38. The Truth Behind Stephen King’s The Shining

0:00This episode is brought to you by Klarna. When I finish the final chapter, I often find that I have more questions at the end than I started with. What happens next? Why did the story end there? But you know, Tabby, it's hard to make time to ponder big questions like that because I'm always getting bogged down in kind of boring day-to-day admin. But that's where Klarna comes in. Their free app helps you stay on top of your money admin so you have more time to answer the unanswerable. Do you know what? It's even easier now because everything about your money is in one scrollable view. So what you use most at the top and absolutely nothing slips by. And their app has built in buyer's protection and

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2:34allergic reactions, increased risk of infections or lower ability to fight them, and liver problems may occur. Before treatment, get checked for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu-like symptoms, or need a vaccine. Explore what's possible. Ask your doctor about Tramfiya today. Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more or visit tramfiyradio.com. She made herself speak calmly, her eyes never leaving his. Her voice was low and husky, almost a whisper. It hurt to talk. Listen to me, Danny. It wasn't your daddy trying to hurt me, and I didn't want to hurt him. The hotel has gotten into him, Danny. The overlook has gotten into your daddy. Do you understand me? Some kind of knowledge came slowly back into Danny's eyes.

3:39The bad stuff. There was none of it here before, was there? No. The hotel put it here. The... She broke off in a fit of coughing and spat out more blood. Her throat already felt puffed to twice its size. The hotel made him drink it. Do you hear those people he was talking to this morning? Yes, the hotel people. I heard them too, and that means the hotel is getting stronger. It wants to hurt all of us, but I think, I hope, that it can only do that through your daddy. He was the only one it could catch. Are you understanding me, Danny? It's desperately important that you understand. The hotel caught daddy. I know you love. The hotel car, Daddy. I know you love your daddy. I do too. We have to remember that the hotel is trying to hurt him as much as it is us.

4:35So what a chilling moment that was. So that was The Shining, written by Stephen King and published in January 1977. One of the best known horror novels of the last 50 years, a huge bestseller in the 1970s and the inspiration for Stanley Kubrick's film, which came out in 1980 and starred Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall. And the film, which actually Tabby has not seen, so you are coming to this untainted by knowledge of the film. The film has become such a cult classic that even people who have never read a word of Stephen King will have a sense of the basic story because, of course, people have seen clips on YouTube, they'll have seen memes, all of these kinds of things. So Tabby, the story, I mean, even you knew the story

5:22before you started reading the book, I imagine. Yeah, well, I knew the story without having even watched it, from knowing of the film. I mean, it's an interesting question. I would say that The Shining is the most famous of Stephen King's many, many successful novels. Do you think it would be as famous if it had not been for the film? No, no, no, definitely not. I mean, so when you think of Stephen King, you think of Misery, Carrie, The Shining, Pet Sematary. I don't know. I mean, all of these things have been made into TV miniseries or films. So it's very hard to separate them out. So the plot of the novel, which is actually quite different from the film. Yeah. It's the story of a young family.

6:03There's the would-be writer, Jack Torrance, his long-suffering wife, Wendy, and their five-year-old son, Danny. And they're hired to look after this vast, empty hotel, The Overlook, high in the mountains of Colorado during the winter season when, so off-season, no one else is there. Jack is a recovering alcoholic and he has serious anger management issues and a family history of domestic violence. Wendy has been so alarmed by his behavior in the past that she has come close to divorcing him. Meanwhile, their son, Danny, there's something special about him. He has an unusual sense of knowing and unusual maturity. And what it is, is he has the power of second sight, which another character, the hotel's head chef,

6:48describes as a shining, the shining. Almost as soon as they move into the overlook, strange things start happening. Everything starts going wrong. Jack becomes obsessed with the gory, gruesome, dark history of the hotel. Wendy is worried that he has begun drinking again and Danny starts having these visions of blood-drenched bedrooms and corpses in beds and bathtubs and a man with a mallet pursuing him down corridors. This one word splattered across a mirror that we'll come to. Yeah, red rum yeah red rum red rum now if you've seen the the film people remember danny when he's sort of possessed in some way he's going kind of red rum red rum with his finger but actually the film and the book are quite different

7:37so the red rum is in both the novel and the film but some of the best known elements of the shining in the popular imagination are only in the film so jack typing all work and no play makes jack a dull boy again and again and again the single line that's in the film it's not in the book jack smashing through a door shouting here's johnny such an iconic film i couldn't believe it wasn't in the book i kept waiting for it yeah not in there i mean I kept waiting for it. Yeah. Not in there. I mean, Jack Nicholson actually came up with the line, I believe, on set, a sort of parody of the talk show host Johnny Carson. Danny's seeing these incredibly creepy twin girls kind of at the end of the corridor as he's kind of peddling along the corridor.

8:22Again, in the film, not in the book. And the ending of the story, the resolution, is completely different. And actually even the death toll is different. And I think the themes of the book are quite different from the film. So if you've seen the film of The Shining, sort of very charismatic central performance from Jack Nicholson. Jack Nicholson is always, you know, he specializes in playing unstable characters. The film is basically a charismatic, unstable character who gets madder and madder as the book goes on. That's the film. In the book, first of all, the supernatural element is much stronger. There are lots of allusions to Edgar Allan Poe. There are lots of ghostly goings-on. There are lots of visions and visitations and things that are not in the film.

9:03The book is much more sympathetic to the two main characters i think so jack is much more fleshed out he has a you know a backstory and wendy who in the film is not really much of a character at all although it's an i think a brilliant performance by um shelly gvel in the book there are more layers to her and we're more in her head much more than we are in the film she's a very active character in the book, there are more layers to her. And we're in her head much more than we are in the film. She's a very active character in the book. She's a very active character. And finally, the book is not just about the supernatural elements or the horror or the madness. It's also about their family life, Jack's alcoholism,

9:38his history of domestic abuse, and the sort of pressures on the nuclear family in 1970s America. So we're going to get into all this. And we'll get into Stephen King himself, of course, who must be one of the most read, most best-selling, best-known American writers of the last 50 years or so. I have to make a confession to the audience. I had never read a word of Stephen King before about two weeks ago when I started reading this book. So this is my first time. What about you? I'm totally the same. I don't like scary books on the whole. Right. But let's talk about Stephen King. So he's one of the best selling writers in modern times. Estimates usually agree he sold about 400 million. Yeah.

10:18Which is... Unbelievable. Unbelievable. And so many film adaptations of his books. So Carrie, Stand By Me, The Shawshank Redemption, more recently Pet Sematary and It, and of course, The Shining. I mean, he's prolific. He's won a huge number of awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Medal in 2003 at the National Book Awards and a Congressional national medal for the arts stephen king's associated with one state above all which is maine you've never been to maine have you tabby it's actually lovely it's like the sort of it would appeal to you i think because it's kind of like the cornwall of uh of north america so it's kind of rugged coastline nice coast people in quarter sips it's very much your territory this is where stephen king was born

11:06in 1947 and his dad was a hoover salesman a vacuum cleaner salesman and i have to say not a great role model his mother stephen king's mum once said to him stephen your father was the only vacuum cleaner salesman that electrolux ever had who sold vacuum cleaners to widows at two o'clock in the morning you look puzzled by this, but I believe that he was... Because he was unfaithful. I believe he was using his vacuum cleaning equipment selling as an excuse for... She wasn't lauding his talents as a salesman, presumably. No, other talents. I've got to sell a Hoover to Mrs. So-and-so down the road. I'm going to be back in a couple of hours. She's like, what, at midnight? Yeah. Great to tell your son that as well.

11:48Yeah. Well, he walked out when Stephen King was two. He went out one day. This is quite Tabitha's side, right? He went out one day to buy cigarettes and never came back. We're all waiting, honestly. This could be my last episode. You'll never know. So his mum, who's called Ruth, she brought up Stephen and his brother David on her own. They moved at least six times, I think before he was about 11, and they relied on her relatives for help. So a sort of slightly troubled family background. And you can see how that might inform some of the themes of The Shining. Like so many of the writers on this show, he's very bookish. He said, I read everything from Nancy Drew to Psycho. So quite American.

12:27But a huge influence is Lord of the Flies. And I think you can see shades of that maybe slightly bleak view of what human nature is capable of in a lot of King's stories. So he wrote the introduction to a Faber edition in 2011. And in that he wrote that as a boy, he once asked a woman driving a mobile library do you have any stories about how kids really are and she gave him Golding's books so pessimistic and he loved it he remembers it as the first book with hands strong ones that reached out of the pages seized me by the throat such Such like aggressive, visceral, descriptive prose. That's very much his style, isn't it? Yeah, totally. It said to me, this is not just entertainment, it's life or death.

13:13Crikey. And actually, I looked at a list of his favourite books. He's very book club friendly because his favourite books are things like 1984, The Lord of the Rings, Bleak House, Blood Meridian, Master and Commander. I mean, he should really be listening to this show. I suppose he would say he doesn't need to because he doesn't need our opinions. Because he read them. Yeah. But, you know, we can have a chat. Got to get him on one day. He could send in his thoughts to our newsletter, our free newsletter, Book Club Notes. It comes out every Saturday and you can sign up. Stephen, if you're listening, you can sign up at thebookclubhq.com. He went to the University of Maine on a scholarship. He wrote his first story, I Was a Teenage Grave Robber, in a comics fanzine.

13:54I'm hooked. Yeah, it's a good title. And then he had a first paid story published, The Glass Floor, in the magazine Startling Mystery Stories in 1967. When he was at the University of Maine, he joined this writing workshop, and this was a huge influence on him both professionally and personally. So his professor was called Bert Hartland, and Bert Hartland was a big influence on him. He said he was the greatest English teacher I ever had. It was he who first showed me the way to the pool, which he called the language pool, the myth pool, where we can all go down to drink. I love this. I love this too. I have trod the path that leads there often in the years since and I can think of no better place to spend one's days.

14:35The water is still sweet and the fish still swim. Yeah, I was struck by that because I've always been amazed at how many stories Stephen King has in him. He's not someone that seems to have ever had, you know, writer's block. He's never dried up. He just has an extraordinarily active imagination, say what you will about his writing. Yes. But it was at this workshop that there was another pivotal moment in Stephen King's life. He met another student with whom he fell in love and to whom he got married. And she had a truly fantastic name, a name that should recommend her instantly to all listeners. Her name was Tabitha. You're so excited about that, aren't you? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so he graduates from university in 1970

15:18and then he trained as a high school teacher, but he couldn't find a job. So he worked at an industrial laundry and sold short stories to obscure little magazines. Eventually he job teaching english at hampton in maine he's still trying to write he's living with tabitha and they have two small children and they're living in a trailer all of this is quite the shining i would say the opening section the aspiring writer the aspiring writer to make ends meet yeah a family on their haunches, all that. Slightly shrieky wife called Tabitha. Absolutely brilliant, supportive wife called Tabitha. Yeah. Because then, in around 1972, he has the breakthrough. He has two ideas. Firstly, he imagines a girl having her first period in the shower at school

16:01and other teenagers being cruel to her. Second, he'd been struck by this article that he read in life magazine about telekinesis so he thinks i'll combine the two into a into a story so early on that kind of combination of um the sanguinary and and the supernatural he hates the result actually he thinks it's rubbish he throws it in the bin but tabitha saint that she is she retrieves it He thinks it's rubbish. He throws it in the bin. But Tabitha, saint that she is, she retrieves it. She says it's brilliant. She wants to know what happens. So he agrees to keep writing it, partly to please her, partly because he's run out of other ideas. I wonder if he just needed confidence more than anything. He has so many

16:40ideas in his career. Everybody clearly needs a Tabitha to give them that confidence. Everybody needs a Tabitha. But this is the book that becomes Carrie. He sends it to Doubleday. They agree to buy the hardback for $2,500, about 10 times that today. Then there's this gigantic deal for the paid-back rights. He gets $200,000. Transformative, life-changing. He's made it as a professional writer. Carrie was published in 1974 it gets strong reviews and it sells well it's seen as one of a handful of novels in the late 1960s and the early 1970s that establishes the horror genre we discussed this a little bit in our american psycho episode so for instance rosemary's baby the exorcist and he follows it up with

17:23salem's lot which i'd actually love to read. Another horror novel about a small town in Maine where the residents are all vampires. So his third novel is The Shining, published 1977. And the origins of this book are a great story in and of themselves. So in autumn 1974, you know, King has made it. He's got money. he and his wife decide to get away from maine for a bit because they've been in maine all this time and they've been looking after his mother who has been dying of cancer and they need a break and king said i wanted to spend a year away from maine and i thought i'd like to give my next book a different background so away from new eng. And he claimed later that he opened an atlas and just pointed randomly at a point in America. And his finger was on Boulder,

18:12Colorado. I've been to Colorado. It's extremely nice state. It seems highly implausible to me that he just happens to point to a lovely college town in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains. Well, maybe it's his shining. Maybe it's the muses throwing him a bone. Yeah, maybe it's something supernatural. So they move to Boulder, which is lovely. And one day that autumn, they decide they're going to drive up to this place called Estes Park, which is the gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park. And there's a very grand hotel, very well-known there, called the Stanley Hotel hotel where they check in and the stanley hotel was founded in 1909 as a health resort as a sanatorium for rich people from the east coast coming out west they've got tuberculosis or whatever and they want to break

18:56in the mountains and the hotel the stanley hotel had always you know had a sort of checkered history a lot of bad luck every Every winter, it had to close because the weather was so bad. So for that reason, it's never really been the money spinner that its progenitors hoped. And the Stanley Hotel is obviously the overlook in this book, even though for legal reasons, every copy of The Shining begins with Stephen King saying, it's not based on any one hotel. It is based on this hotel because he's told loads of stories and interviews over the years, some of them perhaps slightly embellished, but they're great stories. So to quote, when we arrived, they were only just getting ready to close for the season.

19:38And we found ourselves the only guests in the place with all these long, empty corridors. Anyway, he and Tabby, they would have dinner in this huge grand dining room, just the two of them. And there was like taped classical music playing on the loudspeaker. And of all the tables, theirs was the only one set for dinner. And Stephen King said, except for our table, all the chairs were up on the tables. So the music's echoing down the hall and i mean it was like god had put me there to hear that to see those things and by the time i went to bed that night i had the whole book in my mind but a different story that he told in a different interview he said when tabitha went to bed i walked alone around the hotel and i was the only

20:22person there and i went into the bar and the bartender was still there and he was a man called Grady and he gave me a drink. And then, and I quote, that night I dreamed of my three-year-old son running through the corridors, looking back over his shoulder, his eyes wide, screaming. He was being chased by a fire hose. I woke up with a tremendous jerk, sweating all over with an inch of falling out of bed. And then a brilliant, this is very Tabitha Syrett. I mean, this is my daily routine. I got up, lit a cigarette, sat in a chair looking out the window at the Rockies. And by the time the cigarette was done, I had the bones of the book firmly set in my mind. That's how all of our podcasts come to me.

21:03Really? Yeah. Sit in a chair, look out over Archway, and the next thing I know, boom, I've got an episode. Boom. You've worked out your amusing joke for the episode. So this is the setting. Yeah. But the themes of the book are also rooted in King's own experience. Obviously, it would be reductive and inaccurate to say, oh, well, Jack Torrance is King. Also quite offensive. But there's definitely some King in him. For one thing, the experience of being struggling writer's King at the beginning of his career. But then most importantly, Jack's drinking. In King's memoir on writing, he says he wrote The Shining without even realising I was writing about myself. He was drinking very heavily in the mid-1970s

21:54and Tabitha once confronted him about this drinking decades later in a stark fashion. She emptied a bag of his drug debris and booze bottles, et cetera, ashtrays, whatever, in front of their kids. Wow. That would do it, I think. And then there's the second thing, and this is Jack's aggression towards his son, Danny. In an interview in the mid-1980s, he said, as a young father with two children, I was horrified by my occasional feelings of real antagonism towards my children when you ever stop once you ever go to bed so when i wrote this book i wrote a lot of that down and tried to get it out of my system but it was also a confession so yeah i mean i don't think he's confessing to be no he's not he's god no make that clear he's not confessing to domestic abuse

22:42or violence or anything he's he's admitting to that urge yeah to losing your temper i mean there's no parents alive who hasn't lost their temper with their child at some point and i think that tells us something about how stephen king understands the genre that he's working which is horror so yeah there are some writers for whom horror is just pure melodrama it's you monsters, there are ghosts, it's a scary story and that's it. There's no meaning. King is very adamant in interviews, he's given loads of interviews, that the supernatural stuff must stand for something, must be about something. This is quite well established. We discussed this when we did Dracula on our mini-series and the rest is history. We discussed this when we did Dracula on our miniseries on the rest of history. We discussed it in American Psycho, how maybe not in terms of an individual's inner torment or whatever, but horror often reflects, it's a projection of the societal concerns, fears, anxieties of a given period or a given age. it is completely and i i found an interview that king gave to the guardian in 2013 and he was

23:46looking back at writing the shining specifically and he said for me when i'm writing horror you know it is an exciting thing in literary thing in and of itself but it often stands for real fears so the fear of you know dying the fear of having cancer the fear of having a car accident or as he put it the parent who punches instead of kissing he says if such terrible occurrences were acts of darkness they might actually be easier to cope with but instead of being dark they have their own terrible brilliance and none shine so bright as the acts of cruelty we sometimes perpetuate in our own families and he said you know if you look at them's like, it's as if you look at them directly and you're blinded. They're too much for you to cope.

24:29So you use a ghost story or a horror story as a sort of filter, as a lens through which to view some of these issues. The truth is, he wrote, that monsters are real and ghosts are real too. They live inside us and sometimes they win. And I like that way of putting it. I mean, obviously you can write about these things without the filter, but the idea that you're effectively writing about the cruelty within a family through the lens of a horror story and actually in quite a bleak way. I mean, that's also quite Lord of the Flies really, isn't it? Very Lord of the Flies. The monster within us and sometimes the monster wins. Yeah. That's exactly, William Golding would have completely endorsed that verdict.

25:08Yeah. I mean, it's no wonder he's so prolific because he writes it very, very quickly. He wrote 3,000 words a day. So his first draft takes him only about three months. Remarkable. But Tabby, I mean, how many words a day do you write when you're doing the notes? You write thousands and thousands. 20,000. Yeah. But I mean, i'm not that's that's the incredible thing about writers say yeah in comparison to what we do we are walking tracks that have been like laid out for us you know we're not coming up with things totally original you know i mean i am but you're doing this for too long. You're washed up. Yeah, thanks. Anyway, anyway. So The Shining is published by Doubleday in January 1977. Another huge hit, though not all the reviews love it.

26:05So notably, Richard Lingerman in The New York Times calls King a writer of fairly engaging and preposterous claptrap. Oh, hush. He gives him some marks for setting pace and thrills, but he deducts marks for the writing and actually mocks King for using cliches. For instance, Wendy's breath is taken away. Jack holds on for dear life. Yeah. Not to be snotty or anything, but I definitely spotted a couple of cliches. Oh, Tabby's been very snotty. Stephen, but I definitely spotted a couple of cliches. Oh, Tabby's been very snotty. Stephen, if you're listening, Tabby's been really horrible about you. I really enjoyed this, Steve. But anyway, he also said, it's a pity because his sheer rookie's energy,

26:38this is King's, is engaging. And in the relationship of Jack and Wendy, and I so agree with this, there is a core of psychological truth that might have been crafted into a subtle psychological chiller. I so agree with that. I really think one of the most interesting things about The Shining is the relationship between Jack and Wendy. I agree completely. I totally agree. And actually, when I was reading this book, we'll come to the second half when we talk when we talk about, you know, we get into the structure of the book and the characters. I did think within this book, there was an alternative book that could have been written, which would be much more oblique, much more subtle and careful and understated

27:19and would have, I think, perhaps been a better book, but not as successful. And obviously, King is working in a different genre. I'm not dissing. He's choosing to do a very melodramatic, grotesque, gory kind of book, and that's fine because that's what he's set out to do. But you could have told this story differently. Yeah. I mean, obviously, as you say, it probably wouldn't have been as successful a book because this is very successful. And King goes on to be one of the best- selling writers of the 1980s and the 1990s. The issue is, which we've alluded to, is it any good? And I actually think it's kind of interesting because this is often something that is raised about books that thrill horror. Even in the movie

28:02industry, horrors very rarely win awards or accolades. You know, there are exceptions. There is a snobbery. There's a snobbery around it because it has such an obvious visceral reaction. It's not a lingerer. You know, it's part of the reason that, you know, Sinners with Michael B. Jordan, the Ryan Coogler, the reason that got, you know, when that got an Oscar, people were like, great, horror is finally being taken seriously. And I think maybe that's part of the reason people overlook Stephen King or dismiss him as a bit of a Dan Brown. So when he's given the medal at the National Book Awards in 2003, our old friend Harold Bloom, I bet not a fan, in his perpetually sunny way, says it's an extraordinary decision,

28:41another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life i've described king in the past as a writer of petty dreadfuls but perhaps even that is too kind he is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence by sentence paragraph by paragraph book by book basis harsh that said returning to my earlier point there are writers and critics who do defend king and say that he's underrated. For instance, the novelist David Foster Wallace. He says he's one of the first people to talk about real Americans and how they live to capture real American dialogue in all its foul-mouthed grandeur. I'm not sure that's fair. I mean, we just record an episode about capture in the Rye. Yeah, I think there's

29:22lots of books. I don't disagree that King can be very good on how people speak and ordinary people speak to each other and how they relate. But I don't think he's the first person ever to have done this. No, I agree. I agree. And then the essayist, Cynthia Ozik. Never mind all the bestsellers and all the stereotypes. This man is a genuine true-born writer. And that was a revelation. I actually do think he's a true-born writer. He is not Tom Clancy. He writes sentences and he has a literary focus and his writing is filled with literary history. Well, his writing is filled with literary history. It is. That point is definitely well made. So whether The Shining is perfectly written, I'm not sure.

29:59And King himself has actually in interviews said, you know, it's a young man's book. I'd write it differently today or whatever. He is not just a hack who is pouring out bestselling literature. I mean, King, as we've said, studied literature. He was in this writer's workshop. And there are literary allusions in this book. There are a lot of literary allusions. So to give you just three, allusions to Gothic literature in particular, which obviously King is really interested in. Right through the book, allusions to Edgar Allan Poe. So the epigraph is from The Mask of the Red Death, which is the short story published in 1842, probably the most famous story Edgar Allan Poe ever wrote. The motif of this kind of sinister masked ball runs right through the book.

30:42Lines from Edgar Allan Poe's short story keep kind of bobbing to the surface in this way, which we'll talk about in the second half. Then Edgar Allan Poe himself was inspired by the Gothic stories of the 18th century writer Horace Walpole. Wendy herself, the character Wendy, mentions Horace Walpole. She says to Jack, they talk about dining in an empty hotel, the scene that happened to Stephen King and Tabitha. And she says it's like being in a Horace Walpole novel. So it's a novel that's aware of its own kind of literary history, I guess. And then also when Danny is drawn to room 217, which Halloran, who is the chef, the hotel chef, who had first told Danny about the shining. And he has specifically told Danny to avoid room 217. Danny thinks of a

31:26story Daddy had read to him once when he was drunk. And this is the story of Bluebeard, who when his wife discovers that he has murdered all of his previous wives, this image is burned into Danny's mind. The severed heads of Bluebeard's seven previous wives were in the room, each one on its own pedestal, the eyes turned up to whites, the mouths unhinged and gaping in silent screams. Yeah, so a good example of Jack's perhaps slightly unusual parenting style. Always a bit unhinged, yeah. But anyway, the point is, I guess, that Stephen King is a much more literary novelist, or a novelist with greater literary aspirations, shall we say, than people have sometimes given him credit for. You know, he's not Jane Austen, he's not Gustav Flaubert, but at the same time, he's definitely not Dan

32:07Brown. I mean, he is somebody who is much more reflective about his craft and so on. And his book is a cut above, I think it's reasonable to say, it's a cut above your sort of airport thriller or something. Your sort of generic airport thriller will be forgotten in a couple of years. And this was what brought his book to the attention of Stanley Kubrick of the film director. So in 1976, Kubrick had made a film called Barry Lyndon, which was an adaptation of a book by Thackeray. It didn't make any money. Nobody wanted to see it. So Kubrick got the proofs of the shining from the publishers and he'd read a lot of horror books and he hadn't finished them. He'd said they're useless. This is the one book that he finished. He said,

32:49I like the plot. I like the ideas, the structure. They are much more imaginative than usual in the horror genre. So Kubrick bought the rights and he said, I don't want Stephen King to write the screenplay. I'm going to get another novelist to write the screenplay. And he got this woman called Diane Johnson. And Diane Johnson was both a published novelist and she taught Gothic literature at Berkeley. This is an incredible fact. So this is why we've gone on this little tangent. Diane Johnson, if people listen to our previous podcast about the bell jar, they will know that Sylvia Plath won this competition to go with 20 young women to work on Mademoiselle magazine in New York City in 1953. And that's the first section of the bell jar.

33:28Diane Johnson was one of these women. There you go. One of the women whose lives Sylvia Plath destroyed. Because remember, we said that so uncannily accurate was her portrayal of that time. And many of the women were very upset. Yeah. They had food poisoning and whatnot. Diane Johnson was one of these women. She now, all these years later, 20 years on, is confronted with The Shining and she has to adapt it. And she actually thinks it's rubbish. Diane Johnson is not a fan of the book. She said, it's scary, it's effective and it works, but it is quite pretentious and I quote, a very bad book, which is extraordinary. But of course, that is why she has no qualms whatsoever about rewriting it and dropping huge chunks of the book to basically

34:12turn it into the screenplay of the film. And the great irony of this whole story is if we're totally honest, would we be doing The Shining on this show were it not for the film we probably wouldn't because it wouldn't be so well known i mean it just wouldn't have the traction in the public minds that it has and yet the irony of this stephen king absolutely hated the film of the shining he said it was maddening perverse and disappointing he's given multiple interviews about it he's incredibly dismissive about stanley k's work. He says, basically, Stanley Kubrick knew nothing about the horror genre at all. He made his film. He butchered my characters. He butchered my story. And it's the curse of Stephen King's life

34:54that everybody else thinks the film The Shining is great and loves it. That would be gutting, actually, wouldn't it? Yeah, if it's your characters and your story. Let's take a break. And when we come back, we will check into the Overlook Hotel. We will make our way to room 217 and the dark secrets that lurk within. And we'll find out exactly what is going on with the Torrance family. Shaq here. What's it like to buy a car from Carvana 100% online and get it delivered to your door? Let me tell you. Your car is here, Mr. Shaq. Thank you, Mr. Carvana guy. Can't wait to take it for a spin. Only the best for you, Mr. Shaq. Hey, have you always been so big, tall, and handsome? Not always. I was 6'10 once.

35:40Seven days to love it or return it, Mr. Shaq. Not that I would. You never do. No, I never do. So buy your car today on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply. This episode is brought to you by Eden Red Pay. AI is transforming the workplace for finance leaders, helping organizations with automating invoices, fraud detection, cash flow visibility, and more. That's why Eden Red Pay surveyed finance professionals to uncover how AI is being used, where they're investing next, and what challenges they're working to solve. Visit edenredpay.com forward slash Spotify to explore the exclusive survey insights and see how your organization compares. Hey, Spotify listeners. When you travel with American Airlines, you'll enjoy comfort and convenience at every altitude. organization compares. Feel easy from the moment you check in to the moment you arrive. No matter where you're going, American gets you there.

36:45Book now at AA.com. Welcome back to the Book Club, everybody. Now, would you like to check into a remote and sinister establishment haunted by memories of terrible cruelty and premonitions of dreadful suffering? Yes, I would. haunted by memories of terrible cruelty and premonitions of dreadful suffering. Yes, I would. We, Dominic and I, are the caretakers of just such an institution. So let us lure you in to our weekly newsletter, Book Club Notes. It's entirely free. It comes in every Saturday. So many fun bits and pieces. You can give your own feedback. The kind of feedback that chills our blood, if not yours. You can give your own views on the book. You'll get some extra tidbits from Dominic and pieces. You can give your own feedback. The kind of feedback that chills our blood, if not yours.

37:28You can give your own views on the book. You'll get some extra tidbits from Dominic and I. It's huge. So do make that deal with the devil. Now to business. Let's get into The Shining itself. So introduce us to our first two characters. So we meet the key characters in the first two chapters. The first chapter, we meet Jack Torrance. He's being interviewed by a man called Mr. Ullman for the job as the caretaker of the Overlook. And then the second chapter is about Wendy and Danny, and they're at home in Boulder waiting to find out if he's got the job, basically. And in these two chapters, if you go through them, King sets up some of the book's themes, and he gives you hints of the darkness that is going to consume this family.

38:05So the very first line of the book, the very first exchange, Jack is seething at what he sees as the condescension of Mr. Allman. There is a sense of Jack's anger and his temper. I think this is really well done because it strings the bow or something. I don't know. It's the sense of something strung far too tight that is being stretched and stretched and stretched throughout from this point, and you know that it's going to snap. Yeah. That Jack is irascible. He is not easygoing. He could perhaps be a little bit difficult. You get this from the very beginning of the book, but in an understated way. It's not like the guy interviewing from a job and Jack rises from his chair and pummels him to death or something no it's just that jack is annoyed

38:48and offended by this bloke in a way that you would be yeah and king quite cleverly sort of increases that as the book continues yeah there's a reference to his alcoholism but a veiled reference so allman is talking to him about how they had a previous caretaker and stuff and jack says well i won't be drinking i haven't drunk for 14 months so the implication obviously that he was once an alcoholic we have references fleeting references not fully explained to some sort of violence involving jack yeah so an attack on a student called george hatfield we'll come to this a little bit later and a reference veiled but so not clear at this point something happened with danny that meant that danny's arm was then in a cast then we're in chapter two wendy when we meet her she's very

39:32unhappy she's almost crying and actually at the end of the chapter she breaks down in floods of tears so it's obvious to us something is not right with them their marriage you know with her mental states and so on. Danny, the little boy, when they're talking, this is just at the beginning, they're talking about how he's lonely and how he doesn't have many friends and there's a solitariness to him and he doesn't have anybody to play with. But also in that first chapter, Jack is talking to the guy interviewing him and he says of his son, oh, Danny is an extraordinary boy. And obviously Danny is an extraordinary boy and obviously danny is an extraordinary boy because he has all these sort of powers so that's all set up in the first half

40:11but also set up is the hotel's own history of violence and specifically very tellingly the violence of a father towards his family so the previous caretaker or an earlier caretaker recently was a bloke called delbert grady. He drank, he went mad, he killed his girls with a hatchet, he killed his wife with a shotgun, and then he killed himself. And actually, as we'll see, we actually meet Delbert Grady, but he's become weirdly changed into a kind of English butler or something. Yeah, he's like a Bond villain. Jack, perhaps slightly dismissively it's a sign of Jack's arrogance he says to the interviewer well Grady didn't go to he didn't graduate from high school did he and that was your mistake you see because he's an idiot a stupid man

40:56is more prone to cabin fever he's got nothing to do but bitch at his wife and nag at the kids and drink he'll get edgier and edgier and finally boom boom boom but jack is you know jack is foolish there because actually what he's describing in this so-called stupid man is exactly we can see this coming it's exactly what's going to happen to him in the film of course he's jack nicholson and i think you have to get jack nicholson out of your head when you read this i mean jack nicholson gives a very typically charismatic and and quite manic performance and it's brilliant but the jack torrance in the book is more humdrum and is more ordinary and the important thing about him is it's not that he's unstable and mad and all of this

41:40it's actually what becomes important is that he is lumbered he has all this baggage because of his backstory now in the film jack torrance has no backstory at all he has no baggage he has no kind of psychology whereas in the book in the shining jack's backstory is the heart of the whole book so it's not that him being a writer is actually slightly irrelevant i think he's not even writing a book he's writing a play we don't know anything about it and it's never really fleshed out no exactly right it's what actually is the motor of the book is jack wrestling with his own demons and the question that runs through the book and steven king has talked about this loads in interviews is is the violence and horror of the book, does it come from the hotel and the kind of ghosts

42:27and all of that sort of stuff? Or does Jack bring it to the hotel? Is it in him? And there's a tension between those two things that runs through it. I mean, I think it's a combination because we find out that the Jack of the book comes from a small town in New Hampshire. He's the son of a male hospital nurse. And there are veiled hints right from the beginning that he's had a troubled past. So this is what he's bringing with him to the hotel. And as we'll find out, makes him more vulnerable to the hotel. And it becomes more explicit about a quarter of the way through the book. Something in particular sets, you know, triggers these memories. And he's on the roof and he's trying to get rid of a wasp's nest. Something in particular triggers these memories.

43:07And he's on the roof and he's trying to get rid of a wasp's nest. I found these little triggers, there are a couple of them throughout, phrases that recur from his past that then suddenly leap into the present. I found that a little bit heavy handed, as with the wasp nest. Anyway, and he remembers, this is his sort of inner thoughts, his temper all his life. He had been trying unsuccessfully to control it. He could remember himself at seven, spanked by a neighbour lady for playing with matches. He'd gone out and held a rock at a passing car. His father had seen that and he descended on little Jackie roaring. He had reddened Jack's behind and then blacked his eye. And when his father had gone into the house muttering to see what was on television, Jack had come upon a stray dog and kicked it into the gutter. But another thing that comes out here is his father's punishment, his father's

43:55violence. So it's like a cycle of anger and violence passed generationally. And then Jack passing it on to the dog, right? Exactly. But this is all compounded by Jack's drinking. That said, I would say that for vast portions of the book, King is actually very sympathetic towards Jack and his struggle and his efforts to stay sober and do the right thing for his family. So he says Jack was an emotional alcoholic, just as surely as he had been a physical one. The two of them were no doubt tied together somewhere deep inside him, where you'd just as soon not look. Yeah, but that line, I think sometimes the style is quite revealing, quite interesting. So that's being told to us by an external narrator. So there's a narrator,

44:41you know, we're in Jack's head, but there's an ambiguity there. Is this the narrator's verdict on Jack or is this simply Jack's verdict on himself? And Jack kind of making excuses for himself. I think the line between, is it Jack speaking to himself? Is it the hotel speaking? Is it this external narrator? It's very hazy. I actually think that's quite a good thing, thing though because it means that it's impossible to trace absolutely or pinpoint the moment that jack goes from man to monster yes agree completely and i've actually so having read the book i then went back and sort of effectively reread it kind of flicking through it to sort of work out the structure and it and it is very hard to point

45:21to a single moment when Jack loses touch with reality. And when he goes from being our protagonist with whom we feel sympathy to our antagonist towards whom we feel horror. Because I think we are meant to feel sympathy for him throughout. But as the book goes on, there are more and more hints, both of his violence in the past and also hints of the violence that there is to come. So there's a moment when Danny is having one of his kind of episodes, where he's having the kind of second sight, and he's kind of get a spanking if you don't open up the threat of violence and we and we see this from wendy's perspective as well so wendy says to herself he's losing his temper she thought and was more afraid he hadn't touched danny and angus

46:16since that evening two years ago but at this moment he sounded angry enough to do it and this is a reference to an episode when jack was drunk and he came back he'd been drinking and he found that danny danny like tipped something over his papers danny had gone into into the cellar to and opened some case with his old writing in all the play or something yeah and jack came in and basically grabbed him and broke his arm. Yeah, and God, it's so visceral. They hear in memory in the present over and over the snap of his arm. Awful. And then we discover something else about him. The reason he lost his job as a teacher and has been reduced to work as a hotel caretaker. So he taught at an exclusive prep school,

47:04Stovington. So this is very captured in the Rye territory, but clearly had a bit of his chip on his shoulder. We can already see that when you spoke about, you know, oh, it was his mistake to go to college because boom, boom, boom and all that. And he had an issue with one boy in particular, George Hatfield, tall and shaggily blonde and almost insolently beautiful boy. So Jack is clearly envious of him and sees him as sort of this young Robert Redford and he says he thinks that George won't have trouble scoring. Yeah, so he's almost sexually jealous of George. Yeah, exactly, exactly. It's the chip again. And so Jack dropped George from the debate team because he stuttered. And then when he found George hacking his tyres up with a hunting knife,

47:47Jack had waded in, his fists held up in front of him, and it had seemed that he had been grinning. And then he had to be dragged off by the French mistress screaming, stop it, you're going to kill him. So incredible violence simmering just beneath the surface. Exactly, exactly. So in other words, even before they get to the hotel, Jack is bringing the violence with him. So Jack does bring the evil. It's partly within Jack, no question about that. But the evil is also in the hotel as well. I mean, Stephen King is very adamant about this. One of the things he doesn't like about Kubrick's film is he thinks that in the film, Jack just goes mad and the supernatural stuff is kind of in his head, whereas King wants it to be very clear

48:29that the supernatural stuff is real and it's in the hotel. If there's blame to be handed out, in Kubrick's version it sounds like it's 100% all Jack. In this, it's like 70% the hotel preying on a man whose demons are bigger than those of most other people. Make him weak, actually. Jack is weaker. So we should say something about the other characters. So first of all, there's Wendy. Stephen King is very proud of Wendy as a creation. And he has said, one reason I hate the film is the film makes her this screaming, sobbing wreck. Fun fact for people who maybe don't know much about the film, that she makes her this screaming, sobbing wreck. Fun fact for people who maybe don't know much about the film,

49:07that she's such a screaming, sobbing wreck, is that Shelley Duvall, the actress, Sally Kubrick would make her do hundreds, literally more than 100 takes, so that she actually was a sobbing, exhausted wreck in real life. Yeah. And her performance, when she cracks, when the film is really kicking off and she is sobbing and she's distraught, I mean, it's a really visceral performance because you've basically got an actress who's been on her feet for 20 hours or something. She was quite damaged by it, wasn't she? Yeah. She found it really traumatizing, I think. Stephen King doesn't like the Wendy in the film. He says she's too misogynistic. She's just there to scream and be stupid. That is not the woman I wrote about. Now, the woman he wrote about is definitely brave and Wendy is

49:50resourceful and she's gutsy and she's resilient. Is there more to her than that? For me, I don't really think there is. I think she's just a housewife who fights back, basically. I think there is a bit more actually because yeah i mean she does have real metal she's also imperfect though i think it's interesting how quickly she and you actually slightly resent her for it in the first half of the book how quickly she turns on jack and blames jack for things one incident in particular yeah um and also the fact that we do get her backstory and the complicated relationship that she has with her feelings for Jack and had right at the beginning. The one element of her personality that I think isn't at all

50:33like developed and seems a bit pointless as he tries to build this whole thing about how she's got a very complex relationship with her mother and, you know, she's becoming her mother. It doesn't really go anywhere. He's trying to make it a mother jack and his father thing i thought that was pointless but i actually think wendy is a good character what about danny what did we make of danny danny's such an intriguing character i think so it's his psychic power that gives the book its title you know the shining i like that concept i was intrigued by it this is potentially a bit of a problem he's five but his mind is arguably that of a 12 year old it's so mature for his age and reviewers has often commented on this that danny seems

51:12weirdly wise with an improbably wide vocabulary far in advance for five year old that said you could argue well we know that he's brilliant and unusual and extraordinary so he's a you know head of his time i think it's so telling though that in the film the films danny appears feels to us younger than the danny in the book he's not given so much articulis and the reason is kubrick employed a real six-year-old who simply would not have been able to say all the things that danny says in the book fine that's valid. But then you say that Kubrick doesn't lean into the supernatural element of it. You know, therefore the shining, the concept of the shining, doesn't have as much weight as it would in the book.

51:56Danny is an unusual boy, more advanced than he should be because he has the shining. And that's a huge part of his personality. He can understand things intrinsically but i also think that sometimes his attempts to make him to to bring him back down to his age are a little bit weak okay when he suddenly will be like oh i don't understand that or i can't read that or he suddenly is a little boy again they don't quite fit together the two sides of his personality i like the way that the the shining the power of the shining is brought in though and the way that danny danny's mind flits from future to past to present and sort of back again and actually i like the way that his um so he's obviously got

52:36an imaginary friend hasn't he called tony oh i was so creeped out by tony for the first half of the book you're led to think that tony's a bad, aren't you? Yes, I thought maybe in Stephen King's kind of universe, he was like the creature from It. Yes, I can see that. Danny, what I like about Danny, what I like about the way he's written, King has this technique in this book that I do think works quite well, which is that our sort of present day narrative is interrupted by random sentences in italics, which are like shards of the past or kind of glimpses of the future. And it's a little bit like reading, you know, William Fulton of The Sound and the Fury or something, which is jumping between different time periods. And some lines are in italics and some aren't. And he does this

53:21with Wendy and with Jack as well. And they will be telling you something and then that will summon a memory of something or an illusion, a literary illusion, maybe a line from Edgar Allan Poe. It's like it's bobbed up into their consciousness and then bobbed back down again. It really accelerates things as well because it becomes more frenetic the more that you're jumping between all these different time periods. The other thing i think that's done really well um with danny is the way that he senses the tensions and the i don't know dysfunctionalities and his parents marriage but he understands it in the way that a child would understand it he just knows that mommy's not happy and daddy's not happy you know i, I think that's well done. Yeah, exactly.

54:05But some of his premonitions are very frightening and it gives the book its sense of growing tension, the foreboding. So in his earliest chapter four, before they even get to the hotel, Danny's outside, he's playing with this imaginary friend, Tony, and then he has this vision. He was in a room filled with strange furniture, a room that was dark, snow splattered against the windows like thrown sand. Outside there was a hollow booming noise, like a dreadful door being thrown wide. Footfalls. Across the room was a mirror, and deep down in its silver bubble, a single word appeared in green fire, and that word was red rum. I found that so chilling. And then there's another vision. He hears smashing glass, approaching destruction,

54:52a hoarse voice, the voice of a madman made the more terrible by its familiarity. Come out, come out, take your medicine. Quite obvious maybe though. It's obvious. I think it probably is obvious. We sort of know what's coming, don't we? I mean, I think it's very difficult for us as readers to approach this as readers might have approached it in 1977, because the film is so embedded in the popular imagination that you know what's going to happen to Jack Torrance and what's going to happen to this family. I mean, some of the visions are very gory, aren't they? Gosh, he likes grisly,isly descriptions stephen king they're being shown around the hotel early on they go into the presidential suite and jack and wendy are looking out the windows and

55:35saying oh the rock is very nice and and danny's like looking into the bedroom and he sees it covered with like blood and bits of people's brains yeah bits people's brains on the wallpaper um clotted with great splashes of dried blood flecked with tiny bits of people's brains yeah bits people's brains on the wallpaper um clotted with great splashes of dried blood flecked with tiny bits of grayish white tissue a surrealistic etching of a man's face drawn back in terror and pain the mouth yawning and half the head pulverized well this is what makes it a horror book rather than just a ghost story yeah so i was thinking if you know you think of the great ghost stories the turn of the screw by henry james or the m the mr james ghost stories it's always what's unsaid and it's always you know and there's an

56:09ambiguity stephen king i mean there are bits that are unsaid and ambiguous but he if if there's an opportunity to tell you that somebody's brains were splattered yeah yeah he'll do it he will absolutely do it but then that's actually that's something he does well i think you know bringing us to the fourth main character of the book and that's the overlook hotel itself is the growing materiality of the hotel's malice so in the film the hotel and kubrick's film was built on a set but it was based on a real hotel and tab Tabby? This is incredible. This is a hotel that we have been to. It's a hotel in Yosemite in California, the Awani Hotel. We didn't stay in it. Too scary. Way too scary. This was on a Restless History tour to America

56:58and we looked around this very old hotel, huge ceilings, shiny wood, and our lovely tour guide uh dylan told us it was the hotel from the shining and i'd forgotten until today yeah so in the book the book i think does a very good job of evoking the hotel but evoking this kind of hotel that you get in a kind of american national park there's like a huge hotel as you said like polished wood thick carpets you get a real sense of the sort of the spookiness of the deserted hotel, the long corridors, the echoing ballroom, the empty bar, all of this. And there's a sense in the beginning of the hotel as a living entity. So when the chef, Halloran, sees them go inside, he says goodbye to them. This line, it was as if the overlook had swallowed them.

57:44And there are some ways in which, I mean, you say about the materiality of the hotel's malice. There are some ways in which this is well done. So I think that the king said he had a dream about his child being chased by a fire hose. I like this because there's a bit where Danny is upstairs and he sees this fire hose fall off the wall. And he has this, and there's a sort of snake aspect to it. Yeah, yeah. And he finds it scary. Now, we might not find it scary as adults, but you can imagine how a five-year-old. I suppose so. What about the creatures made of hedge, the hedge animals? What, the adorable hedge creatures? The hedge creatures. This, again, I found faintly ridiculous. So it's these hedge animals.

58:26And Danny and Jack start noticing that they're sort of not where they were before and the dog has its paw raised at one point and stuff like that. That's kind of vaguely creepy. So, but then, so I'll read, the lion on the left had advanced all the way to the fence now. Its muzzle was touching their boards. It seemed to be grinning at him. Now the buffalo had moved, circling to the right, behind and around the rabbit. I have to say, it's sort of i mean it's charming it's endearing it's comical i find that and also say what are they going to do are they going to like a twig's going to digest you what's happening there well there's a bit where one of them i can't remember if it's jack or danny imagines what it would be like and how awful it would be if the

59:03hedge creatures caught up with him i'm like I think there's worse things that could happen to you than being basically embraced by a rabbit that's made of hedge what's a confusing menagerie buffalo yeah I mean rabbit lion yeah when they're sort of chasing this stampede of animals sort of chasing Danny towards the hotel that is quite scary because he's trying to, you know, march against the snow and he's exhausted and they're coming closer and closer. Perhaps sensibly they didn't try to put the hedge animals in the film. I mean, it would be sort of like Narnia. Also, I think slightly missing from the film, though, is this, I think that you get a tremendous sense of the suffocating weight of the hotel's history.

59:43So there's this bit where jack goes down to the basements he's going through a scrapbook and he's looking at all the photos and it's very sinister all the mobsters and all the criminals and all the sort of the weird creepy guys who've stayed there and this line it seemed that he could almost feel the weight of the overlook bearing down on him from above all the rooms all, all the people. And there are more and more. I mean, there's a bit where he turns the page and he gets an invitation to a mask ball from 1945. And at that point, he imagines himself the mask of the Red Death, the Edgar Allan Poe story, and then the owner of the hotel shouting, unmask, unmask, and everybody taking their masks off.

1:00:21And then the line, the Red Death held sway over all, kind of comes into his head. Red Death, murder, Redrum. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. The most frightening scene in the whole book for me comes about halfway through and it marks the point really where the hotel is kind of alive. And it's when Danny finally plucks up the, or rather can no longer resist the magnetic pull of room 217 and he goes in and there's you know doubling cleverly used he sort of sees himself in the mirror looking at him is it him is it his friend tony and he goes into the bathroom and he pulls the shower curtain back and the woman in the tub had been dead for a long time she was bloated and purple her gas filled belly rising out of the cold ice-rimmed water like some The shower curtain back and... The woman in the tub had been dead for a long time.

1:01:06She was bloated and purple, her gas-filled belly rising out of the cold. Ice-rimmed water like some fleshy island. Her eyes were fixed on Danny's, glassy and huge like marbles. She was grinning. Her purple lips pulled back in a grimace. Her breasts lulled. Her pubic hair floated. Her hands were frozen on the knurled porcelain sides of the tub like crab claws. And Danny's thinking in his head, it's fine. Halloran said that these things are like these creatures, these ghosts. They're like pictures in a book. They can't hurt you. They can't come out of the book. But then she gets up and she follows him. And Danny's trying to get out, trying to escape, trying to open the door. But it won't open.

1:01:45And so he closes his eyes, as Halloranan told him to so that they all go away so that the woman goes away he can't get hurt and then this gloriously melodramatic final paragraph time passed and he was just beginning to relax just beginning to realize that the door must be unlocked and he could go when the year when the years damp bloated fish smelling hands closed softly around his throat and he was turned implacably around to stare into that dead and purple face yeah it's very it's a very memorable scene isn't it i mean i overused the sentence but literal chills but then you see i like what happens next because you turn the page it's the it's a section break it's about halfway through the book and it's a section break a new chapter and we're not with

1:02:32danny at all we are with jack and jack is dreaming isn't he he's kind of falling asleep he's dozing and it's now that we get the big reveal about his father's domestic abuse i think it's so telling this happens at this moment so it's when the hotel has finally come to life and it's now that we get the big reveal about his father's domestic abuse. I think it's so telling this happens at this moment. So it's when the hotel has finally come to life and it's attacking them that we get the reveal about the demons within Jack. And Jack is dreaming about his father. And there's this scene. You and I were only talking about this the other day. The scene when his father attacked his mother over Sunday lunch

1:03:03and he beat her with a cane and there's like gravy going everywhere and stuff again it's that very physical it's very physical material details the fact that he has this image of her glasses in in the mashed potato yeah in this interview with the guardian i think in the 2010s, Stephen King said this scene was the turning point of his entire literary career. He said, it was my crossroads moment where I decided to blur the line between the supernatural and the psychotic. So what he wanted to do was he said, I was going to write about Jack having been abused by his father, domestic abuse rather than making his father just a villain or something i wanted to show that jack still loved his father and that how complicated jack's feelings were and and he said in this

1:03:51interview i think this made jack a more realistic and therefore more frightening figure that what is motivating jack was eating at him is not just fear of his father but also this kind of love for his frustrated love for his father at the same time which is of course you know how people in this situation often feel and it also means that even when he's as he's really falling into madness there's still this element of love for danny that rears its head you know even when he'll say he'll think things like he won't just think kill kill destroy he'll think it's important that the boy take his medicine you know it's important that he learn and it does make him more sinister that said it's not like the

1:04:33overlook in the book is in any way just a metaphor is it because and this is what king you say was so cross with kubrick about for dan playing that supernatural element and implying that it's all in Jack's head and it's one psychological deep dive into the unravelling of a man. It's a combination of the two things, isn't it? Yeah, but the horrors in the hotel are real. For instance, there's this scene where Jack is totally gone. He attacks Wendy. Wendy defends herself. She and Danny manage to get him into the fridge, you know, big storeroom and lock him in. And the hotel unlocks him. You know, there are so many things that the fact that the old woman in the bath physically touches Danny. Yeah. He has marks on his neck.

1:05:22Yeah, exactly. And you can see that this means a lot to King because in his sequel, Doctor Sleep, the supernatural element of the book is developed, whereas a lot of the psychological stuff is less so. But I like the fact that the psychological and the supernatural, there's a tension between them. So to go back to that scene, he's been dreaming about his father. And then it's as though he sleepwalks into the office of the hotel where the radio is the two-way radio the only way of communicating with the outside world and he hears his father's voice coming from the radio you have to kill him jackie and her too because a real artist must suffer because each man kills the thing he loves because they'll always be

1:06:00conspiring against you trying to hold you back cane him for it jackie cane him with an inch of his life i'll go with you while you give him his medicine i know you can do it of course you can you must kill him part of this is the demon within jack which is his father but also i think king wants us to think part of this is real and it is the hotel and this is a supernatural thing that is happening and this is the moment when jack cracks and he screams at the radio and he smashes the radio up. And of course, by doing that, he's destroyed their only link with the outside world. And then there's a snowmobile. He ends up sabotaging the snowmobile as well. And from this point, the pace really begins to escalate, doesn't it? Yeah, exactly.

1:06:36So Wendy finds Jack. He's incoherent, sobbing. They try to find Danny. We haven't heard from Danny since he was attacked by the woman in the bath. They search for him they find him on the landing with marks from his throat he can't speak Wendy assumes straight away that Jack did it she says don't touch him I'll kill you if you lay your hands on him again and then everything gets totally out of control you know Jack goes into this bar he's ordering imaginary drinks which turn out to be real because wendy can smell gin everywhere he can hear voices around him it's like he's in a party senses the presence of people from the past from the masked ball you know he says there are these nice lines all the booths were empty the

1:07:17sound of laughter had died like a stir of autumn leaves jack said the empty lounge for a tick of time his eyes wide and dark in the very center of him a cold certainty was forming and the certainty was that he was losing his mind and then there were two devastating acts of betrayal perpetrated by jack so first of all he goes to room 217 to see if there actually is a dead woman and this comes just after this moment of actually quite a nice familial reconciliation where they all talk about the fact that they know something bad is happening in the hotel and they come together you know wendy's no longer thinks that jack did it and he does realize that there is some sort of supernatural presence there for instance the bath mat out

1:07:56there's drips on the carpet but he pretends to wendy and danny that it's not there was nothing there he denies it he hasn't got the courage he can't admit that there was nothing there. He denies it. He hasn't got the courage. He can't admit that there's something supernatural because doesn't he see a shape behind the shower curtain? Yeah, it's very creepy. And he just denies it to himself. Yeah, it's very creepy. Yeah, exactly. It's like Edmund coming out of the wardrobe and telling everyone Lucy was making it all up. And then, as you say, he sabotages their only other link to the outside world and the only way of escaping the hotel and this is the snowmobile yeah and i actually thought this scene

1:08:31went on too long jack's deciding whether to do it or not to do it and by but by this point the voice of the hotel is really entrenched in his mind um but this time it's driven by his his sense of fear and humiliation he thinks well if we leave the hotel i'll go broke and i will have failed as the as the breadwinner and also you know i'll never finish my play yeah and he imagines himself washing cars or whatever or you know being a sort of uh washing dishes and he his pride stops him doing that so actually the hotel and so far as the hotel is a supernatural entity it's playing on jack's kind of everyday, very human weaknesses, isn't it? And that's also the moment when he first has this vision of killing Wendy.

1:09:12Yeah. And very, again, a very visceral description. This is a horrible scene. Yeah, talking about, like, he'd have his thumbs on her windpipe and she would be naked. I mean, it's quite sexual in a weird way. And I thought that was sort of interesting because his relationship with Wendy does remain sexual for much of the book. You know, they are a married couple. But again, it's that sexuality twisted into something violent and dark. Exactly. And I think this is actually much more layered in the book than in the film. In the film, basically, Jack Nicholson goes mad and he goes mad in a very, very, you know, sort of telegenic way. It's Johnny. Yeah, exactly. But in the book, it's darker, I think.

1:09:52It's slower. It's more mixed up with Jack's memories of his father beating him and all of this stuff. Now, we get to the final quarter of the book. For me, there's a big weakness here. I know you and I don't really agree on this, I think. I don't like the stuff with the cook. So the cook, Halloran, he's been summoned by Dany's powers. He's coming back. But in the book, there was a huge amount of stuff about traffic jams at the airport and check-in desks. Like literally, Stephen King talks you through like the baggage tags. Yeah, yeah. Or there's this long bit just before he gets Danny's telepathic message where he's like, talks you through what he's going to cook for dinner that night and his friendship with some bloke.

1:10:33I agree, it does go on far too long. But what I do think is great and my favourite scene in the book actually, it's also a brilliant scene in the film, is when Jack is now gone. He's lost the plot. He goes back into the bar he's desperate for a drink there's this very very nicely done sense of all the eras of the hotel's history colliding all the hotel's eras were together now all but this current one the torrents era and this would be together with the rest very sooner that was good That was very good. And so now, as you said, the alcohol has become real. The bartender has become real. And the bartender, Lloyd, who's very sinister, he's described as having the skin of a corpse and very white face. He says, we don't want your money, Mr. Torrance.

1:11:19The orders from the manager. The manager is very interested in your boy, Danny. And then we meet this waiter, this English waiter, again, very sinister in the film, who turns out somehow to be the caretaker, Delbert Grady, who had killed his family. And Jack says, you're the caretaker who killed your daughters, aren't you? And Delbert Grady says, no, you're the caretaker sir you've always been the caretaker i should know sir i've always been here the same manager hired us both at the same time so jack's goal now and now that he's fully insane is basically he's like oh yes no i'm i aspire now to be the i aspire to be the caretaker that's a job i want to win basically yes and he will win He needs to prove he's a managerial timber. And by doing that,

1:12:09he needs to correct his family who are insolent and have spoken out. So Grady says, my own girls did not care for the overlook and I corrected them. I corrected them most harshly. And when my wife tried to stop me from doing my duty, I corrected her. And I do think this is of its time. So this is an early 70s book, feminism, sort of women's liberation movements. King is of a, he was in the anti-war movement, anti-Vietnam war movement when he was a student. Raised by a single mother as well. He's of that world. So this is obviously like a criticism of the patriarchal nuclear family. The idea that the father who is correcting his children and his wife. This is what Jack is being encouraged to do.

1:12:56And then Jack promises that he will deal with Danny. He will handle him. He will correct him. And then the end of the scene is the clock strikes and this this character shouts unmask unmask and at this moment the narration focuses in on the clockwork figures who Danny had earlier seen not really understanding having sex and it's and but this time it's a man because you know they're kind of back to front yeah and this time it's a man because, you know, they're kind of back to front. Yeah. And this time it's a man with a small boy and the man has a steel mallet and it's smashing down on the boy's head again and again. And blood gushes through the dome and there's bits of bone and brain. It's horribly gory.

1:13:38It is. Now, we shouldn't completely spoil the final chapters of the book. Just to say, though, the theme of domestic abuse is still woven into the final chapters of the book just to say though um the theme of domestic abuse is still woven into the final chapters so when jack is now drunk he's mad he's confronting his family and he's shouting but what he's shouting at wendy are the things that people shout when they are you know uh when a marriage is fighting when a couple are falling apart you've turned my son against me that was your plan all along you've always been jealous haven't you he tries to strangle wendy he shouts i will show you who's boss around here which again is that sort of criticism of his sort of sense of

1:14:15you described him his masculinity that's really important to jack that he is the boss but also because of the father he hated and loved. And he's actually like, it's all of that coming through. He's reenacting the way his father treated his mother. And all the time, Danny at this scene is shouting, Daddy, stop, you're hurting mummy. And then there's that thing that, as you mentioned, she manages to lock Jack in the pantry. He is released by Delbert Grady. Delbert Grady is real at this point. This is not all a metaphor. He is let out by Delbert Grady. Delbert Grady is real at this point. You know, this is not all a metaphor. Like he is let out by Delbert Grady, who is needling him. Yeah. You let them lock you in, a woman half your size and a little boy,

1:14:53you know, playing on Jack's fears. And there's actually, the hotel speaks to him, doesn't it? Keep your promise, Mr. Torrance. But it's confusing because it's a different voice to grady who i think maybe we'd come to see as kind of um embodying the hotel but no it's something else it's something it's a far more vast supernatural entity and then jack promises that um to bring him danny and uh he says that he'll give the hotel a sacred vow that he will kill Wendy. He does. And then the final scene hammers it all home. And this is when Jack corners Wendy in their apartment and he's screaming at her. And King says there was nothing of the real Jack out there anymore. She was hearing the lunatic raving voice of the overlook itself.

1:15:42In the introductory reading that we did, Wendy is saying to Danny, this is not your daddy she's also a mother though trying to make danny understand that yes it's actually not his dad that's doing this he can still love his father and hate the monster one thing i did find very powerful in these final scenes is that danny still consistently calls jack daddy or my daddy or whatever. And I think, I mean, maybe this is just my sentimental parental side, but I did find this actually quite moving. We see a lot of this, the sort of climax of the book through Danny's eyes, and he's still heartbroken that his daddy, that this has happened to his daddy. This is completely absent from the film. We don't get any sense of this in the film at all, really,

1:16:31because it'd be very hard to do in the film, I think. That's not a criticism of the film. But by showing it through Danny's eyes, King really does bring home this sense of a child watching his family disintegrate around him and how heartbreaking that would be. But it also buys Jack a little bit of redemption at the very end. And actually the narrative voice stops calling him Jack or Daddy. It starts calling him the thing or whatever. So he is actually totally differentiated. Obviously, we don't want to spoil the ending. It's very, very different from the film. So you better read the book, I i guess and i better watch the film are you gonna have the courage to watch the film tabby surely i don't know i don't know i feel like i just have to it is a cult

1:17:13classic isn't it you do i think i just have to man up you so do yeah um all right so uh our final verdict and i suggest that we uh score this this in implausibly mobile hedge rabbits. If you have a better idea, overheating boilers or whatever. Implausible menageries, I think. I'm going to give it a 6.5. I just thought it was so much fun. I really enjoyed reading it. I had so much fun reading it. It definitely didn't shatter and remake my world as I know it. But then, you know, books don't always have to. Sometimes they can just be really fun. I read it on holiday. It was a great holiday read. It is, though, I think a tiny bit obvious. I think it could have leaned a little bit more into the whole,

1:17:56is this real? Is this not real? Is this a psychological journey into the humanity's heart of darkness? Or is it literally happening everything is is very literal um and i think the middle section was a bit long but a fantastic page turner would recommend okay i am going to give it six now that sounds harsh i don't mean it to be harsh basically i'm just not a massive fan of horror um as a genre um so it didn't convert me the writing is sometimes very good and sometimes not i think it's just uneven it's a young man's I'm just not a massive fan of horror as a genre. So it didn't convert me. The writing is sometimes very good and sometimes not. I think it's just uneven. It's a young man's book.

1:18:31I'm not dissing Stephen King for that. There are bits that are clumsy and cliche, but then there are bits that are very well written and really, really well observed. I think there's loads of good stuff in here. I think a lot of the psychology is very good, actually. I think the gothic melodrama element and the goriness, which of course is why it's so successful, but for me, slightly suffocates and obscures the more subtle story within. And when that New York Times reviewer back in 1977, probably a review that annoyed Stephen King at the time, said, it's almost like there's another book in here struggling to get out. I agree with that. Actually. I think if Stephen King were a different kind of writer, he would be less

1:19:12successful. So it's not for me to judge him, but I think he might've written a book that was 200 pages short because this is what, 400 pages or something. Yeah. 200 pages shorter and more subtle. And actually probably for me, it would be more scary because it would be like the turn of the screw or something. Would I recommend it to people? I would recommend it to people. I think it did drag, but I think it was fun. It was a nice, I mean, I just read that in the bell jar or something. So it was like a massive change. What's coming up, Tabby? A massive palate cleanser next. I mean, you could not think of a more different book. Honestly, night and day. So Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brien,

1:19:51To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Money by Martin Amis, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré, Tesla d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, Dune by Frank Herbert, and Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling. And also actually just one, a tiny, tiny, you know, using The Shining, I'll look even further into the future. We're also doing A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. And that will be our third book adapted by Kubrick on the show. What was the first one? Lolita. Oh, Lolita, of course. Wow. He had a good taste. Very good taste. Superb. All right. Have a good holiday, Sabby. Bye, Lolita. Of course. Wow. He had a good taste. Very good taste. Superb. All right. Have a good holiday, Sabby.

1:20:28Bye, everybody. It's getting chilly outside. But you know what that means? It's time to cozy up with Panera Bread. Let's get toasty. Cheesy. Oh, hello, broccoli cheddar soup in a bread bowl. How about melty? Okay, Chipotle chicken avo melt. It's dipping bread in soupy goodness season. Oh yeah, we are so back. It's Panera season. Order now. John Cena here. Some people say I got range. Comedy, action, drama. You know what else has range? Chime. You get fee-free banking and 5% cash back on everyday purchases. Easy credit building, high yield savings, premium travel perks with Chime card. Oh, did I say fee free banking? Open a Chime account in minutes and switch today. America's number one choice for banking.

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