It’s been 36 years since Stephen King published his famous hotel horror story, “The Shining.” After global acclaim and a successful movie adaptation lauded for Stanley Kubrick’s precise direction and Jack Nicholson’s maniacal performance, it seemed as though the story of the Torrance family and the Overlook Hotel had settled in with the classics. Its characters were frozen right where King seemed to want them, leaving the viewers to imagine their fates after escaping the burning Overlook Hotel. But King apparently couldn’t put the story to rest just yet, bringing them back with the sequel, “Doctor Sleep.”
After fleeing the murderous Jack Torrance and the haunted Overlook Hotel, Wendy Torrance and her young son Danny, who has psychic abilities that family-friend and psychic Dick Hallorann calls “the shining,” move into a cramped tenement apartment. Danny, however, remains plagued by visions of rotting, malicious ghouls from the Overlook. Luckily, Hallorann comes along and teaches him to control his powers.
The story then jumps 20 years ahead, where Danny — now Dan — is an alcoholic bum, wandering from place to place. Dan’s travels bring him to a long-term job at a New England hospice, where he uses his powers to help the elderly pass away peacefully, earning him the eponymous nickname “Doctor Sleep.” His relatively routine new life is interrupted, however, when a little girl with bizarre talents needs help with a band of homicidal supernatural creatures.
“Doctor Sleep” fares better if looked at as a stand-alone work, rather than a sequel to “The Shining,” as the works fundamentally differ. The fact that it takes place over such a long period of time and in a variety of places takes away the helpless isolation that characterized its predecessor. Dan’s ability to learn and adjust to the nature of his telepathy brought his character into a believable adulthood. Even this truly unnatural quirk has become familiar to him, making the story have a type of unexpected normalcy. The comfort with his ability actually takes away from the work’s aspect of horror, which is King’s trademark. Ghosts aren’t as scary when the protagonist can will them away.
Yet, being scary doesn’t seem to be King’s goal with this novel. Horrific descriptions of people burning alive and one particularly nauseating scene in which a little boy is tortured to death are present, but Dan’s personal demon, alcoholism, gets a lot more attention from the author. On a sentence by sentence basis, Dan’s struggle to stay sober probably comprises just as much of the text as anything supernatural. It seems that King has moved on to the truly scary: the horrors that fill out our daily lives. Several subplots deal with physical and sexual child abuse, and Wendy dies of an illness resulting from smoking cigarettes.
King packs as many working class woes into “Doctor Sleep” as possible, but the way that he presents them is often tiresome and cliché rather than conducive to empathy or investment in the characters. Dan is a hot-tempered alcoholic until a wise yet stern mentor-figure takes him under his wing. Reformed, but still plagued by demons from his past, Dan tries to ease his troubled conscience by working for the public good. It’s an exhausted storyline veiled with supernatural elements.
The occasional gory, creepy scenes in “Doctor Sleep,” both those explicitly described and those with the cringeworthy details left implied, illicit the chills they were meant to and will satisfy anyone looking for a solid paragraph of quality horror writing. The bulk of the work, however, feels more like a scattering of stock characters and cynical anecdotes loosely connected by a plot that is itself pulling from “Carrie,” “Salem’s Lot,” obviously “The Shining,” and at times even “The Sixth Sense.” King’s latest work indicates he might not agree, but even old ghosts must eventually die.
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