The Shining: An Honest Review

Stephen King, greatly renowned for his horror novels has received much critical approval for his unique storylines and captivating writing style. His career, spanning several decades has also seen great commercial success with many works adapted for films. These include “Shawshank Redemption” and “The Green Mile”, among others.

His work spans across many genres but his most successful stories are in the field of horror; books like “IT”, “Pet Sematary”, or perhaps the book I shall review in this article, “The Shining.”

This is also one of King’s most popular books and the film adaptation also received quite a bit of traction, so I was really excited to read the book to say the least. 

It’s quite a piece of work so there’s a lot to break down, such as the writing style, the whole composition and the dynamics between the characters, along with helpful information for you, dear reader, like the overall plot outline, or if this is the right book for you; of course with no spoilers. 

What’s the story?

This book revolves around a 5 year old boy called Danny and his parents. Going through a tough financial situation, Danny’s father reluctantly takes up a job as the winter caretaker of a luxury hotel called “The Overlook”, a seemingly quiet and peaceful place. However, it is shrouded with an enigmatic history consistent with disturbing events. Our protagonist Danny discovers that he has a gift called “The Shine”, which works in mysterious ways and enables him to read minds and foresee the future through visions. However, he also discovers that this hotel is not what it seems and that there are evil forces after him and his family.

Given the condition of the job, the family is totally cut off from the rest of the world due to the harsh winter blizzards. All they can do now is pray that The Shine will keep them safe, and that it wouldn’t be used against them as they face the terrifying and gruesome horrors lurking in the halls.

Should you read this?

This book deals with mature concepts, a great level of gore and violence, in the sense of brutal descriptions of inflicted injuries and such. I also feel that there was too much profanity that was unnecessarily used as it provides nothing to the plot at all. Needless to say; not a read for younger audiences. If you’re alright with the above mentioned things, this book might be for you as the story itself is very captivating. 

My personal thoughts

Inside the minds

The way the book is written is quite unique, I like how it also captures the thoughts of the characters and the visions mentioned above like a spree of words, as if they are in a surreal or half dream state. 

It gives lot of room for character development, and adds a puzzle factor as the messages are quite enigmatic. It feels quite fun to get an opportunity to interpret what these cryptic messages mean and how they contribute to the bigger picture.

Lengthy bits

The book had a couple of extremely long sections spanning several chapters each that hinder the momentum of the story and are also quite boring and do not provide anything to the story. The introduction is also quite dragged out but it feels good to read as it slowly invests the reader in the story and introduces the characters without it seeming like a barrage of facts about them. Moreover, it makes the reader familiar with the character’s thought process and personality.

In this case, it feels more like the book is luring you to their world without any direct literary device being used. The introduction starts the book out in a quite sad and depressing way and there didn’t seem to be anything important at first but it really all starts to make sense as we see these same people make certain decisions and we can see clearly why they made these decisions. 

The main antagonist

In the book, the hotel itself seems to be the malevolent force that the protagonists deal with, and personally I felt the lack of any interesting dynamic between the protagonists, The Shine and the intents of the hotel or the beings residing there.

I feel that this very interesting supernatural interest had not been very expanded upon. We don’t really get to see it personified or get to know the full extent of its power and we also don’t get to dive into the roots of this evil. We see some of these, if not all in King’s other horror novellas like IT or Salem’s Lot so the puzzle element teased throughout the story seems to lose its significance.

However, the idea of the hotel itself is a very unique sort of character in itself and it feels very intimidating and foreboding, thus it’s quite interesting to speculate how the story is going to turn out. Another point is that these kind of unique entities are rarely seen in the modern horror genre, which mostly showcases stuff like ghosts, demons or aliens, for example. 

Conclusion

It feels like a fresh breath of air seeing something so unique in a genre that may feel monotonous and stale sometimes. The Shining was a really fun read, although it does leave quite a few questions unanswered, it further enforces the mystery of the book itself.

But hey, I guess that’s why we all love Stephen King so much; it’s his ability to create the most different stories with the wildest ideas. So in conclusion, this book gets an easy 

3.5/5