3.5 stars.

Commute audiobook. Easy to follow while driving, interesting enough to keep me awake. The reader was Campbell Scott, who often sounded quite a lot like Brent Spiner (Data from Star Trek TNG), which was frankly distracting. I guess he can't help it if he sounds like Data.

Fair warning, I don't know how to talk about it without also talking about the film at least a little. For an interesting discussion about the differences between Kubrick's film and King's book, check out this great article at Salon which explains how, even if Kubrick's film is a great film, as an adaptation it misses the point of its source material which justifies Stephen King's longstanding and vocal dislike of the film.

So. The book.

The good
1. The book is more than a simple horror story -- it explores the causes of horror, one supernatural and one psychological. The supernatural: The hotel has basically absorbed all the bad things done at the hotel over the years, taking on its own evil force able to infect people who stay in the hotel too long. (Evil works from the outside in.) The psychological: Jack Torrance is an alcoholic. He's cleaned himself up but he still feels the pull of the bottle. He has a bad temper which he tries (mostly successfully) to keep under control when he's not drinking. As he falls back into alcoholism, he becomes a monster and a threat to his family. (Evil works from the inside out.)

2. King does a great job of capturing the isolation the family experiences once the hotel is snowed in.

3. It's a humanist story. King is obviously interested in his characters: their psyches, how they interact with each other, how they behave in different situations. I was very interested in the complex family dynamic. I've not experienced this kind of alcoholism or abuse first hand, but it felt (mostly) realistic to me. Book Wendy's feelings about Jack are complicated by his alcoholism and past behavior. Book Jack resents her for feeling this way because he can't take responsibility for the terrible things he did while drunk. Book Danny loves his dad even though his dad has hurt him. So, the book is a humanist and psychological story in a way the film is not. The film isn't interested in origins of evil or Jack's inner torment or Wendy's complicated feelings -- Kubrick is interested in the aesthetics of horror, and he uses his characters as set pieces to achieve particular aesthetic results.

The not-so-good
1. I get that Wendy's feelings about Jack are complicated, but why didn't she leave Jack IMMEDIATELY after he broke Danny's arm? I worry that sounds a little like victim-blaming, but frankly I don't have a lot of tolerance for people who fail to protect their children from abusive situations.

2. Dick Hallorann. Fuck. The ultimate example of the Magical Negro trope (a trope that Stephen King has returned to frequently. Ugh.). (Basically: the token black person in a lily-white cast of characters is imbued with magical powers and exists solely to aid the white characters.)

3. What's up with Al Shockley? He was Book Jack's alcoholic-in-arms. He got Jack the job at the hotel; we learn he has a huge financial stake in its success; he basically threatens Jack when Jack suggests he wants to write a book about the hotel's terrible history. I was under the impression that he was a Bad Guy who, like the mysterious Horace Derwent, was propagating the evil of the hotel and basically sacrificed Jack's family to the hotel for financial success. Except that at the end Wendy's taken a job with him, so I guess not? I'm no author, but that seems like a missed opportunity to me.

4. It's not scary. I think it's supposed to be -- there's ghosties and vicious animated topiaries and all sorts of things that go bump in the night, and we learn early on they can do real harm to Jack's family -- but it's just not. Maybe that's partly my fault. I'd seen the film before, which killed the surprise factor; and good hide-under-the-covers horror relies a lot on anticipation and surprise. But I still feel like the book could have been better in this regard. There's SO MUCH BACKSTORY. It took multiple CDs before we even got to the hotel, and more CDs still before creepy stuff starts to happen. And even then, it's kind of light on the creepy.

5. One thing I really liked about the film was the depiction of Movie Jack's writer's block and descent into madness. The book talks a little bit about the block he's experiencing with his play, but with nowhere near the power of the film's famed imagery. He eventually loses interest in the play and becomes interested in writing a book about the hotel's horrible history. But as a signifier of madness and evil, Book Jack's interest in writing a book about the hotel just does not compare with Movie Jack's pages and pages of "All work and no play..."