Danny, once five-years-old, is now a grown man struggling with alcoholism himself. Stephen King returned the famous characters in ‘ The Shining’ in his 2013 novel ‘ Doctor Sleep’. I’ll keep that one to myself.’ I drew on that memory.” The Shining by Stephen King Visual Representation When speaking about his own history with alcohol, and if he too experienced a rock bottom moment as Jack Torrance did, he says he does not “have anything as traumatic.” The thing he remembers most he says is:īeing at one of my son’s Little League games with a can of beer in a paper bag, and the coach coming over to me and saying, ‘If that’s an alcoholic beverage, you’re going to have to leave.’ That was where I said to myself, ‘That’s something I’ll never be able to tell anybody else. He attributes his experience with Alcoholics Anonymous as the primary reason he was able to succeed in his sobriety. Stephen King has been sober since the late 1980s after his family staged an intervention for him. He visited the hotel in 1974, wrote the book two years later, and published it in 1977.įamously, Stephen King’s ‘The Shining’, and specifically the character of Jack Torrance, was inspired by King’s history with alcoholism. It helped establish the author as one of the most important contemporary fiction writers in America.īefore writing the novel, Stephen King visited the famous Stanley Hotel in Colorado, taking a great deal of inspiration from the hotel’s purported ghostly history. ‘The Shining’ was Stephen King’s third novel and first hardback bestseller.

Antagonist: Jack Torrance and the evil entities in the hotel.Climax: When the boulder explodes in the Overlook Hotel killing Jack and destroying the hotel.Setting: Overlook Hotel in the Colorado Rockies.Despite his desire to be a good husband and maintain sobriety, the hotel has different plans. Such forces fill the Overlook Hotel and drive Jack Torrance to violence and insanity. The novel is fueled by King’s skill for creating realistic and believable supernatural events and unknown haunting entities.

The shining king