Doctor Sleep by Stephen King

As I feel it’s only proper to be honest on this blog I will come clean before I get into the heart of this review. So here goes; I love Stephen King. I more than love him. He is, undeniably, one of only a handful of people I would describe as a 'hero'. He is my role model. He is someone, in short, I aspire to be like.

For my fifteenth birthday I was given a copy of Carrie. I read it cover to cover in about a day and must have read it twenty times since. The only two books that have ever scared me so much they invaded my dreams, It and The Shining, are by King. He’s created many characters I’ve had a genuine emotional connection to, from the powerful and doomed Carrie White to the desperate and damaged Louis Creed in Pet Sematary. I have more books by King than any other author (partly, I’ll admit, because the guy is so damned prolific) and I have re-read a higher proportion of his books than anyone else’s. Two of the ten books I would take to my desert island (unlikely I know…but just go with it) are by King.

There’s plenty of people who’ve written on King’s skill with words. The Guardian recently ran a series of reviews of Kings books in the order they were published and the literary techniques he uses are appraised much more eloquently there than I could manage. All I’ll say on the subject is at his best King’s writing approaches stream of consciousness. He writes like thoughts form and you’re pulled along with it, not just reading the story but living it. What makes him so terrifying is by the time the monsters have arrived he’s so deep in your head you accept it because it’s the only reality you have at that moment.

The thing that has always grabbed me in King’s writing is his characterisation. The people in his stories are a joy to read, even if they are utterly despicable human beings. They are layered and interesting and the baddies have pasts that have led them to this and the goodies have flaws that don’t make them completely sympathetic. The relationships ring true with their secrets and their compromises and the basic humanity of his creations means that you really care about the outcome. The skill I’ve always envied the most in King is his ability to imagine people and craft them so perfectly. It’s that, rather than his gift of creating fear, that’s broken my heart so many times.

That’s at his best. He’s not always at his best. It stands to reason that someone who’s published over fifty books will have some that are better than others. Some of his books I have finished and put to one side knowing I won’t pick up again. There was one, Cell, that I couldn’t finish because I just couldn’t engage with it. Still, percentages suggest that I’ll be more than likely to enjoy his stories so I’ll keep working through them as long as he keeps writing them.

Now I’ve had my moment I’ll get down to the reviewing. For the first time in I don’t know how long I bought some hardback books back in November. I don’t buy new hardbacks because they’re so expensive, and once you’ve got them you can’t port them around very easily to read while waiting for buses to show up and coffee to cool. But I thought I would buy Doctor Sleep, the sequel to The Shining, in hardback as a gesture of respect. And the cat’s eyes on the front cover are embossed turquoise and look fantastic.    

As mentioned above The Shining scared the bejesus out of me the first time I read it. I read it in December 2007 in the week I stayed in my halls of residence at uni after almost everyone else had left because I had managed to get myself a part time job and didn’t fancy the commute back from Bradford. There were maybe six of us left in a hall designed for a hundred and twenty. The days were short and, it being Manchester, the skies were constantly dark with rain or sleet or snow. It was freezing cold all week and eerily quiet. Some genuinely spooky stuff happened that week, but it was probably just the mood infecting us all. Either way I thought it would be a good idea to read The Shining under these conditions.

I had dreams featuring the ghosts from the Overlook Hotel. I once lay in my room really needing the loo but unable to go for hours after reading that bathroom scene. But I had to keep reading. I had to know the Torrance family, posted up into the Colorado mountains all alone, were going to be alright. And it was a good story, a damn good story brilliantly written and I couldn’t get enough of it. When I heard there was a sequel, about what happened to the Torrance’s little boy, Danny, when he grew up, I knew it was going to be a case of when rather than if I read it.

 

Whereas The Shining used Danny's psychic gifts as a catalyst for the ghosts in the hotel, Doctor Sleep is about a group of psychic vampires and their endless quest for children who ‘shine’ to sustain themselves. They set their sights on thirteen year old Abra Stone and it’s up to the little boy from the Overlook, now all grown up and an alcoholic like his Daddy, to protect her.

Grown up Danny Torrance (now going by the more mature sounding Dan) is brilliantly realised. He inherited his father’s drinking and temper but seems a stronger and worthier character than Jack Torrance. King certainly seems to like him better and I warmed to him almost immediately. The new shining child prodigy is as adorable and believable as Danny was in the original novel, although notably older and, consequently, has a bit more about her. For me it was these two characters that held the story together.

 

Is Doctor Sleep as good as The Shining? No is the simple answer. It’s not as long, it’s not as detailed and there’s very little of the patented King side lines into the characters. The result is that, after expecting to know every in and our of their psyche, they feel depressingly like characters in a book rather than real people. 

It's also not particularly scary or tense. The band of miscreants after Abra were a quite hit and miss. I liked that King put a new twist on vampires (which are getting a bit tired now, to be honest) by making them dependent on psychic energy and having them drive around America in RVs but ultimately they lacked depth. I can’t help but feeling twenty years ago King would have given each one a detailed back story and presented the reader with a complete history of this strange movement. Instead they seem oddly flat. Their leader, Rose, has the potential to be terrifying but you hardly get a glimpse of what’s going on under her infamous hat.

The writing still works though. Stylistically this couldn’t have been penned by anyone else. This book is incredibly easy to read and the confidence of the prose is probably what carries it through the plot’s thin patches.

I am glad I read it, and I’m glad Danny Torrance got his own story and Abra Stone was given to the world, but I wish it had just been a little bit better. I know I went into it with high hopes with it not just being from my favourite author but the sequel to one of my favourite books but I still can’t help feeling a little bit disappointed that it wasn’t incredible. Still, those cat’s eyes look great on my bookshelf.