now, we get to the final quarter of the book. For me, there's a big weakness here. I know you and I don't really agree on this, I think. I don't like the stuff with the cook. So the cook, Halloran, he's been summoned by Danny's powers. He's coming back. But in the book, there was a huge amount of stuff about traffic jams at the airport and checking, check-in desks. Like, literally, Stephen King talks you through, talks you through like the baggage tags.

• 1:10:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Or, or there's this long bit, uh, just before he gets Danny's telepathic message where he's like, talks you through what he's gonna cook for dinner that night. And his friendship with some bloke. I agree, it does go on far too long.

• 1:11:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  But what I do think is great, and my favourite scene in the book, actually, it's also a brilliant scene in the film, is when Jack is now gone, he's lost the plot. He goes back into the bar, he's desperate for a drink. There's this very, very nicely done sense of all the eras of the hotel's history colliding. All the hotel's eras were together now, all but this current one, the Torrance era, and this would be together with the rest very soon now. That was good. That was very good. And so now, as you said, the alcohol has become real, the bartender has become real, and the bartender Lloyd, who's very sinister, he's described as having the skin of a corpse and very white face. He says, uh, you know, we don't want your money, Mr.

• 1:11:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Torrance, you know, the orders from the manager, your, the manager's very interested in your boy, Danny. And then we meet this waiter, this English waiter, again, very sinister in the film, who turns out somehow to be the caretaker Delbert Grady, who had killed his family. And, and Jack says, you're the caretaker who killed your daughters, aren't you? And Delbert Grady says, no, you're the caretaker, sir. You've always been the caretaker. I should know, sir. I've always been here. The same manager hired us both at the same time.

• 1:12:22Speaker 01

  So Jack's goal now, and now that he's fully insane, is basically, he's like, oh, yes. No, I'm, I aspire now to be the, I aspire to be the caretaker. That's a job I wanna win, basically.

• 1:12:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes. And he will win. He needs to prove he's of managerial timber. And by doing that, he needs to correct his family, who are insolent and have spoken out. So Grady says, my own girls did not care for the overlook, and I corrected them. I corrected them most harshly. And when my wife tried to stop me from doing my duty, I corrected her. And I do think this is of its time. So this is an early seventies book, second, you know, feminism, sort of women's liberation movement.

• 1:13:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  Uh, King is of a, he was in the anti-war movement, anti-Vietnam war movement when he was a student.

• 1:13:10Speaker 01

  Raised by a single mother as well.

• 1:13:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's of that world. So this is obviously like a criticism of the patriarchal nuclear family. The idea of the, the, the father who is correcting his children and his wife. Yeah, this is what Jack is being encouraged to do.

• 1:13:27Speaker 01

  And then, um, Jack promises that he will deal with Danny, he will handle him, he will correct him. And then the end of the scene is the clock strikes, um, and this, this character shouts, unmask, unmask. And at this moment, the narration focuses in on the clockwork figures, who Danny had earlier seen, not really understanding having sex. And it's, and, but this time it's a man, because, you know, they're kind of back to front.

• 1:13:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:55Speaker 01

  Um, and this time it's a man with a small boy, and the man has a steel mallet, and it's smashing down on the boy's head again and again. And blood gushes through the dome, and there's bits of bone and brain. It's horribly gory.

• 1:14:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  It is. Now, we shouldn't completely spoil the final chapters of the book, just to say, though, um, the theme of domestic abuse is still woven into the final chapters. So when Jack is now drunk, he's mad, he's confronting his family, and he's shouting, but what he's shouting at Wendy are the things that people shout when they are, you know, uh, when a marriage is falling.

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're just fighting.

• 1:14:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  When, when a couple are falling apart. You've turned my son against me. That was your plan all along. You've always been jealous, haven't you? He tries to strangle Wendy. He shouts, I will show you who's boss around here, which again, is that sort of criticism of his sort of sense of, you, you described him, his masculinity. That's really important to Jack, that he is the boss.

• 1:14:51Speaker 01

  But also because of the father he hated and loved.

• 1:14:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:55Speaker 01

  And he's actually like, you know, it's all of that coming through.

• 1:14:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's reenacting what is the way his father treated his mother. And all the time Danny, at this scene, is shouting, Daddy, stop, you're hurting mommy. And then there's that thing that, as you mentioned, she manages to lock Jack in the pantry. He is released by Delbert Grady. Delbert Grady is real at this point. You know, this is not all a metaphor. Like, he is let out by Delbert Grady, who is needling him.

• 1:15:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  You let them lock you in, a woman half your size and a little boy, you know, playing on Jack's, um, and, and his fears. And there's actually, the hotel speaks to him, doesn't it? Keep your promise, Mr. Torrance.

• 1:15:33Speaker 01

  But it's confusing because it's a different voice to Grady, who I think maybe we'd come to see is kind of, um, embodying the hotel. But no, it's something else. It's something, it's a far more vast supernatural entity. And then Jack promises that, um, to bring him Danny, and, uh, he says that he'll give the hotel a sacred vow that he will kill Wendy.

• 1:15:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  He does.

• 1:15:56Speaker 01

  And then the final scene hammers it all home. And this is when Jack corners Wendy in their apartment, and he's screaming at her. And King says, there was nothing of the real Jack out there anymore. She was hearing the lunatic raving voice of the overlook itself.

• 1:16:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  In the introductory reading that we did, Wendy is saying to, to, to Danny, this is not your daddy.

• 1:16:18Speaker 01

  She's also a mother, though, trying to make Danny understand that.

• 1:16:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes.

• 1:16:23Speaker 01

  It's actually not his dad that's doing this. He can still love his father and hate the monster.

• 1:16:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  One thing I did find very powerful in these final scenes is that Danny still consistently calls Jack daddy, or my daddy, or whatever. And I think, I mean, maybe this is just my sentimental parental side, but I did find this very, actually quite moving.

• 1:16:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  We see a lot of this, the, the sort of climax of the book through Danny's eyes, and he still see, he, he's heart, he's heartbroken that his daddy, that this has happened to his daddy. This is completely absent from the film. We don't get any sense of this in the film at all, really, because it'd be very hard to do in the film, I think. And that's not a criticism of the film. But through Kate, by showing it through Danny's eyes, King really does bring home this sense of a child watching his family disintegrates around him, and how heartbreaking that would be.

• 1:17:17Speaker 01

  But it also buys Jack a little bit of redemption at the very end. And actually, the narrative, the narrative voice stops calling him Jack or daddy. It starts calling him the thing, or whatever. So he is actually totally just differentiated. Obviously, we don't wanna spoil the ending.

• 1:17:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:33Speaker 01

  It's very, very different from the film. So you better read the book, I guess. And I better watch the film.

• 1:17:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Are you gonna have the courage to watch the film, Tabby? Surely.

• 1:17:41Speaker 01

  Oh, I don't know. I don't know. I feel like I just have to. I mean, it's a cult classic, isn't it?

• 1:17:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  You do.

• 1:17:45Speaker 01

  I think I just have to man up.

• 1:17:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  You so do.

• 1:17:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  All right.

• 1:17:49Speaker 01

  Just grow, grow up.

• 1:17:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Uh, our final verdict, and I suggest that we, uh, score this in, um, implausibly mobile hedge rabbits. If you have a better idea, overheating boilers or whatever, I'm happy to hear it.

• 1:18:03Speaker 01

  Implausible menageries, menageries, I think. I'm gonna give it a 6.5. I just thought it was so much fun. I really enjoyed reading it. I had so much fun reading it. It definitely didn't shatter and remake my world as I know it. But then, you know, books don't always have to. Sometimes they can just be really fun. I read it on holiday. It was a great holiday read. It is, though, I think, a tiny bit obvious. I think it could have leaned a little bit more into the whole, is this real? Is this not real? Is this a psychological journey into the, you know, humanity's heart of darkness? Or is it literally happening? Everything is, is very literal. Um, and I think the middle section was a bit long. But a fantastic page turner, would recommend.

• 1:18:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay. I'm going to give it six. Now, that sounds harsh. I don't mean it to be harsh. Basically, I'm just not a massive fan of horror, um, as a genre. Um, so it didn't convert me. The writing is sometimes very good and sometimes not. I think it's just uneven. It's a young man's book. I'm not dissing Stephen King for that. There are bits that are clumsy and cliched, but then there are bits that are very well-written and really, really well-observed. I think there's loads of good stuff in here. I think a lot of the psychology is very good, actually. Um, I think the Gothic melodrama element and the gorriness, which of course is why it's so successful, but for me, slightly sort of suffocates and obscures the more subtle

• 1:19:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  story within. And when that New York Times reviewer, back in 1977, probably reviewed that annoyed Stephen King in the Times, said, you know, it's, there's almost like, it's almost like there's another book in here struggling to get out. I agree with that, actually. I think if Stephen King were a different kind of writer, he would be less successful. So it's not for me to judge him. But I think he might have written a book that was 200 pages shorter, because this is what, 400 pages or something?

• 1:19:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  200 pages shorter and more subtle. And actually, probably for me, it would be more scary, because it would be like, like the turn of the screw or something. Would I recommend it to people? I would recommend it to people. I think it did drag, but I think it was fun. It was a nice, I mean, I just read that, The Bell Jar or something. So it was like a massive change. What's coming up, Tabby? A massive palate cleanser next. I mean, you could not think of a more different book.

• 1:20:17Speaker 01

  Honestly, night and day. So Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brien, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Money by Martin Amis, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John Le Carre, Tesla Durbavilles by Thomas Hardy, Dune by Frank Herbert, and Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling. And also, actually, just one, a tiny, tiny, you know, using The Shining, I'll look even further into the future. We're also doing A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, and that will be our third book adapted by Kubrick on the show.

• 1:20:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  What was the first one?

• 1:20:50Speaker 01

  Lolita.

• 1:20:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, Lolita, of course. Wow. You had a good taste. Very good taste. Superb. All right. Have a good holiday, Tabby. Bye, everybody.

• 1:21:00Speaker 01

  Thank you. Bye.