I used to think I was sort of immune to horror books. The only thing that ever really "gets me" in media is jump scares, and those don't tend to work so well on paper. I never get nightmares fervently knocks on wood and I've never been in a jumpy phase or a leave-the-lights-on-at-night phase after finishing such a book. Those things still didn't happen with The Shining, thank God, but it was very effective horror (read: frickin' terrifying). The fear it causes isn't so much of an "oh God my heart" variety as a sort of increasingly uncomfortable, bile-like thing rising up, biding its time and occasionally manifesting into terribleterribleterrible things. Which I was a fan of, I guess; as much as you can be a fan of that kind of thing. The horror is really steady, with the amount of not-subtle-in-the-slightest foreshadowing going on, and perpetually suspenseful. You don't get those flat places full of too much angsty character exposition or mildly-scared window-staring. Well, you do, and it's kind of a relief, you think you're safe for a bit and maybe you could read this part at night under the covers, and then the hedge animals start to fricking move. Gaah.

This book also works because it's not just "oh the scary things are coming to get us" horror, it's psychological horror as well (which is my jam). It's a story of abuse and violent cycles and family ghosts and being a little kid in a really big and scary world where no one quite understands you and you're not sure you understand yourself. The Torrance family is stuck in this like-father-like-son loop of alcoholism and abuse, but the story manages to be somewhat hopeful with the cycle finally coming to a cataclysmic halt within the confines of The Overlook hotel. And the hotel is like a metaphor or something. I believe King once said something about it being an extension of hell, whatever you perceive that to be. It's a place where pots that have been angrily simmering for years finally boil over.

The writing, as usual for King, is wonderful (aside from one line about a black hole resembling a "dilating iris" which made me twitch. No. You're thinking of a pupil. That's the thing that dilates.). Jack's downward spiral is absolutely chilling in the sense that you don't recognize it for what it was until you're at the bottom with him. It's only toward the very end of the book that you realize, "Wow, this guy is legit insane right now," and you leaf back to try to find exactly when it happened, when something Shifted, and you can't. It's eerily, and plausibly, gradual.

My gripes: the book is kept firmly grounded in patriarchal reality by King's inability to describe women as anything other than sensual or fat and ridiculous. Gratuitous and choppy sex scenes abound to make it feel more adult or something. Wendy Torrance would be an acceptable female character on her own--she has backstory, and pretending that overly submissive and victimized women don't exist for the sake of writing "strong women" is no good--if she wasn't a cardboard copy of almost every other female King character I've read. Sub in Sadie from [b:11/22/63|10644930|11/22/63|Stephen King|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327876792s/10644930.jpg|15553789] and nothing changes: the "great legs", the history of abuse and bending to husband(s)' will, the being endangered by a psychotic husband, the bizarre and inopportune sexual appetite. (Wendy's maternal instincts toward 5-year-old Danny are pretty strongly emphasized at the beginning of the book, but when he's nearly strangled by what is potentially a reanimated corpse with them in the hotel that they can't leave and they're all sleeping together in one room with Danny on a cot in the corner that. That is when she chooses to have sex with her husband and sleep happily in his arms for the rest of the night. ??!! Even if that wasn't my kid, every instinct I possessed in that situation would be telling me to GTFO of the hotel absolutely as soon as possible no matter what?) Wendy does sort of redeem herself at the end, but honestly I was more interested in her as a character than Danny, and I wish we could have had more material from her point of view. Her justifications for staying with Jack? More about how she feels about her extended family? She had a lot more potential as a character than was used.