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by Stephen Kingread by Campbell Scott
(New York: Simon & Schuster Audio, 2005)
MP3 Audiobook, 881.6 MB, 15.8 Hours, Fiction
REDRUM! REDRUM!
From the Cover: First published in 1977, The Shining quickly became a benchmark in the literary career of Stephen King. This tale of a troubled man hired to care for a remote mountain resort over the winter, his loyal wife, and their uniquely gifted son slowly but steadily unfolds as secrets from the Overlook Hotel’s past are revealed, and the hotel itself attempts to claim the very souls of the Torrence family. Adapted into a cinematic masterpiece of horror by the legendary director Stanley Kubrick – featuring an unforgettable performance by a demonic Jack Nicholson – The Shining stands as a cultural icon of modern horror, a searing study of a family torn apart, and a nightmarish glimpse into the dark recesses of human weakness and dementia.
My Original Review: 09/07/2005 – 10:31:00 PM
My Redux Review: I’m not even sure where to really begin in this review. I have been so steeped in The Shining for the last three or four months that my brain is full of it. This “Overlook Overload” is due to the fact that in the Spring 2007 semester I wrote a paper for my Contemporary Critical Approaches to Literature class titled “‘Haunted Men’: Stephen King’s The Shining and the Men’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s.” It was a bear of a paper to write but the payoff (even more than the A on the paper) was the fact that I had convinced my skeptical professor that one could produce a sustained and coherent argument on Stephen King which did not “give undue literary value to the text itself” (in his own words).
This last semester (Fall 2007) I took Contemporary American Literature from the same professor and he gave me the opportunity to expand on my original ideas. The result was the addition of 18 pages to the original 12-page paper. He also encouraged me to submit my paper to the Utah Conference on Undergraduate Research (UCUR) and to the National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR). I was accepted and asked to present my paper at UCUR and am currently waiting to hear back from NCUR. This process involved creating an abstract for my paper which was a grueling process to say the least. I have also used this paper as the writing sample for my applications to graduate school.
So, the end result is that I have been wading neck-deep in scholarship on Stephen King, The Shining, the Men’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s, Gothic and horror literary traditions, Nathaniel Hawthorne and masculinity nearly nonstop since March 2007. In mid-November 2007, I decided to re-immerse myself in The Shining in order to better understand what I felt King was at, and so put the audiobook onto my iPod and began to listen.
It took a long time to get through it as I didn’t have many opportunities to listen – what with the end of the semester and a number of writing projects on my plate (the common lot of the English major with four literary studies classes in his schedule). Recently, however, I was able to finally finish listening to King’s story and I have to say that after spending the last 10 months trapped in the Overlook with Jack and Wendy and Danny Torrance, I am ready to be done with The Shining for a while (or at least until February when UCUR rolls around).
Don’t get me wrong, this story is anything but a drag. This is a vibrant and engaging story (and scarier than hell) that – as I’ve argued in my paper – deals with the perceived emasculating of men in the mid- to late-1970s by such cultural and social movements as Women’s Liberation, Gay Rights and Affirmative Action. There was a male backlash against these movements that echoed the “strenuous life” advocated by Teddy Roosevelt and others at the fin-de-siècle. Jack, and his violent lashing out at his wife, son and the African-American cook of the Overlook (who comes to save the family) is a physical manifestation of the perceived damages, the spiritual castration (so to speak), that men were feeling in the 1970s.
What raises this novel above the more didactic “morals” that King often employs is the fact that ostensibly King sympathizes with Wendy, Danny and Dick in the novel and, again ostensibly, King endorses the fact that Jack’s perception is clouded by the voices of the Hotel (which represent the collective voice of society). However, the novel makes a veiled shift and – I argue in my paper – in fact argues for Jack’s role as put-upon father/husband/provider and casts Wendy in the role of nagging wife (subtly, of course) and the Reader ends up sympathizing instead with Jack by the end of the novel. He is not a man who has acted, but one who has been acted upon, and therefore is ultimately blameless of his actions. Of course, this message is dangerous given the extreme violent measures to which he resorts to “correct” his wife and son.
The Shining is perhaps (and you’ll have to excuse the pun) a shining example of King’s craft. This is, I have come to believe, the crown jewel in the career of Stephen King – quite a statement, really, considering it was only his third novel. The Shining is King at his literary best, he makes subtle moves and plays with cultural shifts in The Shining that are not seen in any of his other novels; maybe ‘Salem’s Lot, but really, those aren’t King’s original ideas and only a rehash and update of the themes and cultural norms that Bram Stoker plays with in Dracula.
On a less scholarly note, The Shining is one hell of a scary story. There is a veritable rogue’s gallery of ghosts in the Overlook Hotel and the claustrophobic atmosphere that King creates in this novel is heightened by degrees from page one until the ultimate climax. This craft makes this novel an incredible read and makes the audiobook version a literary experience you will not forget. Reader Campbell Scott (who, while meandering on the internet, I discovered is the son of the late, great George C. Scott) infuses King’s story with such emotion and anxiety and sheer terror and range (for example, his portrayals of a raging Jack Torrance to a terrified Danny) that this audiobook will leave you on the edge of your seat – even if you know the story already – and drained physically and emotionally by the time the last syllable is over.
If it’s not already apparent, I love this novel. I would not have spent the last 10 months poring over it, picking it apart, and examining the story’s minutiae if I didn’t. If you haven’t read Stephen King before, you could do worse than starting with The Shining. If you have read King’s canon previously, give The Shining a try again. I think you’ll be surprised by what you find there on a re-reading.
3 comments:
I'm finding your argument that King is an anti-feminist in the subtext (and in the text) a new idea for me. I've always thought of his characterization of women and his way of getting into their heads as especially good. He does have some misses, but among popular writers, he usually hits the mark.
I'd like to hear more of your POV on this, if possible.
If anything, I've thought of King as one of the few writers who writes women sympathetically.
Julie
Julie,
This is from my December 2008 review of the audioook version of Bag of Bones (http://bryansbookblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/bag-of-bones-audio-redux.html):
There is a “passive sexism” that is present in most, if not all, of King’s novels. I discussed it to a point in my review of The Gingerbread Girl (http://bryansbookblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/gingerbread-girl-audio.html); I have written on this “passive sexism” vis á vis his novel The Shining (which is about as tight a novel as you could wish for, in any genre), and it is especially present in his novels Rose Madder, Dolores Claiborne and Gerald’s Game, and once again in Bag of Bones this “passive sexism” rears its ugly head. The main female characters in the novel—Mattie Devore, Johanna Noonan and Sara Tidwell—are all, outwardly, strong, liberated female characters that call no man “master” and are in control of their own lives and destinies. Yet, they are not. Each one of these characters is subtly and subversively kept from achieving “true” liberation and becoming a truly strong female character. Johanna’s character comes the closest, but that is hampered by the fact that she is dead from Page One. Sara Tidwell is doubly handicapped as she is both female and black (more on that in a minute) and while she tries to rise above King’s “passive sexism,” she, in fact, is put down into “her place” in a harsh and brutal manner. Mattie has much the same trajectory as Sara does, however the strike against her (in addition to her femininity) is not race or ethnicity, but her socio-economic status. She is a poor single mother; “Trailer Trash,” in fact. Her transgression, like Sara’s, is to try and buck the socio-economic stratification that has arisen in TR-90, and she too is put down into “her place” in an equally harsh and brutal manner. The end result is that the men in the novel, Mike Noonan, John Storrow, even Max Devore, that have to ride in and either “save the day,” whether this “saving” is beneficial to the women in the novel is, of course, up for debate, but I would submit that it is not as “beneficial” as King would have you believe.
I go into in a little more depth in my review for "Gingerbread Girl" ... but in all honesty, it is a theory/critical line of thought and writing that I am still developing, so it is in a state of constant flux.
I wasn't thrilled with Bag of Bones; the "magical Negro" trope that King likes to use was in full-force there, only on the opposite side of the coin. The female victim was turned into a murderer. The villain was made sympathetic, and had turned his own daughter into a creepy, vengeful terror. I did not much like that book.
I wasn't thrilled with a few of his novels, but generally, I thought the women came out okay--at least, *before* his accident. I found your thoughts on The Shining, one of my favorite of his books, VERY interesting.
Julie
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