The Shining

But it's, yeah, it, it's two na- two teenage boys, uh, who kinda have an adventure where there's a blend of, uh, reality and fantasy, and this is the thing d- that's kind of interesting when you look behind the veil of the, the, uh, uh, the author, what, uh...

Same thing with Stephen King of like how did you come up with, uh, The Shining and just having a very strange dream of, uh, I think his son being chased, or his son had a dream of the fire hose in the hallway chasing him.

Right, right.

It's like, what if other weird things came to life in this place? And he came up with the concept smoking a cigarette on the balcony late at night, and it's like, that's the book.

Popularity does not negate architectural integrity.

The Shining from 1977 is strict, mathematically perfect, dark and stormy fiction.

The massive winter blizzard closing the winding mountain roads to the Overlook Hotel is the literal physical lock on the door.

You have the ultimate closed world.

The wind is howling, the temperature has dropped, and the house is groaning.

This is when you move to a completely closed house.

This is the time to lock yourself inside Rebecca, or navigate the halls of The Haunting of Hill House, or check into the Overlook Hotel in The Shining.

But a crucial absolute warning for the listener, do not stack masterpieces.

No, I literally did not know that until I looked up the director and was like, oh, he did Inkheart too, which that movie is like, meh.

But the book is...

so wonderful look at my very holy hell

that is that is loved very very violently very

violent okay fair enough i'm sorry

violently

it's a book i'm talking about a book

Yeah, I know.

[laughs] But he went to, um, Estes Park.

He went to, uh, the place where Stephen King wrote The Shining, and he stayed there with his wife and spent a whole lot of money, I mean, thousands of dollars.

And then he went to the Lizzie Borden place, and he did the same thing.

But he's an individual that likes the thrill.

He uses the supernatural not as the source of the evil, but as a violent intensifier of preexisting ordinary human harm.

You can trace the direct genetic lineage of Carrie straight through to The Shining, Salem's Lot, The Dead Zone, Firestarter, and Christine.

It all originates from the shower room at Ewen High.

Which brings us to the most unsettling aspect of this deep dive, the modern relevance of the text.

... just as a woman, was, like, super impactful to, for me as a, as a girl growing up just trying to find my way.

But as a new King reader, so, you know, reading The Shining for the first time, Doctor Sleep, that's what I'm reading right now, It, uh, Pet Sematary, there is a sense of, like, his character development is very different than most.

Mm.

Like, there is a sense of you're reading at 1,200 pages, not to, like, get a check mark, maybe some people are, but because you deeply are invested in what happens to these characters and how-

Hmm.

But the writing is beautiful.

It's kind of a direct riff on The Shining, although he didn't seem aware of that.

It's about that-