Doctor Sleep: 7th - 18th August 2016

Lovely stuff. Another one I got through comparatively rapidly. For me, that is.

One of the things that highlights how well I got into a book, is how much other stuff I read at the same time. For this and Joyland, I remained faithful. With The Wind Through The Keyhole, meanwhile, I read both Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and Dan Rhodes' The Little Whte Car. I read those books in particular as I was about to go to Paris for the week and both wanted to get into the vibe and also as I'd made two previous attempts to read Tropic of Cancer and thought maybe this time I'd get through it and be able to be that little bit more pretentious while I was over there. It didn't help. That said, while it was nothing but a tongue-in-cheek goal for me, it clearly isn't for many literary tourists to Paris. Back to sort of the point; for all but the overall conceit of The Little White Car, its being set in Paris is completely incidental and barely features in the book.  I knew that beforehand, but I love Dan Rhodes so much, I'll grab even the most tenuous reasons to read his stuff. So should you.

Anyway, back to Doctor Sleep. I'm going to come clean and say that I'm not the biggest fan of The Shining. I'd have to go back and read my thoughts from my latest reading to see whether I was still trying to shoehorn my opinion into the common mould, weighing the book against its popular reception and its relationship to the Kubrick film. At this point, I think I'll claim the inability to remain objective and admit a massive critical weakness.

With Doctor Sleep, however, its perfectly possible to read it without any of the kind of obfuscation that hampers The Shining for me. Evidently, as I bashed through it and really enjoyed it.

The Shining - Film

I finished reading The Shining on Saturday night and it was a bit late and with a belly-full of wine I didn’t think I’d make it to the end of the film. So, I resolved to do so at the next convenient opportunity.
6 AM, next morning and BOING!, my eyes spring open and sleep eludes me. That’s 6 AM on a Sunday morning, which is a catastrophe in anyone’s book. So, while it’ll be a push to fit the whole thing in before the kids wake up, it’s still dark, I can still have the room and TV to myself, so I tramp downstairs, make a cup of coffee and put the DVD in.


I’ve come to realise that rather than saying that I’m not much of a fan of Kubrick, I should say that I haven’t watched his films properly and didn’t appreciate the complexity of what he was doing. With that in mind, when I went out to buy The Shining on DVD in preparation for when I finished the book, I ended up buying a box-set of his last eight films plus the Jan Harlan documentary.


So, lights off, volume up.


As I’ve said before, comparing books and film adaptations and getting all bent out of shape about the divergences from verbatim is for whiny tits. They are different and for good reason. Kubrick’s film is his vision, not Stephen King’s.
I’ve seen the film before, but this time it hit home. There are times when you wonder whether Jack Nicholson was the right choice for Jack. From early on, you can see the psychosis bubbling under the surface. His cracking up isn’t a big step and I’m sure, even for those who haven’t read the book, it doesn’t come as a surprise.


I made it through the first 45 minutes or so when I heard my son chatting away to himself. Well, I initially just heard some noises and, being a bit on edge from the film, wondered what it was. I paused the film and went to the foot of the stairs to find that he was calling me. So, I went upstairs to find him leaning over the headboard of his bed and peering out the window to announce,
“Daddy, it’s snowing!”
I hardly watch any scheduled television and very rarely see the news or weather reports, so this snowfall came as something of a surprise. There wasn’t much on the ground at that time and it could have gone either way, but after three hours steady snow, we had to cancel the day’s plans (cinema followed by dinner at the mother-in-laws) and were effectively, although much less dramatically than it sounds, snowed in. At this point I had to leave it there and, far from contemplating a bloody conclusion to the day as the mildest of cabin fever seeped in on the heels of the Tinkerbell dvd followed by lashings of Thomas the Tank Engine, we made the best of it.
I eventually finished the film that night. Awesome.
I know many people have a problem with film adaptations for not sticking to the source, but the few I’ve watched so far, ‘Salem’s Lot (2004), The Shining and Carrie last night have been so much better for having just read the books. Far from spoiling them by taking away any of the surprise of the plot turns etc. you can appreciate the film much more as ‘the film.’ There’s no need try to work out motives or who did what (or even who’s going to do what) and, a bit like the inverted detective story format favoured by Columbo and Hitchcock among others, you are free to sit back and revel in the spectacle of it all. Done well, you can see the actors breathing life into the characters, see the director’s take on the vision and, done badly, you at least get a reminder of the Stephen King story and, quite often, a nudge to read the novel or story again.

The Shining

Once again, this is one of the books that I have already read. I’m not sure whether I saw the film before reading the book, although I’ve certainly seen it since. Perhaps I merely knew the basics, particularly the “Here’s Johnny!” scene and picked up the book at home (my parents seemed to have quite a few decent books lying around when I was young (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Kramer Vs Kramer are ones I remember most clearly – maybe they only read novels that had been adapted to film, who knows), although they’ve never been what you’d call readers. These days, such a description would be doing them a disservice as, my mum particularly, consistently has a book on the go.

Anyway, the reason I mention the film is that it’s barely possible to conceive of the novel without the image of Jack Nicholson in your head as well as so many of the scenes from the seminal film. I’m going to do my best to separate the two as I re-read it, concentrating more on the writing and allowing myself to follow the story as Stephen King told it. Only then will I go back to the film and try to see that in as great a degree of isolation as possible.

Out of the books I’ve already read and those of which I haven’t, but know something about, this is one that I’m most looking forward to and will be opening myself up for.