The Shining
Stephen King, 1977
★ 4.28 from 1.8m ratings on Goodreads
A struggling family takes a winter job in an empty mountain hotel, where isolation, old violence and a boy's strange gift begin to press in. Dread builds slowly through a plain, gothic voice, while family tenderness keeps the tension human and close.
Feels like dread, tenderness and unease. About family, time and madness.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you want a haunted-hotel story that spends as much time on family strain and addiction as on scares. Some readers find the middle slow and the frights milder than its reputation suggests.
Why read it
It gives you a tense, intimate portrait of a family coming apart in an isolated place, with the hotel's old violence pressing at the edges.
A page from the book
How to tell a child the world is hard without making it crueler.
Danny? You listen to me. I’m going to talk to you about it this once and never again this same way. There’s some things no six-year-old boy in the world should have to be told, but the way things should be and the way things are hardly ever get together. The world’s a hard place, Danny. It don’t care. It don’t hate you and me, but it don’t love us, either. Terrible things happen in the world, and they’re things no one can explain. Good people die in bad, painful ways and leave the folks that love them all alone. Sometimes it seems like it’s only the bad people who stay healthy and prosper. The world don’t love you, but your momma does and so do I. You’re a good boy. What readers say
Readers describe this as deeply frightening and claustrophobic, with the hotel’s menace and Jack’s unraveling keeping them tense. Many also value the family drama and addiction struggle, feeling for Danny and Wendy, though some find it slow or less scary than expected.
Stephen King.King conceived The Shining after a night at Colorado's Stanley Hotel in 1974, when he and his wife found it nearly empty as it closed for the season.
Books that feel like this
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The Stand
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A flu escapes a lab and empties America; survivors choose between a saintly old woman and a smiling dark man. King's big, bleak, compulsive plague epic.
Pet Sematary
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A doctor moves his family to a Maine town where the local pet cemetery sits beside something older, and grief becomes a door that should stay shut.
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Questions readers ask
- Is The Shining for me?
- You may like it if you want a haunted-hotel story that spends as much time on family strain and addiction as on scares. Some readers find the middle slow and the frights milder than its reputation suggests.
- What is The Shining like?
- Dread builds slowly through a plain, gothic voice, while family tenderness keeps the tension human and close. Feels like dread, tenderness and unease. About family, time and madness.
- What should I read after The Shining?
- If you liked The Shining, try Red Dragon (Thomas Harris), The Exorcist (William Peter Blatty) and Dracula (Bram Stoker).
A taste of the feed
What makes a place a home is who you come back to.
Graham returned to the table. He was afraid that this was how he would remember the end of Sugarloaf Key-ice melting in two tea glasses and paper napkins fluttering off the redwood table in the breeze and Molly and Willy far down the beach.
Red Dragon · Thomas Harris
Some people are cold in a way no weather can fix.
The blaze of sun wrung pops of sweat from the old man’s brow, yet he cupped his hands around the glass of hot sweet tea as if to warm them.
The Exorcist · William Peter Blatty
A mind wakes up with no history, and nobody to ask.
“But where were my friends and relations? No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my past life was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing. From my earliest remembrance I had been as I then was in height and proportion. I had never yet seen a being resembling me or who claimed any intercourse with me. What was I? The question again recurred, to be answered only with groans.
Frankenstein · Mary Shelley
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