Doctor Sleep by Stephen King-- A Book Review

The Shining was never one of my favorite Stephen King books. Of course, I recognize it as the classic haunted house novel that it is, second only to Shirley Jackson's Haunting of Hill House, in my humble opinion, but it's never been my fav. That honor would probably go to Salem's Lot or maybe Pet Sematary. Still, when I learned that King was writing a psuedo-sequel to the book, I got excited. It's always exciting when King publishes a straight up horror novel. As stereotyped as he is as America's King of Horror, he really doesn't write as many horror novels as you might think. Joyland was a mystery novel. 11/22/63 was a sic-fi thriller, as was Under the Dome. The Dark Tower series is fantasy, and many of his more well-known books, the Green Mile for example, are more fantasy than horror as well. So, yes, a return to the horror genre by one of its masters tends to get me excited, especially since he described it on his website as "a return to balls-to-the-wall, keep-the-lights-on horror."

So is Doctor Sleep "balls-to-the-wall, keep-the-lights-on horror"?

In one word, nope.

Now, I'm not saying it's a bad book. It isn't. It's a very entertaining read, and there were passages that tugged on my heartstrings a bit, or made me ponder some of the themes King was trying to evoke with the book-- mostly about family and that great mystery we share but cannot share (as King so insightfully puts it).

But it just ain't that scary.

I think one of the problems keeping this book from being "balls-to-the-wall" horror was the villains. The True Knot are a bunch of polyester pants wearing, Gypsy-like old folks who cruise the US in RVs looking for children who possess the shining to feed on. Beneath their ridiculous facade, they are actually psychic vampires, and they torture these kids in order to get them to produce "steam", a sort of psychic cloud that floats up out of their mouths at death, which the True Knot inhales to maintain their youth and vigor. As villains, they are more pathetic than creepy. In displaying them so prominently in the novel, King commits one of the cardinal sins of horror writing: he shows the monsters too much. They are displayed so prominently in the book, their powers and motives explained so meticulously, that he completely pulls their fangs. That, coupled with their silly names, and quite a bit of scatological humor, turns them into cardboard caricature villains. I couldn't even feel very sorry for them in the end, when (I think) King tried to save face by pulling the sympathy card. They're not evil. They're just doing what predators do. Umm, lame.

The main character of the novel is Danny Torrance, now Dan, a scruffy but handsome forty-something-year old who is battling alcoholism, the nightmarish memories of his childhood experiences in the Overlook Hotel,  and some major guilt. He gets a job at a hospice and joins AA, and eventually comes to befriend a young girl named Abra, who is also gifted with the shining. When the spunky teenager runs afoul of the True Knot, Dan steps in to protect the girl from the ravenous old geezers who want to suck up all her youth. Throw in some stereotypical New Englander sidekicks, an extraneous quest to fetch a baseball glove, and you have a slightly formulaic but satisfying race to the finish line. I won't tell you where the book reaches its climax, but you can probably guess pretty early on where King is going with all of it.

Doctor Sleep is a fast-paced supernatural thriller (fast-paced for King, who tends to ramble), flawed in only two ways. One, he spends too much time and effort trying to justify the True Knot's actions and make them seem more desperate. I think he felt they needed more motivation to pursue Abra so relentlessly. They didn't. And two, he spent too little time fleshing out the Doctor Sleep aspect of the book. I found Dan Torrance's hospice work far more riveting than the True Knot's measles or Grampa Flick pooping his pants. The parts of the book where Dan helps his terminally ill patients "pass on" to the other side had me glued to my Kindle. So basically, the main flaw is the book's pacing, but it certainly didn't ruin the experience, just left me wanting a bit more of Doctor Sleep and a bit less of the True Knot.

Kudos to King for coming back to the genre that made him a literary superstar, but he's going to have to dig a little deeper if he really wants to nail our balls to the wall.