Doctor Sleep, By Stephen King

Doctor Sleep, By Stephen King - A Review, with a dash of literary criticism

Who can forget Mrs Maissy in The Shining. The dried up old hag of the Overlook Hotel, that lurks in room 217 and climbs out the bath to strangle any intruders. Certainly not Danny Torrance! Doctor Sleep, begins with her reappearance:

‘Sometimes you had to know. You had to see [...] Naked on the toilet with her legs spread, and her pallid thighs bulging. Her greenish breasts hung down like deflated balloons [...] Her eyes were also grey like steel mirrors. She saw him and her lips stretched back in a grin.’

Yikes! The hero of the story, now an adult, intuitively recognises: ‘The Overlook hotel hadn’t finished with him yet.’ 

So begins a journey of rediscovery, where the future is always begotten by the past, and destiny begins in childhood. Like his father, Danny is now an alcoholic. He still possesses what the old caretaker of the Overlook, called ‘the shining,’ a psychic gift of clairvoyance. Like his father, he too will wrestle with his own inner demons, and ultimately confront the original trauma, in more ways the one. When Abra an adolescent girl contacts him telepathically, he is swept into a life or death struggle, with a band of life-sucking vampires, the ‘True Knot,’ who will stop at nothing to capture them.

One of the central themes of the novel is intoxication. Danny is a drunk like his father, but the story’s arch-villains, are also drunks. The only difference is, that the ‘True Knot’ rely on a different sort of spirit, to gain their inebriation. The sought-after drug, is known as steam, (also called shining) but they can only ingest it, by torturing children until the magic vapour, leaks out the pores of their victims. Danny belongs to the Alcoholics Anonymous, Rose the Hat (the lead vampire) belongs to the True Knot. In affect both are part of a community with an addiction problem. Nevertheless, it is Danny, and his fellow brethren, that are able to take responsibility for their actions, and reduce whatever destruction they have caused. The True Knot, in contrast, revel in it.

The other theme is sleep, and the books title, is of course Doctor Sleep. Danny works at a hospice where old people go to die. Here he develops a cherished gift of helping the terminally-ill crossover to the next world. He says to each patient: ‘Theres nothing to fear, you just need to sleep.’ The problem is, that the ‘True Knot’ also have a gift of helping people fall asleep (permanently), and their tagline - ‘don’t you need to sleep?’ echoes Danny’s message.

We get to a point where, the heros and villains share uncomfortable similarities. Hamlet wonders, ‘To sleep, perchance to Dream [...] For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come.’ For Stephen King, the psychic gift of ‘the shining’ is indeed a power that can lead its recipients into dream worlds, which are sometimes nightmares, sometimes fantasies, but both a world’s beyond this life. Clearly sleep is not the peaceful crossing over it’s made out to be, and there is something to fear from it after all!

Whether it is because I read the Shining when I was twelve, or because I have studied literature at university, I found Doctor Sleep just not that scary. It is an exciting and enjoyable page-turner, but it doesn’t contain that original claustrophobic scare the original novel provoked. In fact, reading King’s work has now become a sort of guilty pleasure for me, simply because his stories are unliterary and the monsters are adolescent.

Nevertheless the overall story is more profound and complex than the surface ghosts make it. King has matured in his style, to write about some pretty hefty philosophical topics. His writing, is also contemporary, true to life, and more importantly invested with insight and love. As a result we care about the characters. Can Danny, and his little shining prodigy, Abra defeat the True Knot? This is what makes the book so exciting and unputdownable.

Overall, this is an good novel, albeit not as good as its predecessor. However, King is to much of a gifted storyteller for his readers to ever outgrow him completely. Behind all the ghosts, ghouls and dream landscapes, is the real world of love, compassion friendship, life and death. These are the real hallways through which King continues to weave his fiction.