Tag Archives: The Shining

Baby You Can Drive My Car by Bev Vincent

Historical Context Essays

The roaring engine that became Christine rolled off the assembly line as a short story idea inspired by the old, decrepit red Cadillac Stephen King owned in 1978. “One night as I was turning into my driveway, I saw the odometer numbers on my car turn from 9999.9 to 10,000. I found myself wondering if there might not be a story in an odometer that ran backward.”

ChristineThe book was written in the late 70s (the same era during which the novel is set), before King spent time in the greater Pittsburgh area working on Creepshow, but its location is an homage to his friend, director George Romero, to whom the book is dedicated. King decided to use a 1958 Plymouth Fury because they were “the most mundane fifties car that I could remember,” he told Randy Lofficier.[1] He didn’t want to use a vehicle that had a legend already attached to it.[2]

He thought that the car (and perhaps the kid who owned it) would get younger. As he told Douglas E. Winter: “The kicker would be that, when the odometer returned to zero, the car, at the height of its beauty, would spontaneously fall into component parts. It would echo that Lewis Padgett story, ‘The Twonky’—really funny, but maybe a little sinister, too?” » Read more

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Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall by Bev Vincent

Historical Context Essays

Different Seasons is a collection that contains only four tales and, with the exception of “The Breathing Method,” there is nothing remotely supernatural in them. None of the stories had been previously published. That may not seem unusual now, but at the time it was something of a departure for King.

Different SeasonsThe publishing landscape was different in 1982. In his lengthy afterword to Different Seasons, King bemoans the sad state of the novella, that peculiar form of fiction that falls between longer short stories and shorter novels, tales in the 25-30,000 word range. This is a territory King called “an anarchy-ridden literary banana republic.” Nowadays, there are more opportunities to publish novellas, especially in the small press. Even “The Mist,” a later novella, was published as a standalone book from one of the big houses as a movie tie-in.

He calls the stories in this collection his bedtime stories. The ideas came to him while he writing other novels. He couldn’t stop those books to tackle these ideas, so he got into the habit of telling the stories to himself while he was going to sleep at night instead of counting sheep. He says that he often has six or seven of these ideas going on at the same time and many of them never pan out. Either that or he ended up telling the entire story to himself, so there was no point in writing it down. In a later interview, King says he originally submitted only three novellas to his then-editor John Williams but, since he called them “seasons,” Williams felt there should be a fourth, so he wrote “The Breathing Method.” » Read more

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Five Easy Pieces by Bev Vincent

Historical Context Essays

When he was a student working in the University of Maine library, Stephen King inherited a ream (500 sheets) of oddly sized bright green paper, almost as thick as cardboard. (His future wife, Tabitha Spruce got one, too, except hers was robin’s egg blue.) This eccentric material seemed to invite him to write something special.

The Dark Tower - The GunslingerTwo years earlier, in a sophomore course on the romantic poets, he’d studied the Robert Browning poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” He wanted to write something long that embodied the feel of that poem, if not its exact sense. Seeing The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (while flying high on mescaline, he told an audience at Yale in April 2003) made him wonder if he could blend two different genres. He wanted to capture Tolkien’s sense of quest and magical fantasy set against Sergio Leone’s “almost absurdly majestic Western backdrop.”

He started the book during his final year at university. In March 1970, he wrote the iconic first line and the rest of the sections ”The Gunslinger” and “The Way Station” while living alone in a cabin on the banks of the Stillwater River (his three roommates had flunked out one by one, a progression reminiscent of the novella “Hearts in Atlantis”). In that cabin, he experienced ghostly, unbroken silence that undoubtedly affected the mood of what he was writing—unbroken, that is, except for the music of Johnny Winter. He believed at the time he was embarking on the longest popular novel in history, something he estimated would approach 3000 pages[1]. » Read more

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Graveyard Shift by Bev Vincent

Historical Context Essays

While recent experience told King that Doubleday didn’t want to publish more than one book by him a year, they most definitely wanted no less than a book a year from him, either.

Night Shift by Stephen KingAfter he finished The Shining, he spent a couple of weeks writing “Apt Pupil” and then returned his attention to the abandoned Hearst-inspired novel, The House on Value Street. He spent another six weeks on it, but the story still wasn’t taking off. Then he started work on one of his longest novels, The Stand, and realized early on that it wouldn’t be finished on Doubleday’s schedule. So, to bridge the gap between novels, King offered them a short story collection.

Night Shift assembles twenty stories. The earliest, “Strawberry Spring,” was first published in 1968 and the most recent, “The Man Who Loved Flowers,” came out in late 1977, shortly before the collection was published in early 1978. Four stories—“Jerusalem’s Lot,” “The Last Rung on the Ladder,” “Quitter’s Inc.” and “The Woman in the Room”—were previously unpublished. Nine were reprinted from Cavalier, and two each appeared in Ubris and Penthouse. The remaining three stories first appeared in issues of Maine magazine, Cosmopolitan and Gallery.

Bill Thompson took an active hand in helping King pick the best of the available stories for this collection. Among others under consideration were “The Blue Air Compressor,” “It Grows on You,” “The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands,” “Survivor Type,” and “The Wedding Reception” (later published as “The Wedding Gig”) as well as some unnamed poems. In an editorial letter to King, Thompson referred to these rejected stories as being “too much ‘Steve-the-student writer’” stories—adding that “Survivor Type” was too grisly. He felt they could do him more harm than good.  “This is as important a book for you as a novel,” he said, believing Night Shift would generate more reviews than previous books and no “writing gaucheries” would be overlooked. King obviously listened, though he did allow a few of the stories to be collected subsequently.
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“Speaking of The Shining…” An Interview with R.J. Cavender by Robert Brouhard

Guest Essays

R.J. Cavender is the managing editor of horror at Dark Regions Press, editor-in-chief at Cutting Block Books, and he is an Associate Member of the Horror Writers Association. He is best known for creating and co-editing the Horror Library series of anthologies. R.J. Cavender recently started organizing the Stanley Hotel Writers Retreat which is an author and artists retreat that is held at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado (this year’s will be October 22nd – 25th, 2015). Guests of honor this year include Jack Ketchum, Richard Chizmar, Kealan Patrick Burke, Tom Piccirilli, Michelle Scalise, Josh Malerman, and Trent Zelazny.

The Stanley HotelRobert: R.J., do you prefer to be called “R.J.” or something else?

R.J.: “R.J.” or “Cav” (short for Cavender)…either is fine. I started going by my initials in middle school to clear up any confusion when there were four of us students all with the same first name in one class. And no I won’t tell you what my first name used to be. Haha! I’ve had a legal name change since then and the last living person who called me by my given birth name was my Grandmother and she’s since passed away. But yeah, “R.J.” or “Cav” is fine…–“R.J.” is my actual legal first name.

Robert: I’ve read that your favorite novel is The Shining. Why?

R.J.: It was the first novel I ever read by Stephen King and it made a hell of an impression. It set the bar high, too, I’d say. It’s a modern classic haunted house tale.

Robert: When did you first read The Shining and how many times do you think you’ve picked it up since then? » Read more

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Excerpt from “My Magnificent Seven” by Robert McCammon about The Shining!

Guest Essays

Robert McCammon’s official website posted a new 3,100 word essay entitled “My Magnificent Seven” yesterday and it’s a “must read” in our opinion.

In addition to some intriguing updates about what McCammon is writing at the moment, he also went into great detail about seven books that he revisits from time to time.

Here is what he had to say about The Shining by Stephen King (and also a wonderful aside about Omniscient Third Person, a topic that’s probably a little too near and dear to our hearts), but please be sure to read the rest of “My Magnificent Seven” on the official Robert McCammon website because he highlights some really wonderful books you need to read if you haven’t already!

An excerpt from “My Magnificent Seven” by Robert McCammon:

Number Four: The Shining, by Stephen King, published by Doubleday in 1977.

The ShiningThis is The Complete Book. It has everything. It captures a small space of time for a family in crisis, but it really encompasses the entire lives of those involved. The creation of these characters and this situation is absolutely magnificent, and this has the best scene of an alcoholic who is “on the wagon” seeing the “flaws” of being “on the wagon” that will probably ever be written. The malevolent spirits (and Guiding Spirit) of the haunted hotel aside, this is just a great  book about a man trying to hold his life and family together. This is so rich in description, symbolism and themes that you’d have to write a book praising the book. And of course, one of the central elements is timeless, that of an Evil force finding a weakness and exploiting it. That was ever true and will be true until the end of time.

I will digress here for just a minute and say that The Shining would not work nearly as well without multiple viewpoints…the Omniscient Third Person (or “God”) viewpoint. On looking up “Omniscient Third Person” on the Net, you find a description that says this viewpoint technique is most identified with novels of the nineteenth century. In other words, according to this description, it’s considered creaky and old-fashioned.

What the &***???????
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The Shining Revisited by Michael Koryta

Guest Essays

The ShiningI’d love to say that the first crime I committed was stealing a copy of The Shining, but in truth it was probably well along the list of crimes. It is the first thing I remember stealing, at least, although I want to add the critical caveat that I returned it to its rightful owner. That always satisfies the judge, right?

The Shining was the first King book I read, and I didn’t intend to read it. The book was in a neighbor’s house and while they were on vacation I was entrusted with a key in the hopes that I would keep their cats fed and not steal their literature. I batted .500.

I opened the book with only mild curiosity because I expected to know the story since I’d already seen the film, a decision of great controversy in my family and one that produced an all-time-classic memory of my parents. My mother was hesitant to let my sister and I see the movie; my father was convinced that “we were ready.” The vivid memory comes with Danny’s visit to Room 217 (er, sorry, 237) but it isn’t the awaiting horrors that make the memory stand out in my mind. It’s my mother shouting at my father to fast-forward through the (gasp!) sight of the naked woman, a sight that threatened the moral compass of her children – and one that clearly had a cost, because I was soon stealing from the neighbors. My father leapt into action and did as he was told, punching the fast-forward button. In the fashion of the old VHS tapes, two blurred lines appeared on the screen: one The Shining Movie Postercovered the woman’s face, the other her stomach, meaning that the image was now reduced to an advancing pair of faceless female parts. My sister and I will laugh over that one until the day we die.

But back to the book. As I said, I didn’t intend to read it. I certainly didn’t imagine that it would be one of the few novels I keep beside my writing desk today, a constant source of inspiration, a reminder of how much a reader can feel from a book. I intended to skim a few pages, that was all. But you don’t just skim a few pages of The Shining. King’s remarkable novel doesn’t allow that. The Torrances might not be trapped (yet) in the Overlook, but you are.

An element I remember from that first read was a sense of astonishment as I realized: wait, a minute – Jack isn’t crazy. Jack hasn’t lost it yet. In the film, the first shot of Jack Nicholson’s face assured me that we were traveling along with a mad man. The crisis of the story was clear: innocent family is en route to snowbound hotel with insane husband/father. The worries of the character I met on the page, however, the desperate man calling in the last favor he has in the world to protect the family he loves, a man battling the threats around him and within him, were jarring. I thought maybe I don’t know the story so well after all and set about making my theft, carefully hiding the book lest it reinforce my mother’s suspicions about the corruption of character that had occurred during that fateful family movie night. I had a few days before the neighbors returned; it did not take me a few days to read the book.
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Revisiting The Shining by Richard Chizmar

Richard's Essays

THAT WAS THEN…

The ShiningTHE SHINING was the second Stephen King novel I ever read, and when I look back at that experience there is one crystal clear memory that surfaces above all the others: this book is almost too scary.

Let me explain. I was sixteen at the time. The son of a strict, but loving father and a doting mother. Baby brother to four older siblings. A mostly normal teenager who just happened to see and hear and feel things a little deeper (okay, a lot deeper) than most of my friends. I already knew I wanted to be a writer one day, and somewhere deep in my subconscious, I think I also knew that writing would one day be my salvation. The same way that books were my escape from the real world, I somehow knew that writing would be my way to understand and cope with that real world. » Read more

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Welcome to the Overlook by Bev Vincent

Historical Context Essays

Now free to write full time, and having produced two books set in Maine, Stephen King decided to move so he could absorb a new setting. According to one version of the story, their destination was left up to chance—a blind finger-stab at a US roadmap.

In 1974, after King finished “The Body,” the family moved to a rented house in Boulder where King planned to write The House on Value Street, a novel loosely based on Patty Hearst’s kidnapping by the SLA. He struggled with it for several weeks and abandoned it after he and his wife spent a getaway weekend at the Stanley Hotel in nearby Estes Park.

They arrived on the night before the Stanley closed for the winter, and were its only guests. The mostly empty hotel struck King as the perfect setting for a ghost story. Only one entrée was being served in the dining room. The chairs were stacked atop every table except theirs. The tuxedo-clad orchestra played for them and them alone. A person could get lost in the endless hallways he wandered after Tabitha went to bed. The hotel bartender was named Grady. The clawfoot bathtub in their room was so deep someone might drown in it. That night, he dreamed of their son, Joe, screaming as a fire hose chased him. Soon, King had the framework of the story in his head. » Read more

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Richard Chizmar Reading The Shining, Contest Update, Found Photos, and Following Richard

News & Updates

Four quick updates today:

1) Our Stephen King Revisited contest is up and running and we’ll start picking winners THIS WEEK. Read all of the details to make sure you’re entered because this is a FREE contest and the prizes are pretty awesome.

2) Remember, you can follow Richard on Facebook and Twitter for his personal updates and other posts of interest to readers and collectors and Stephen King fans.

3) Richard Chizmar was caught reading on the job yet again today. For the record, he hit Chapter 17, The Doctor’s Office:

Richard Chizmar Reading The Shining

4) In the category of “you never know what you’ll find in an old book,” here are two photos Richard found in The Shining paperback. He has no idea where they came from:

photo in 'Salem's Lot 01photo in 'Salem's Lot 02

Finally, this would be a great time for you to join in and read along with Richard. You can order an eBook and start right now. Here are the eBook store links if you want to download a copy:

Amazon.com
Barnes & Noble
Kobo
iTunes/iBookstore

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