A Brief Guide to Stephen King by Paul Simpson Read Free Book Online Page B

helps him to understand what’s happening earlier than others.
    Bill Thompson at Doubleday was offered the manuscripts for
’Salem’s Lot
and
Blaze
as potential follow-ups to
Carrie
; he decided to go with the vampire story, although he requested various changes from King. Some of the deleted scenes (notably Jimmy Cody’s death by rats rather than knives) were included as extras in a deluxe edition of the book, published in 2005. The book was dedicated to his daughter Naomi Rachel King.
(Blaze
was eventually published in 2007.)
    ’Salem’s Lot
was the first of King’s works adapted for television, in a four-hour miniseries in 1979, directed by Tobe Hooper. Although some of it hasn’t dated well, it still provides some shocks, with David Soul called upon to dig much deeper than he was in his hit cop show
Starsky & Hutch
. Changes were made, in particular the nature ofBarlow: rather than being a sophisticated gentleman vampire, he became a homage to the Nosferatu version of the vampire, as seen in the 1922 movie. A sequel,
Return to
’
Salem’s Lot
, followed in 1987 with little bar the presence of vampires linking it to the original miniseries, or King’s novel. The story was adapted in seven parts for BBC Radio in 1995 by Gregory Evans, with a framing sequence added of Ben confessing to a Mexican priest.
Hellraiser’s
Doug Bradley played Barlow in a version that director Adrian Bean wanted to have ‘terrifying psychological realism with no holds barred action and horror’. In 2004, Rob Lowe’s Ben Mears battled Donald Sutherland and Rutger Hauer as Straker and Barlow respectively in a new TV miniseries; in this version, Ben is a war correspondent, rather than a fiction writer, and Father Callahan has a rather different fate.
    The Shining
(Doubleday, January 1977)
    Welcome to the Overlook Hotel. The isolated hotel, in the Colorado Rockies, is the setting for an epic battle for the minds of father and son Jack and Danny Torrance, as five-year-old Danny’s special mental abilities – the way that he can ‘shine’ – are eagerly sought by whatever it is that possesses the hotel.
    Jack thinks the Overlook will be the perfect place to write across the winter months, when the hotel is completely cut off from the surrounding area. His only company should be his wife, Wendy, and his son. Jack can’t handle his drink, and has attacked both Wendy and Danny in the past, but the hotel caretakers aren’t allowed to take alcohol with them, so Wendy hopes that everything will work out. Danny’s psychic powers allow him to see the future, and he talks to an imaginary friend, Tony (who appears to be a teenage version of Danny himself).
    As the weeks go past, the Overlook plays on Jack’s weaknesses, as Danny receives increasingly disturbing visions, culminating in Jack succumbing to the hotel’s influence. Hemanages to break free sufficiently to give Danny a chance to run, and with the help of Dick Hallorann, the Overlook’s chef who can also ‘shine’ and has heard Danny’s telepathic call for help, Danny and Wendy escape before the boiler explodes. Jack is killed and the Overlook is razed to the ground, although its malevolent influence can still be felt . . .
    Although the traditional horror elements are front and centre in this early King novel – enough to worry his publisher that King would be typecast as this sort of writer – reading the novel of
The Shining
without the image of a grinning Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance makes it clear that the true horrors described are the ones affecting Danny. The spousal abuse, alcoholism and the collapse of everything that Danny holds dear thread through the book: the monster that Tony warns him of looks like his father, the man he should trust implicitly. Although King didn’t recognize the problems in himself at the time, he knew he was channelling the instincts that many parents feel towards their children from time to time. He later realized that a tale of an