![]() ![]() But it’s not the demons that terrify me so much as what they stand for: a world where evil is not only real but lingers, where love may not redeem us in the end. ![]() This is not to say that “The Shining” isn’t scary it’s the scariest book I’ve ever read. ![]() In many ways, that’s the essence of “The Shining,” in which, even from the depths of his madness, Jack Torrance, the writer-turned-caretaker who has been possessed by the evil of the Overlook Hotel, manages to hold off his demons for a final instant and in so doing spares his son. Make of this what you will, but it suggests that King has always had more at stake than merely to frighten us, that he wants to get at the big themes: love, loss, loyalty, what happens between parents and their kids. Initially, he told The Times in 1998, he conceived of the book as “a Shakespearean tragedy, a kind of inside-out ‘King Lear,’ where Lear is this young guy who has a son instead of daughters.” He even went so far as to divide the first draft into acts and scenes. When Stephen King published his third novel, “The Shining,” in 1977, he was a writer with a lot on his mind. ![]()
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