by Stephen King (Hodder)
“FEAR stands for f*** everything and run.”
By the time five-year-old Danny has survived his psychotic father, Jack Torrance (in the Stanley Kubrick movie, The Shining, with Jack Nicholson in one of his most memorable and manic roles…) and those invasive decomposing Overlook Hotel ghosts, the fact that the kid is still vaguely compos mentis is something of a triumph.
Doctor Sleep picks up Danny’s story some years later. An adult, and now, a drifter, Dan, like his father before him, is fighting the “demon drink”. Jobless and, every so often, still dealing with an Overlook ghost or three, he still has “the shining”, his psychic abilities, although his will to live is shaky.
Life seems to be an endless bar tour and when, one night, he ends up leaving his one-night stand and her toddler, to what he knows will be a bad ending, Dan finally reaches gutter level.
But, still possessing a vestige of survival instinct, Dan manages to find his way to a small town, where a few locals help him start the long crawl back, not the least via AA attendance. Stephen King’s association with alcoholism and his own recovery are well documented elsewhere, the AA thread runs strongly through Doctor Sleep, evocatively described by an author who has been there and done it.
Dan has found a job in a hospice where his “powers”, are used compassionately, to help patients teetering on the edge of death.
The True Knot cult are a drifting group of half dead motley types who, slithering around the US roads in their mobile homes, tend towards the guise of retired grandparents and the like. They feed off “steam”, a secretion best harvested from children who are tortured and murdered. Yes, grim.
When Dan’s psychic abilities click with those of a young teen, Abra, (the latter is being hunted by The True Knot), the scene is set for a dark, repressive, storyline guaranteed to creep out any horror fan. Only the darkly inspirational Stephen King could come up with such a bleak and stomach-turning nightmare.
What a skilled storyteller! A warped story indeed. Now I keep seeing True Knot types all over the place…