Willy called it the Shinning
On occasion, movies outshine the books they were made from. One of these cases is The Shining. I had seen the movie many times before I ever read the text. I must say that I liked the movie far more than I did the text. There are several reasons why.
The text like so many Stephen King books is too dense with what I consider uneeded information. King sometimes gets too carried away in his own story and writes pages and pages of tangents that aren’t really needed. The Shining is no different. The movie cuts out much of this thick tangential information. Of course mind you, there is little in way of coherency between the book and movie. The movie only takes in the highlights of the book and leaves out a lot of other information. But enough about the movie.
The Shining is about a little boy with ESP, a haunted hotel, and a father haunted by his own past and alcoholism. As with most haunted house books, King makes the malevolent hotel attack the most vulnerable first. It goes after Daddy because of his alcoholism and his checkered, violent past. He becomes easily swayed by the powers of the Overlook. Danny is the next to be attack and this is because of his psychic ability. The hotel and all the evil spirits in it fear Danny because he has the power to stop them from their evil work. Poor Wendy is just caught up in the game. The hotel really has little interest in her.
The major problem with The Shining outside of King’s verboseness (which is more reigned in than some of his other texts) is that the characters are unbelievable. Danny is especially hard to swallow. The boy isn’t in school yet, but talks and thinks at an adult level of cognition, sometimes. Other times, he is like a child. Danny does have very strong ESP, but that would not make him think like an adult. He oftentimes thinks just like an adult in situations where a child wouldn’t understand what was happening well enough to make much of a thought process period. This pulled me out of the story more than anything else. It is what made the story almost impossible for me to finish.
Of all the text that I have read this semester for my study of the haunted in horror literature, The Shining has been my least favorite, replacing The Phantom of the Opera. The story just doesn’t work. Danny is too adult to be a four-year-old, and Wendy far too passive. If a hotel is running it’s own elevator, and my husband was okay with it, and going nuts, I don’t care how much snow is out there; I’d take my chances with the snow. Eskimos live in snow houses, why couldn’t she and Danny made shelter like that on their way to the town. Also why did rangers and other check on them when there was no communication at all? There were too many unanswered questions for me to enjoy this book.
The text like so many Stephen King books is too dense with what I consider uneeded information. King sometimes gets too carried away in his own story and writes pages and pages of tangents that aren’t really needed. The Shining is no different. The movie cuts out much of this thick tangential information. Of course mind you, there is little in way of coherency between the book and movie. The movie only takes in the highlights of the book and leaves out a lot of other information. But enough about the movie.
The Shining is about a little boy with ESP, a haunted hotel, and a father haunted by his own past and alcoholism. As with most haunted house books, King makes the malevolent hotel attack the most vulnerable first. It goes after Daddy because of his alcoholism and his checkered, violent past. He becomes easily swayed by the powers of the Overlook. Danny is the next to be attack and this is because of his psychic ability. The hotel and all the evil spirits in it fear Danny because he has the power to stop them from their evil work. Poor Wendy is just caught up in the game. The hotel really has little interest in her.
The major problem with The Shining outside of King’s verboseness (which is more reigned in than some of his other texts) is that the characters are unbelievable. Danny is especially hard to swallow. The boy isn’t in school yet, but talks and thinks at an adult level of cognition, sometimes. Other times, he is like a child. Danny does have very strong ESP, but that would not make him think like an adult. He oftentimes thinks just like an adult in situations where a child wouldn’t understand what was happening well enough to make much of a thought process period. This pulled me out of the story more than anything else. It is what made the story almost impossible for me to finish.
Of all the text that I have read this semester for my study of the haunted in horror literature, The Shining has been my least favorite, replacing The Phantom of the Opera. The story just doesn’t work. Danny is too adult to be a four-year-old, and Wendy far too passive. If a hotel is running it’s own elevator, and my husband was okay with it, and going nuts, I don’t care how much snow is out there; I’d take my chances with the snow. Eskimos live in snow houses, why couldn’t she and Danny made shelter like that on their way to the town. Also why did rangers and other check on them when there was no communication at all? There were too many unanswered questions for me to enjoy this book.
Ghost stories and haunted house tales are always hard for me to take. They rely on so many tropes, psychic abilities, evils of the past, weak characters haunted (no pun) by their past for me to get into them. Although, I believe in very little in the way of monsters and other factors horror stories hand their hats on, I have the hardest time suspended disbelief when it comes to ghosts. A vampire I can swallow; a disembodied spirit gives me heartburn. Go figure.
