The Shining

by Stephen King

Book Overview

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME - Before Doctor Sleep, there was The Shining, a classic of modern American horror. Jack Torrance takes a job as the caretaker of the remote Overlook Hotel. As the brutal winter sets in, the hotel's dark secrets begin to unravel.

"An undisputed master of suspense and terror." --The Washington Post...

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0307743659
• ISBN13: 9780307743657
• Release Date: June 2012
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 672 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 4.1" x 6.7"

Customer Reviews

Eery and Tense!

I loved this book and definitely consider it my new favorite. It kept me on my toes the entire time and I didn’t want to put it down!

Wrong book

I was sent “Salem’s Lot”, which is not - in any way, shape, or form - “The Shining”.

Is there such a thing as possession of a human by another entity?

This book. If you have ever wondered about spirit possession, read this. It might be old but it is CLASSIC. I've always wondered if the author didn't get a bit possessed himself writing this book. And I know Jack Nic was praised for his portrayal in the movie, but I always thought a subtler portrayal would have conveyed more eeriness. The story was strong enough to have carried that.

An Absolute Classic, One of Stehpen King's best works

This book is an instant classic, There's a reason King is considered the Master of horror, This is an awesome book that will keep you hooked until the end.

Chilling

love this book. slow to the start, king writes with such detail! had to stop reading at night got spooked. read this book in two days.

A Stephen King classic!

From the beginnings of the story, arriving at the hotel, assuring his wife of his stability and then, once the doors are locked and winter encroaches, things start to happen. King uses that element of the unknown to gradually work the environment on you and gradually bring in all sorts of fascinating apparitions. He leaves everything to the imagination, drawing in the reader further and further into the abyss, until you're so locked up in the King world that the only escape is to finish the book. It's this twist of reality that clenches it, that delivers a vague feeling of mistrust. You begin to wonder what the protagonist is up to. He is writing a book.... you expect details and then you're horrified at the repetitions it reveals, making you gasp at what's next. He is led into the ballroom where the 1930's atmosphere is re-established so that the protagonist can blend in, a prelude to the conclusion. There, he is given advise, advise that would change his nature and violate the newly formed relationship with his unsuspecting wife. The cook knows what's wrong...just as the boy does--for they have the shine! And when he comes to investigate the situation to satisfy his curiosity, the gruesome welcoming takes him by surprise. And you sit there, reading, led deeper and deeper into the creepy world of King's tremendous imagination, only limited by the pages you turn.... but you keep turning, driven further in.... until you reach an angry point...which I won't spoil for you. Read it!

Reread

Just decided to reread this after some 20 years. Mr. King surely has improved as an author since those days.

Remains one of King's most powerful, frightening novels

Twenty-seven years after its publication, The Shining remains a visceral, gripping read that showcases Stephen King's unfathomable powers to hypnotize and terrify readers, a power King had in abundance in the early stages of his career. Coming on the heels of Carrie and 'Salem's Lot, The Shining truly established King as a modern master of horror and an unequaled purveyor of a literary mirror into pop culture. If you've only seen the original movie starring Jack Nicholson, you really owe it to yourself to read the novel; Stanley Kubrick made a fine and scary movie, but he did not capture the essence of King's story, and his dramatization followed a different path than what you find in the original vision brought to life through the words of King. The more recent miniseries was more faithful to the novel, but it doesn't take an Einstein to figure out that a made-for-TV dramatization is limited in terms of what it can get away with in a number of important areas. Simply put, The Shining stands just behind Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House as one of the best "haunted house" novels ever written. The plot should be quite familiar to one and all by this point. The Torrance family embarks on a months-long retreat into complete isolation when Jack Torrance signs on to be the winter custodian of the Overlook Hotel in Colorado. Jack takes some personal demons with him to a hotel chock-full of malevolent, ghostly spirits; he is a recovering alcoholic who, in the last couple of years, lost his job and broke his little boy's arm in a state of drunken fury. He thinks the months alone with his wife and son will allow him to find peace - and to finally finish the play he has been working on. His long-suffering wife has some misgivings, but the only person really clued into the dreadful possibilities is his son Danny. Danny has "the shine," a gift which allows him to see and know things he cannot possibly know; it is a powerful gift which the Overlook (which really is an entity unto itself) jealously desires for itself. As the days pass, the Overlook exerts more and more of an influence on Jack, exploiting his weaknesses, exacerbating his paranoia and persecution complex, and basically turning him into a murderous new tool at the hotel's disposal. Danny sees what is happening, although he cannot really understand much of it given his very young age. He can certainly understand the terror of the Overlook, however, as he sees images of the hotel's murderous past and very dark near future in a number of unsettling scenes interspersed throughout the novel. This is a harrowing tale of survival against incredible odds of a supernatural nature, and King brings every nuance of the story to vivid life, capturing perfectly the internalization and externalization of fear among exceedingly real, believable characters that the reader gets to know very well indeed. As has always been the case with Stephen King, it is his incomparable powers of chara

A perfect blend of subtle horror and human drama

If you need blood and guts every few pages to stay interested in a book, you will be dissapointed. If your definition of drama is the murderous villains lengthy monologue before his final, grisly defeat, you will be dissapointed. If you're looking for a clone of the movie in book form, you will be /very/ dissapointed.If, however, you appreciate one of those rare novels that leads you into the story step by step, immersing you with effortless grace into the world in which it occurs, a world that is, on the surface, plain and even non-descript yet brimming just beneath with murky, brooding awareness, then this one might be for you. If you appreciate full and starkly realistic characters painted in bold and brilliant strokes of emotion and personality, you may want to have a look. Finally, if you can accept Steven King as something more than "The Horrormeister", and instead as a natural story-teller who is as capable of capturing the subtles and nuances of terror as the hack and slash aspects, who can blend it perfectly into a familiar yet hauntingly awry world of ghosts darkness and ordinary people struggling against not only such mundane horrors as abuse and acoholism but horrors of a decidedly more supernatural nature, then you might be ready for this book.I was captivated by the plight of Danny, a very unique young boy, struggling against unimaginable forces out of pure, unconditional love for his father. Likewise, Jack Torrence is not merely the bloodlusting maniac of the movie, but a man who is hounded by his alcoholism, all the way into the heart of the Colorado Rockies where he attempts to come to terms with his personal ghosts and heal the rift that is threatening to pull his family apart. Despite his best efforts, however, the sinister awareness that has infested the Overlook, an awareness birthed by years of murder and tragedy, slowly twists him to it's evil ends in a heart-breaking struggle of wills.This book is full of disturbingly memorable imagery, moments of slow and creeping terror that will keep you turning pages deep into the night. The ending is a satisfying as it is tragic, bringing the grisly drama to a gut-wrenching climax and exorcising the tortured prisoners of the Overlook in a curtain of purifying flame.As King books go, this is one of his finest. As far as any book goes, this is one of the scariest I've ever read.

It's The Shining

Some people seem confused by the review of this book, below, being in another language. It's completely appropriate, as all signs point to this being The Shining in Spanish... The Shining is a great book, so to all of the readers of Stephen King, translated into Spanish, I recommend this book highly.