Page 442/683 (the paperback version I have). Part Four: Snowbound. Chapter 35: The Lobby.
This is the perfect weather for reading Stephen King and really sinking one's teeth into the story of the horror that befalls the Torrence family as caretakers to the very well haunted Overlook hotel.
I'm thinking back to the first time I was ever exposed to this story, which was the first time I was ever exposed to the author as well. It was the summer before my second grade year, and my sister carried two books to our kitchen table. A family of horror fans (mostly cinematic), I was truly one of the brood, and I remember picking the two books up to see what she brought home to read. The Shining was one, Cycle of the Werewolf was the other. I remember looking through the second tome, mostly glancing through the colorful illustrations sprinkled throughout the work, but it was The Shining that really got my attention. It was the book that I carried to my bedroom to lay on my bed during that long, hot summer to begin reading.
I don't remember just how far I'd gotten during that initial foray into a world I was far too young to truly comprehend, but I do remember it being the first time I ever read the word "prick." I recognized that it was a bad word - I could infer as much in the context in which it was used - but I wouldn't ask anyone to define it for me. I'd done so with another word the previous Christmas when my sister got me my very first album: Madonna's Like a Virgin, and after learning all the words and singing and dancing around my bedroom in the days that followed the holiday, I finally asked my sister, "Missy, what's a virgin?" I got the definition, and that was when I realized why I had to hide the tape from displaying it for my great aunt or my grandparents when they came to see what all Santa had brought me.
In addition to learning a new bit of profanity, I remember feeling very afraid by several elements and feeling even greater levels of fear much later when I re-read the book in my adolescence. The most specific aspect I remember really freaking me out was that of the hedge animals becoming animate characters and first chasing Jack, then Danny over the grounds of the Overlook. I also remember being struck by the fact that there was no maze (at some point between my introduction to King in second grade and my later reading of the book when I was old enough to understand, I'd seen Kubrick's film, which - though considered one of the greatest horror films ever made - bears strikingly little resemblance to the source material). The maze is something which stands out to me from the film because I think that the film's scene in which Wendy takes Danny on a picnic deep in the labyrinthine depths of the meticulously created puzzle was my actual first exposure to anything related to man whose work I'm reading and researching. I have a very early memory, from what age I do not know, of attending a party (New Year's Eve, I'm sure) at my Aunt Didi's where the film was playing on the television in her living room. I remember walking through the room to sit on the floor with newspapers (we always made our own confetti, but I don't remember ever being up late enough to count down and throw it) and that particular scene playing. That memory has always left a very profound and unsettling feeling in my stomach, and it is the same feeling with which I associate this particular book, even though that scene never occurs in print.
I see that YouTube is littered with all sorts of documentaries and shorts that investigate the multiple layers of the film, and I'm curious to know what all these people have to say about the Kubrick masterpiece, but I really have no interest in viewing any of these until after I've finished reading, which may very well be tonight if I can get busy and not find any reason to procrastinate. I know that Stephen King has always generally disliked the film that Kubrick made, and I can see why. Neither Jack Nicholson nor Shelley Duvall are anywhere close to the way I picture Jack and Wendy while reading. The family is mostly a happy one, just trying to escape the ghosts of their past in the novel. In the film, they seem to be generally scared and troubled from the very first scene. The novel gives greater depth to the demons with which Jack is constantly barraged as the result of the wreckage he created in his active alcoholism, and the gift with which Danny has been bestowed is given much more explanation - both Jack and Wendy going so far as to take Danny from the hotel to have him examined by a doctor and the couple later speculating as to just what is really going on with Danny and that gift (an idea that excites me more than ever now that I know King is soon to publish Dr. Sleep, a sequel to The Shining, which has something to do with Danny's abilities).
I suppose I'm rambling a bit tonight. As a dear friend in high school once critiqued about an episode of our school soap opera that I'd written, this is "a little short and incoherent, but not bad."
Before I lose the great sound of occasional, rumbling thunder in the distance and the continued splatter of rain outside my bedroom windows, I suppose I ought to pull out the book and see if I can't get it finished tonight.
No comments:
Post a Comment