A-Z Wednesday ... on Thursday (Again): The Shining

A-Z Wednesday is hosted by Reading at the Beach.

Here are the rules: Go to your stack of books and find one whose title starts with the Letter of the Week and post the following:

1. A photo of the book
2. Title and synopsis
3. A link (Amazon, B&N, etc.)
4. Come back here and leave your link in the comments

If you’ve already reviewed this book, post a link to the review as well. Be sure to visit other participants to see what books they have posted and leave them a comment (we all love comments, don’t we?) Who know? You may find your next “favorite” book.

THIS WEEK’S LETTER IS: S

My “S” Book is:

The Shining

by Stephen King

(New York: Signet, 1978)

Paperback, 447 Pages, Fiction

ISBN: 9780451078728, US$4.95

From the Cover: What of the penetrating cold terror of an old hotel, a haunted place of seductive evil with a malevolent will of its own—and a five-year-old boy of innocent beauty whose mind mirror the nightmarish secrets of its past? Behind every door of the Overlook’s 101 empty rooms there is a chamber of horror. Little Danny knows of these things because he has the terrible power—The Shining.

My Review: Now, first of all, I know that today is Thursday and not Wednesday, and for that I apologize. As embarrassing as it is to admit it, I was suffering through a severe bout of caffeine withdrawal yesterday and could barely drag my butt off the couch to do anything, let alone put some coherent sentences together for an A-Z Wednesday post, but today, I am properly medicated and ready and raring to go.

Second, I know that I have missed a couple of letters: Q and R to be specific, and so, in the interest of keeping up the alphabet, I offer up two truncated (read: title, author and link only) entries for those letters:

Q: Quicker Than the Eye by Ray Bradbury

R: Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin

Third, I want to acknowledge that this is the 700th post on this blog since I started it way back when in September 2005. So, hooray for me!

Fourth, and now we’re into the meat of this post, so to speak, I know that I usually post “obscure” or “forgotten” books in these posts, to highlight the “uniqueness” that is out there, and my first impulse on seeing that this week’s letter was S was to post one of my favorite books, Sherwood by Parke Godwin (which is a retooling of the Robin Hood legends), but then I saw Stephen King’s The Shining sitting on my desk and I knew instantly that that was going to my S book because it has completely defined my academic career that how could I not post this book?

This is, for me, the quintessential Stephen King novel … his best even. I know that some will make the case for It or The Stand as epic in nature and casting a wide net across human behavior, and while I acknowledge those aspects of those novels, I think that The Shining is far superior to anything King has written since (seriously) and is his most complete, most intimate and most compelling novel. Why? It is in its intimacy that the novel finds its power and resonance. For the most part, there are only three (maybe four) real characters in the book: Jack Torrance, his son Danny Torrance, his wife Wendy Torrance and, yes I will include him as a “main” character, the black hotel cook Dick Halloran. Yes, there are ancillary characters: hotel manager Ullman, Danny’s imaginary friend Tony, the ghostly bartender Lloyd, hotel magnate, millionaire and Overlook owner Horace Derwent, the myriad ghosts that inhabit the Overlook … but really, it is Jack, Danny, Wendy and Dick who are the main focus of the novel, and really, one could say that Jack is the only “real” character in the book.

But, I don’t want to go into too deep an analysis right now, but I have done a real in depth analysis of the book as a precursor to the men’s movement that started in the late seventies as a reactionary movement against the ERA, Women’s Lib, Affirmative Action, and Gay Rights that were happening at the time the novel was written and that were assailing the male patriarchy. The Shining then is a catharsis book, one in which male anxieties about race, sex and gender roles (which were under “attack” at the time) is acted out to an extreme in which the reactionary male is embodied in Jack and is able to act against the perceived feminization of society, and take that reaction to its ultimate extreme: not just physical abuse against spouse and child (and, given Dick Halloran’s presence in the novel, against race) but the desire to completely eradicate spouse and child and race and assert white male dominance.

I have written pages on this subject (specifically on The Shining and more generally the depiction of gender, race and women in Stephen King’s novel) and the 30+-page paper that has evolved from and initial 12-page paper on gender in The Shining for a Contemporary Literary Critical Theory class has been one that I have presented at two national conferences (the National Conference for Undergraduate Research in 2008 in Salisbury, Maryland, and the Pop Culture/American Culture Associations’ National Conference in 2009 in New Orleans (the paper is titled: “Haunted Men: Stephen King’s The Shining and the ‘Earlier More Essential and Violent Manhood’ of the 1970s”)) and served as a writing sample for my grad school applications (and, apparently, was good enough rhetorically to get me into the Masters program at Western Washington University and get me a position as a Teaching Assistant (because, honestly, I don’t remember turning in an application for a Teaching Assistantship)) and has been the jumping off point for a Masters Thesis on gender roles, race and sex in the novels of Stephen King.

So, while it is probably one of the most “mainstream” novels that I have presented for A-Z Wednesday it is, however, one of the foundational novels for me personally, and one which is very near and dear to my heart.