In a picturesque remote town somewhere in Colorado, sits the Overlook, a grand old hotel that is the setting of this expectedly disturbing and frighteningly vivid book. The perfect storm builds up to an explosive ending when Jack Torrance, a short-fused recovering alcoholic, his wife Wendy, and their son Danny, a five-year old with the gift of the 'shining' move in to the hotel as it's out-of-season caretakers, and the hotel with it's equally sinister garden starts to slowly take over their lives.
'Jack Torrance thought: Officious little prick.'(opening line)
'Watson shrugged. "Any big hotels have got scandals," he said. "Just like every big hotel has got a ghost. Why? Hell, people come and go. Sometimes one of em will pop off in his room, heart attack or stroke or something like that. Hotels are superstitious places. No thirteenth floor or room thirteen, no mirrors on the back of the door you come in through, stuff like that,'(25)
'He had been frightened, had tried to explain to them that there was nothing wrong, that this sometimes happened to him when he concentrated on understanding more than what normally came to him. He tried to explain about Tony, who they called his "invisible playmate."(32)
'Don't go, Danny...
Then the wind gusted again, making him squint, and the shadow by the bus stop was gone... if it had ever been there at all. He stood by his window for
(a minute? an hour?)
some time longer, but there was no more. At last he crept back into bed and pulled the blankets up and watched the shadows thrown by the alien streetlight turn into a sinuous jungle filled with flesheating plants they wanted only to slip around him, squeeze the life out of him, and drag him down into a blackness where one sinister word flashed in red:
REDRUM.'(64)
'And in the bug, which moved upwardly more surely on the gentler grade, he kept looking out between them as the road unwound, affecting occasional glimpses of the Overlook Hotel, its massive bank of westward-looking windows reflecting back the sun. It was the place he had seen in the midst of the blizzard, the dark and booming place where some hideously familiar figure sought him down long corridors carpeted with jungle. The place Tony had warned him against. It was here. It was here. Whatever Redrum was, it was here.'(71)
"You got a knack," Halloran said, turning to him. "Me, I've always called it shining. That's what my grandmother called it, too. She had it. We used to sit in the kitchen when I was a boy no older than you and have long talks without even openin our mouths."(89)
"...a lot of folks, they got a little bit of shine to them. They don't even know it. But they always seem to show up with flowers when their wives are feelin blue with the monthlies, they do good on school tests they don't even study for, they got a good idea how people are feeling as soon as they walk into a room. I come across fifty or sixty like that. But maybe only a dozen, countin my gran, that knew they was shinin."(90)
'There was an iron scream behind his lips, but he would not let it out. His mommy and daddy could not see such things; they never had. He would keep quiet. His mommy and daddy were loving each other, and that was a real thing. The other things were just like pictures in a book. Some pictures were scary, but they couldn't hurt you. They... couldn't... hurt you.'(105)
'They watched until the car was out of sight, headed down the eastern slope. When it was gone, the three of them looked at each other for a silent, almost frightened moment. They were alone. Aspen leaves whirled and skittered in aimless packs across the lawn that was now neatly mowed and tended for no guest's eyes. There was no one to see the autumn leaves steal across the grass but the three of them. It gave Jack a curious shrinking feeling, as if his life force had dwindled to a mere spark while the hotel and the grounds had suddenly doubled in size and become sinister, dwarfing them with sullen, inanimate power.'(112)
'Once, during the drinking phase, Wendy had accused him of desiring his own destruction but not possessing the necessary moral fiber to support a full-blown deathwish. So he manufactured ways in which other people could do it, lopping a piece at a time off himself and their family. Could it be true? Was he afraid somewhere inside that the Overlook might be just what he needed to finish his play and generally collect up his shit and get it together? Was he blowing the whistle on himself? Please God no, don't let it be that way. Please.'(203-204)
'The bewilderment seemed to grow and for a moment she saw his true face, the one he ordinarily kept so well hidden, and it was a face of desperate unhappiness, the face of an animal caught in a snare beyond its ability to decipher and render harmless. Then the muscles began to work, began to writhe under the skin, the mouth began to tremble infirmly, the Adam's apple began to rise and fall.'(256)
'The whole place was empty.
But it wasn't really empty. Because here in the Overlook things just went on and on. Here in the overlook all times were one.'(339)
'Dying was a part of living. You had to keep tuning in to that if you expected to be a whole person. And if the fact of your own death was hard to understand, at least it wasn't impossible to accept.'(349)
First Pocket Books trade paperback edition, October 2002
505 pages
Book borrowed from the library
Book qualifies for: 100+ Reading Challenge
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Personal Note: I could not stop reading this book, and it was perfect for the 16-hour flight to the Philippines. It definitely made the long flight seem shorter. It was a busy two weeks, and only found myself finishing three books instead of the six books I planned. Thanks to all the thoughtful well wishers. A few pictures from the trip:
overlooking Laguna de Bay
catching the sunset
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