Doctor Sleep

Doctor Sleep by Stephen King

     I've read two books by Stephen King that have genuinely frightened me. Pet Semetary was one ("sometimes dead is bettah"), and The Shining is the other. Imagine my delight when, after two decidedly un-horrific novels, Under the Dome and 11/22/64, King announced Doctor Sleep, a sequel to The Shining and a self-proclaimed return to 'balls-to-the-wall horror'.

     When he was a much younger man, King's prose was tight and filled with two things that made him hot literary shit: bubbling suspense and a unique voice that set him apart from the Grishams and the Koontzs. He was the master of the slow build. Characters meticulously constructed over hundreds of pages, were dumped into utterly horrific situations and the results were immensely satisfying. There’s an episode of Friends where Rachel has to sleep with her copy of The Shining in the freezer because it’s just too terrifying to keep on her bedside table.

One night, in the middle of Pet Sematary, I was dropping my girlfriend off at her house and my headlights illuminated a strange cat, eyes-a-glow, on her fence rail. I audibly gasped, much to my girlfriend’s amusement. At his best, King has a way of sinking under your skin and gently prodding you with long skeletal fingers.

     A lot of critics say that he has lost his edge, and it really does pain me to have to agree with them. Doctor Sleep is no way near the same calibre as The Shining. I suspect that King, like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, has softened with age. He no longer seems to believe in ending on a down-note. Doctor Sleep is no exception, though the upbeat ending works quite well this time (compared to Under the Dome whereby the mysterious dome was lifted by some simple begging on behalf of the protagonist).

     Okay, I’ve ranted enough about the supposed decline of King’s career. It’s time to get into the meat of Doctor Sleep. The beginning is very good. An opening bathroom scene is particularly terrifying: 
  

The woman from Room 217 was there, as he had known she would be. She was sitting naked on the toilet with her legs spread and her pallid thighs bulging. Her greenish breasts hung down like deflated balloons. The patch of hair below her stomach was gray. Her eyes were also gray, like steel mirrors. She saw him, and her lips stretched back in a grin.

     
        The middle slows right down and actually becomes tedious. There were a lot of chummy, average-American ‘jinkies-how-are-we-gonna-solve-this-mystery?’ scenes that sort of made me cringe to read. The only exception being a particularly moving scene where Dan Torrance tenderly aids an elderly nursing-home patient in dying.

     The ending was actually really good. Very, very, good, in-fact. I won’t give anything away, except to say that it’s quite dramatic, quite moving and shows a maturity on the subject of alcoholism that only a legitimate alcoholic could really muster with any authenticity. This pushes Doctor Sleep into literature territory, and genuinely so. I recommend reading this book, just don’t go in with ‘shining’ expectations.