REVIEWS
All Work and No Play...
By Maddie Reiser
A boy with a magnificent gift, an insane father and nine months in a closed hotel makes for a very thrilling read.
This book is so mind-wrenchingly insane that by the time I finished this book, my skin had already crawled off my body and left the room. A modern classic, "The Shining" by Stephen King really packed a punch in my nightmares. King's imagination is as terrifying as it is painfully descriptive– which poses as a good and bad thing.
The novel centers on Jack Torrance, a recovering alcoholic, who is set up with a maintenence job at the Overlook hotel, an upscale inn that closes his doors throughout the winter due to the intense snow it receives. He moves in with his wife and his son to live in the temporarily abandoned hotel for half a year, and things move quickly downhill from there. As Mr. Torrance suffers from "cabin fever," the family's safety is put to the test.
The author's attention to detail creates a colorful picturefor te reader, but sometimes I felt that a lot of the details and foreshadowing used to add suspense weren't essential to understandingthe main idea of the novel. The constant talk of dange from Danny's imaginary friend obviously foreshadowed future doom.
Unfortunately, my June and July months were spent dragging through the first four hundred pages, waiting endlessly for the climax of the novel to occur. A measly detail such as the layout of the hotel took King pages and pages to describe. King seems to only talk about Jack's crumbling marriage, the failure that is his writing, and the abusive situations between himself and Danny, and by the time I was nearing excitement, I had heard the same stories countless times.
This occurs almost constantly throughout the better half of the novel, but once the real horror began, I was undoubtedly hooked. A steep uphill climb resulted in an intense scene that left me too scared to leave my room, making the overwhelming amount of detail worth it in the end.
As a person who has never read horror novels, let alone Stephen King novels, I was intrigued to see what his novel had in store for me– his mind works in mysterious ways that makes his readers eager for more. In the end, I would say that this novel is a big thumbs up, but as a tip to future readers, keep going. Even if you feel that the slow section has no end– it's worth every horrifying page.