The Shining (1977) is a horror novel by American author Stephen King. King's third published novel, the success of the book firmly established King as a pre-eminent author in the genre. An important film based upon the book, directed by Stanley Kubrick, was released in 1980. The book was later adapted into a television mini-series.
Basic Plotline
Jack Torrance is a temperamental writer who is trying to rebuild his and his family's life after his drinking problem and volatile temper cause him to lose his teaching position at a small preparatory school. Having given up alcohol, he accepts a position maintaining a large and isolated hotel in Colorado for the winter, in the hope this will reestablish him as a responsible person and enable him to finish a promising play and resume his career. He moves to the hotel (the Overlook) with his wife, Wendy, and young son, Danny, who is telepathic (the "shining" of the title) and sensitive to supernatural forces. The hotel is possessed by a life force or is itself sentient and feeds especially off people with psychic powers. Danny, who has had premonitions of the Hotel's danger to his family, begins seeing ghosts and frightening visions from the hotel's past, but tolerates them in the hope that they are not dangerous in the present. He doesn't tell his parents because he senses how important the job of caretaker is to his father's and his family's future. Having difficulty possessing Danny, the hotel begins to possess Jack, frustrating his need and desire to work as he becomes increasingly unstable, and gradually turns him to its purposes.
Genre
The story is an entry in the supernatural or horror genre that effectively uses the concept of a building having a conscious will (or a soul, as it were), an idea perhaps first explored by Edgar Allan Poe in The Fall of the House of Usher.
The Book
The author has said that The Shining includes an exploration of alcohol dependence and relationships with parents and children in one's life.
The Shining has been used as an example of how to structure a story to keep the plotline moving. Like many King stories it reaches a climax from which point the story moves inexorably to its conclusion.
Film and TV miniseries adaptations
1. 1980 film directed by Stanley Kubrick. Considered on of the greatest horror films of all time, Kubrick's work is a loose adaptation of the King novel. Though considered one of Kubrick's most commercial works (Kubrick reworked the ending after it fared poorly with commercial audiences), the film follows few of the conventions of horror movies, contrasting an asture visual style with overlaid symbolic motifs and long, hypnotic tracking shots with broad performances by Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance and Shelly Duvall as Wendy Torrance.
2. 1997 television miniseries directed by Mick Garris. King was widely known to have been unhappy with Kubrick's take on his work; this provided him with the impetus to re-acquire the rights to write another screenplay, which was the basis for the more-faithful TV 1997 miniseries. However, even this version revises the novel; while a number of plot elements and events are restored from the book, others are changed, in some cases differing both from the book and Kubrick's earlier film.