Stephen King in The Shining has written a novel about a childhood fears that may seem fantastic but that have a reality in the modern world that we all know, either personally or by reading the newspapers and seeing the television news. This is not a novel to be dismissed as a horror story filled with cheap thrills. This is a novel to make us think about life as it is in the world. .

             A lot about the novel seems fantastic because it deals with the supernatural. Jack Torrance is a bad tempered writer, not very successful, who has lost his teaching job because he got into trouble. Now he gets a job looking after a big old hotel in Colorado through the winter when the place would be snowed in and just needs somebody there to take care of it. .

             Torrance takes with him his wife Wendy and his little son Danny. Earlier, during a drunken rage, he broke Danny"s arm. But that was a while ago. Now the three of them are going to be alone in the hotel all winter long. .

             In some ways it looks like the American dream, a big house, all the food they can eat, lots of room and lots of time to do whatever they want, time to be together and enjoy each other, and time for Jack to finish writing a play he is working on. But the American dream exists in fiction to be torn apart. .

             Danny has a supernatural gift, a kind of second sight that allows him to read minds. When he and his parents arrive at the Overlook, as the hotel is getting ready to close down for the winter. He meets a black cook named Dick Hallorann who also has this gift. Hallorann is on his way to Florida to spend the winter, but he will become essential to the story. .

             Part of the story is, of course, that the hotel is haunted, it has been owned by criminals, and it has been the scene of every kind of evil from sexual orgies to murders. As the snows come Wendy, Danny, and Jack are shut away from the world, the ghost try to posses both Danny and Jack.