by Stephen King
Part of The Shining
First published 1977
Jack Torrance loads his family into the car and drives to the Overlook Hotel, a grand old resort shutting down for the Colorado winter. He needs this job. A fresh start after losing his teaching position, after the drinking, after everything that went wrong. His wife Wendy wants to believe in him. Their five-year-old son Danny wants to believe too, though Danny knows things a child his age should not know. He sees things. He calls it the shining. The Overlook sits empty and enormous around them as the snow piles up and the roads close. Jack tries to write. He tries to be a father. But the hotel has its own history, soaked into the walls and the hedge maze and the long, carpeted corridors. It wants something from Danny. It wants something from Jack too, and Jack is not as strong as he needs to be. The cold outside keeps growing. Inside, the pressure builds. Danny watches his father change, day by day, and understands before anyone else does that the danger is real and it is close. The question is whether love is enough to survive what the Overlook has planned for all of them.
Genres: fiction, drama, horror, thriller, dark-fantasy, psychological-horror
Vibes: atmospheric, claustrophobic, dark, dread-filled, psychological, suspenseful
Tropes: descent-into-madness, isolated-setting, protective-child, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Overlook Hotel, Colorado
Period: winter
675 pages · Paperback · Anchor Books
Content warnings: addiction, child-abuse, domestic-violence, mental-illness