Book Review: Doctor Sleep, by Stephen King

The Shining was one of the first adult horror novels I ever read – coming before it were Carrie (I chose it because it was really short), Salem’s Lot (Vampires!), and Firestarter (because how can you beat a title like that?), but the more of these books I read the more I needed to read. I read The Shining for the first time in grade eight, and I’ve got to say, the book really stuck with me.

I don’t know if it was the idea of this creepy hotel, or the claustrophobic feel the whole novel quickly began to build, but at the time it really unnerved me, especially as the lead was a five-year-old boy with some telepathic powers (called The Shining in the novel), desperate to save his family from the horrors of The Overlook Hotel.

By the way, if you’ve never read The Shining, you should definitely pick it up. Although the 1980 film has a lot in common with the original novel, the book is much, much scarier.

So decades later and in my late 30s, I pick up Stephen King’s newest book, Doctor Sleep, which follows Dan Torrence, the now grown five-year-old from the original novel, and his involvement with a deranged family that hunt for other kids with The Shining – and not to help them out.

I really don’t want to give away plot points for the book (It’s been on shelves for a few weeks at the point I’m writing this post), but it is well worth the cost and not just to see how things worked out for Dan. The new villains in the book are some of the more terrifying I’ve come across in recent fiction – except for Charlie Manx from Joe Hill’s NOS4A2 (which also has connections with this book), and it was incredibly hard for me to put down when I needed to be working or visiting with friends and family.

Bookmonkey vs Hack/Slash: Day Thirty

Conclusion

Having spent the last month reading and blogging about Hack/Slash, I thought I should finish by going back to the beginning. As a life-long fan of the horror genre, I’ve often wondered how best to handle these stories within the guidelines of library work. In school (Kindergarten through grade 12) horror stories are often limited due to graphic content, and as good horror “…allows the reader to feel the action and fear with all their five senses, and [comic books] use of illustration to help tell [the] story adds a new element to the appeal” (Spratford, 2012, p. 133) it is even easier to quickly pass judgment on a title and consider it inappropriate for young readers.

My first interaction with horror fiction, and not just YA fiction with scary bits in, was back in Junior High (middle school for my American readers) when I was sitting in the school library reading fantasy fiction and noticed another teen return a book called The Shining to the librarian, who immediately slipped it behind her desk. Gathering up the courage to talk to her, I was informed that although the school had a small collection of Horror novels, they were kept behind the library desk to ensure that they didn’t alarm uninterested students. Of course, finding out that my library had a secret library collection, and that it was deemed too dangerous for the average student, had me interested in seconds, and within a few months horror was the genre for me.  Over the next few years I became a fan of the stories, plays, games and films of the genre, and yes, that included the Slasher film.

Looking at the mechanics of Hack/Slash, I loved the crossovers, involving Cassie and Vlad with characters from film, fiction and both print and web comics in a way that made sense and probably introduced a lot of new readers/viewers to the crossed over material. The series played with horror movie concepts ranging from horror movie logic, sequels, and trailers, and then moved on to questions of how a horror movie-themed world would really work and what regular people could and would do in incredibly tense situations.

What I love most about Hack/Slash is the honest love it has for the genre, and specifically the slasher sub-genre. Considering that slasher movies are often considered to be bottom-of-the-barrel films, this series treats its source material with great care, pointing out some errors yes, but working the whole way to increase the emotional connection the reader will have with Cassie, Vlad, and every other human character it introduces, and getting the reader to care about what happens to these characters, and in the end, what else do you want from any story?

IMAGE USED

McDevitt, M. (2013) Bookmonkey vs Hack/Slash [Image].  Retrieved from http://wisdomofbookmonkey.blogspot.ca/2013/10/bookmonkey-vs-hackslash-day-thirty.html

WORKS CITED
Spratford, B. (2012). The Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror. Chicago, American Library Assocation.