Doctor Sleep: A Novel

First off: I promise, NO SPOILERS. I apologize if there is some vagueness as a result. I'd like to write two reviews for Dr. Sleep: one on its stand-alone merits, and as a continuation of the story of the Shining, and one on its success as a continuation of the brilliance of The Shining. I'd give the first 5 stars, but the second only...3. Which is unfair, I guess, especially in light of Stephen King's afterward ("...people change. The man who wrote Doctor Sleep is very different from the well-meaning alcoholic who wrote The Shining, but both remain interested in the same thing: telling a kickass story. I enjoyed finding Danny Torrance again and following his adventures. I hope you did, too. If that's the case, Constant Reader, we're all good.")--which seems to say that my first 5 star review is the one King would care about, if I were to presume he cares what I have to say. And since I love Stephen King, that's what I gave it, officially, and that's the one I'll start with. This book is SUCH a fun read! The best kind of King book, the kind that leaves you hungover in the morning because you were up much too late reading, and almost makes you miss your bus to work because you get engrossed in it again while you brush your teeth. Several times I got a big giddy grin on my face and even laughed aloud with ridiculous delight at a super stephenkingy turn of phrase, words I imagined gave him a similar satisfaction as they left his fingers for the page. Some of these were even scary-creepy things, but they were so perfectly done, they were thrilling on that second level, too. It felt to me like King had a lot of fun with a lot of this book, just reveling in his own GoodAtItNess, long passages spooling out with gleeful sprezzatura. The story runs smoothly along, suspenseful questions answered with perfect timing, never leaving so much unknown at once that the complications are impossible to follow. The central characters are excellent. Grownup Dan surprisingly unlike 5 year old Dan in the way my own grownup children are surprisingly unlike their 5 year old selves--something of the little boy remains, but he didn't just stretch to man-size, he's a fully realized person, very changed. Abra is a great character on her own, and her relationships with Dan, her parents, and her friends, are all truthful and nuanced. Good on whoever talked King through the markers of early adolescent girlness that pepper her believability. The scary creepy horrors are scary, creepy, and horrible; turning off the light when I finally forced myself every night was just as unpleasant as it had been when I read The Shining. Loose strings of the original plot are nicely knotted up. I'd have maybe liked to know more about Wendy, but real grown men--as Dan is, in this novel--don't have the kind of insight or, frankly, interest, in their mothers' inner lives. Even if they're psychic. So it works, as a function of Grownup Dan being well done. Less likely, I thought, was the way Dick was written out of Dan's life, but I have to admit that works too, in the sense that Dan grew up in ways that were unpredictable when he was five. Expository backstory from the first book doesn't get the clumsy treatment it normally does in sequels, but is dropped in usefully and gracefully throughout the plot. It was very satisfying to have some things I thought I understood about the Overlook, and Dan, and Jack, confirmed, and equally satisfying to have some new details mixed in to deepen and thicken that foundation of the story. The final revisitation from The Shining gets a muted, subtle treatment in the narrative, and I hope it's not just sentimental over-imagination on my part to think King let it be so simple because it might have been unbearably moving otherwise. Five stars! Buy it, read it, you'll enjoy it! Now then. The Shining is one of my all-time favorite books. It's the one I wax rhapsodic about when I'm making an obnoxiously over-thought case for Stephen King as an underrated capital G genius of American capital L literature. It's the one I compare to Dickens and the one I compare to Steinbeck and the one I say doesn't need to lean on those comparisons because it's capital G greatness all by itself. I like to make people listen to me say that the only reason The Shining is not a genuine masterpiece, recognized or not, is that King was young and still growing as a writer. And still not so market-proven that his (now routinely over-indulgent) editors gave him free reign. I have always assumed those factors caused the flaws (I apologize for my cheek, Mr. King; I know I'm unworthy, but for lack of a better, more obsequious term, I have to go with flaws) in The Shining, and I was unrestrainedly thrilled to hear a sequel unaffected by those was in the works. I refused to entertain fears that I wouldn't like it as much as the original, the way absolutely everyone likes the sequel less than the original; when the first reviews came out and I read that Barbara Kingsolver loved Dr. Sleep, I went directly to Kindle, did not pass go, and Amazon collected my seven dollars. And it was, as I've already said, money well and unregrettedly spent. But this book isn't anything like The Shining. Not as a literary feat. Both books tell, as King says he intended, kickass stories. The Shining, though, spent its first half telling a fascinatingly ambiguous story, too. The Shining is about a man with demons we all recognize, and a lot of us live with intimately. For a good chunk of the beginning of the book, it is impossible to determine from the text alone whether or not those demons are the only demons in the Torrance family's life. The interplay between Jack and his family and the things in Jack's head is fantastic, and the aforementioned flaw is that the transition between "Is This Real or Is Jack Just Crazy" to "Oh, yeah, it's real. Jack's crazy, too, but that's secondary" is less smoothly done than the writing on either side of the divide. And Dr. Sleep has nothing at all like that. The kickass story is all out in the open and straightforwardly linear, as is the development of all the characters and the reader's understanding of who they are and what they're doing. Dr. Sleep is extragood pop culture writing. The Shining was that, with unrecognized actual literature icing its cake. Without the icing, I give it three stars.

Stephen King has done it again with this fascinating, new tale that reunites an old hero with new ones, who have to face a traveling band of creatures that only King could think up. This story involves a now grown Danny Torrance, one of the survivors of the ill-fate Overlook Hotel in Sidewinder, Colorado, and a band of monster hunters on the trail of supernatural RV folks known as “The True Knot.” These horrific creatures we have seen before traveling the highways and byways when we’re on the road. They have those all too familiar motor homes, truck campers and what have you vehicles designed for cross-country jaunts. They stay in those all too-familiar, and quite creepy-in-their-own-way locales where these seemingly ordinary vacationers stay. But, beware, these folks are true monsters in search of the life essence we all have; our life force if you will -- Our “steam,” as it were. Now, Dan, who has been battling his own demons of alcoholism for years has met a young girl who also has the “shine” to her, far more than even Dan has. The teen girl, named Abra Stone is very powerful, as well as desirable to The True Knot; who has made it a habit of killing hundreds; if not thousands of children over the centuries for their “steam,” and they want her badly. With Abra, however, the wicked band of traveling monsters are in for a surprise… This book pays homage to King’s great work, and one of my personal favorites: “The Shining,” and returns to it for some reference, though does not over use the past success of the novel to take over this story. Instead, the psychic events experienced by Dan earlier in his life, as well as the haunts at the Overlook are put into perspective, and as a source for explanation, offering the reader a foundation as to why some things happened, and how his father’s issues visited him. It also brings closure to the past characters and their fates. Dan chooses sobriety, and leads a life of helping those ready to pass on, offering them a chance to do so with dignity and compassion, the source of his true power and strength…A strength that will be put to the test. Now, Dan ultimately teams up with others to hunt down the band of monsters, giving a similar feel to a much older team of English monster hunters such as Dr. Van Helsing, Dr. Seward and Jonathan Harker, or perhaps a more recent team of American monster hunters like Ben Mears, Jason Burke and Mark Petrie in our own little Jerusalem’s Lot. To be sure though, the hunt won’t be easy. The audio book is great for those on the run like myself, and certainly makes the driving time go by faster, and certainly more entertaining. Read by one of my favorite actors Will Patton (Falling Skies), who acts out every character like a true thespian, this 15 CD set, or other delivery systems, and of course the book, will delight you in a way only Stephen King can: 10% intrigue, 10% levity and 80% terror, all delivered in strangely believable settings. An excellent story read by an excellent actor. I give it as many stars allowed by law…Can’t wait for the film. If made for TV, maybe they can consider hiring Mr. Patton to play a part. As he can play good as well as evil with apparent ease, we might consider him for the part of “David Stone” (Abra’s father) or if playing the baddy, he would make a great “Crow Daddy.” For “Rose the Hat,” I get an image of Lucy Lawless (of Xena: Warrior Princess fame…God I love her), and when she turns into the monster that she really is; I would consider either Rosie O’Donnell or Nancy Pelosi…We need really evil women for that part. The other parts could vary depending on many things. The only other request is that if to made for TV, maybe it could be made on a better-than-average cable station like AMC, where you can show all the blood and guts that other stations won’t allow, as well as the proper language in order to reflect the book faithfully. If you add too much fluff to a King story, it takes away from the true girth that it was meant to be, kind a like drinking alcohol-free beer – What’s the point?

I really enjoyed this book, but perhaps I enjoyed it because I had different expectations than it seems some readers did. First, I'm not particularly a King fan anymore. I loved his early work, and I believe The Shining is my favorite of his novels (followed closely by The Stand), but I haven't followed him much since, and some of his later books I have not enjoyed. I reread The Shining last year, and I think I maybe enjoyed even more than I did on previous reads, when I was younger and read it for horror rather than for what I now think of as the subtleties of the book. Like another reviewer here, I see The Shining as a novel of psychological horror even more than being a ghost story: to me the scariest parts were the ways in which Jack Torrance's rage and alcoholism destroyed himself and almost destroyed his family. That was a real horror to me. While I love the rest of the story, especially the scary hotel itself, it is the characterization and the portrayals of an alcoholic that really stuck with me. So I was actually quite pleased to see that Dr. Sleep does the same thing: it dwells on characterization, especially of Dan Torrance. Another thing about me as a reader is while I enjoy some horror, I much prefer atmospheric, gothic horror to gore, and I tend to also be a reader of literary fiction. So I was not going into this novel looking for shocks or a certain kind of horror. I do see that this book is, perhaps, not typical of most horror novels, though, which was fine with me. That said, I found much to enjoy in this book. What this book does well is characterization, and Dan Torrance was a complex character. As some readers have noted, the early chapters hit on tough subjects: child sexual abuse, extreme alcoholism, etc. Dan, like his father, Jack, was not likeable when he was drinking. I will say I was a bit worried by those first chapters: I thought that if the book had to much about child sexual abuse, I didn't want to read it. But that was one character's history, and while certainly what the True Knot did to children with the Shining was awful, it was not in that realm, and also, it was not so explicitly described that I felt it was too much. Once I got past the opening, though, and once Dan found stopped drinking, it improved. While some reviewers here said Dan was boring, I didn't think he was at all; I actually felt invested him in a character, and so I was also invested in his sobriety. I felt the same about the AA parts--it's not a world I'm familiar with, but I found it interesting, and believable and it made him more of a compelling character to me, and I liked to think that this might also be the writer's experience, and I like to see the way writers integrate their personal history and experiences into fiction. As for his role as "Dr. Sleep," that was one of my favorite parts of all; I found Dan's work as psychopomp moving and intriguing, especially because it was the dead who had caused him so much trouble as a child. For me, reading this book was much like it seems King meant it: I was getting to find out what happened to a character that was almost like an old friend, and for me it was wonderful to see what had happened to that brilliant, wounded child, and to see the man he grew into, even with his flaws. But then again, unlike some readers, I always have found Danny the more compelling character of The Shining; I never found Jack Torrance that sympathetic. And as for villains, Rose and the True Knot were as good of villains as you may find, scary and rapacious. I do wish we could have found a bit more about their history through time, though. and I did love how King played with the idea of them being RVers....that was a witty touch. There were other witty touches too: references to other books and characters, and even authors--yes, we see their names. I'll always think of Eliot's "Hurry up Please, it's Time" in a different way now! There were some things I had problems with though. I wanted to love Abra, but.....I had to make an effort. She was a bit too much: too perfect, too beautiful, smart, the warrior queen. Could she have had one flaw other than the temper, something which she actually needed? She was not as complex to me as some of the other characters, even as some of the more minor characters. I also found the plot a bit.....slack? It seemed in some ways not enough was on the line, and while I didn't know the specifics of the ending before reading it, the outcome seemed a bit obvious. I didn't need great chills and gore, but a bit more narrative tension would have improved things. And there was also one rather major plot detail that was just too much of a coincidence for my taste. I won't say what it is, but it's related to Abra's "theory of relativity." And finally, while Dan's "secret" was not something to be proud of, it didn't seem quite as horrible as he played it up. Of course that's part of the point; the shame he carries is a weight somewhat unrelated to the long past action. However, I still found it not as interesting as it could have been. Some people have suggested it wasn't a sequel, which just puzzles me. Of course it was. It had many of the same characters, and knowing the first book (NOT the movie! You need to read the book!) makes this book much more powerful and resonant. No, we don't get some of the same characters/settings, but, um, the Overlook Hotel is gone, and of course it can't be the same. Anyway, while it wasn't the best book I've ever read, and not as good as The Shining itself, it is still a novel worth reading if you enjoyed the first one, and for me it was wonderful to spend a day or two with Danny, who seemed like an old friend, and old friend who'd been through terrible hardship (some of his own making), but had come through it older and wiser, a flawed man who still had something to give.

When I was a hyperactive and slightly crazed child I learned to read by reading comic books. And yes I'll admit that at first all I did was look at the pictures, but eventually I found myself running in to my parents to try and figure out what exactly Spiderman, The Hulk, The Avengers, and the X-Men were saying. The comic books instilled within me the desire to learn because I found them vastly entertaining and interesting. At the same time as this I was living out in the country and we only had four TV channels, ABC, NBC, CBS, and KTVU Channel 2 out of San Francisco. I know in this age where we have hundreds, upon hundreds of channels to choose from, that its hard to imagine just having four TV channels, but that's what I grew up with. One of my favorite TV Channels outs, of the big four I had to choose from, was the independent KTVU Ch.2 and the reason I liked it more than the others was that on Friday Nights they would have Creature Feature movies, which were hosted by a dude named Bob Wilkins, who had a great sense of humor and always had great intros to the movies he'd play like, Frankenstein, Dracula, the Werewolf, and a whole bunch of other great black and white horror films. I thought these films were just great because they opened me up to the wild world of horror. And then somewhere around the seventh grade I discovered Stephen King and everything changed... Stephen King took the horror that I saw on Creature Features and made it scary. The Stephen King novels were the first full length books that I read for pleasure. At the time I would have told you that it was the subject matter that drew me to the books, but as I look back now, I think it was more the way he told his stories. The Creature Feature Movies and the Comic Books were aimed at a more innocent audience, but the Stephen King books were aimed at scaring the hell out of adults, and as I was reading them, not completely understanding all of what was being said, I was thinking that I was being let into the world of adults, like I was pulling back a door and looking into a world I was not yet a part of. Stephen King wrote in such a way that it drew me in and made me a part of that horrific event at the center of each novel and in doing so he personalized it, he humanized the horrible, and that he made you feel each and every action that was perpetrated on his characters. I wasn't alone in feeling like this, because at that time Stephen King was the absolute Rock Star of writing, every single one of his novels was a blockbuster success, and they were all being made into movies, one right after the other. So it's fair to say that what I was feeling as a reader was what other were feeling too. But really when you look at what he was producing at that time, Carrie, Salem's Lot, The Shining, The Dead Zone, Firestarter, Cujo, Christine, and Pet Sematary and you realize it is a succession of great books that tap into some of our deepest fears. I'm not sure which book I started with, but I think it was The Dead Zone. Today I understand politics, and how the wrong person in office can have dire consequences, but at the time I had absolutely no idea what any of that stuff meant, all I knew was that Stephen King made it scary as all hell and totally engrossing to read about. And from that point I was hooked. I went racing through the books as fast as my little mind would allow me to read. I remember it got so bad my mother would take the bulb out of my light at night so I wouldn't stay up reading too late, but I couldn't be thwarted, I got a flashlight and a bunch of batteries and just kept reading. King had that kind of effect on me, I felt compelled to keep turning the pages until I reached the cataclysmic conclusions of his books. And then came The Shining... Of all the books I read by Stephen King The Shining is the one book that made me sleep with a light on at night after I read it because it just terrified me. The Overlook Hotel, the snow, the moving hedge animals outside, the little girls, Room 217, all combined together in a nightmarish vision that frightened me half to death. I mean they were stuck, miles away from anything and anyone else, in a hotel filled with horrifying things, and that had this strangulating feel to it, like there was no possible way out, and everyone was going to get killed. Of all the books I've ever read that one made one of the deepest impression Ive ever felt. It was hard to top The Shining. The Kubrick Movie left a bad taste. I started college. I moved on to Clive Barker, and I didn't read anything else from Stephen King... And then came Doctor Sleep. Doctor Sleep was the first Stephen King book I've bought since my last year of high school in 1984. It wasn't as good as The Shining, but it was still a pretty damn good book. More than anything, for me, it was like meeting up with a good friend, where you find yourself falling into the same patterns, and memories, and you walk away with a smile on your face because you remember just how much that friend meant to you. Stephen King ushered me from my childhood into the adult world of reading for enjoyment. He taught me that a writer could be a superstar, that his books could be made into a massive succession of movies and TV shows, and that a writer could have a deep influence on a persons life. Doctor Sleep brought me back to those thoughts. It gave me an idea what actually happened to Danny Torrence and his mother. It gave me new creatures to hate and fear. It gave me a new hero to cheer for. King gave me a story I could deeply enjoy like a fine wine that's been aged to perfection and is filled with all of those tastes that remind you of where the grapes were grown, what barrel it was aged in, and the person who made it. The story wasn't deeply original, and borrowed from a lot of sources, but it was very Stephen King and that was greatly satisfying for me. As I begin my own writing career I've had a lot of influences in my life, my parents, Mr. Murphy in high school english, too many movies to name, a whole bunch of books, and Stephen King. I don't think my head would be filled with all the thoughts I have of writing glory if I hadn't started reading that first Stephen King book. If I hadn't watched Stephen king become a household name. If I hadn't read The Shining. As I went through college as an English Lit Major I remember teachers looking down their noses at what they called "populist writer" like Stephen King as they tried to get me interested in all of the greatest literature, and yes some of those books and plays were very good, but it was very wrong of them to do that. I don't care if it's Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, or Stephanie Meyer, if the books get people excited and make them want to read, then teachers should encourage that and they should embrace it. You never know where the next writer is going to come from or what is going to influence along the way. Doctor Sleep is a very good followup to The Shining. I couldn't recommend it higher. But I make that recommendation with one piece of advice, read The Shining first, and make sure all the lights work in your house, because you might need to keep a few of them on.

Stephen King's THE SHINING is a classic to which I never expected to read a sequel, yet DOCTOR SLEEP came seemingly out of nowhere and now that I've read it it's hard to imagine either complete without the other. This is a very different reading experience than the original, yet it dovetails beautifully with the first and emerges a modern epic that's so much more than the sum of its parts. Far more than a simple horror story, it picks up with Dan Torrance from childhood after his fateful winter in the Overlook (odds are, you already know that story), the follows him through the lowest rock-bottom of his young adulthood, to unexpected heroic redemption as he confronts the demons of his past. Ultimately the continuing history of Torrance family and their troubled history (both in battles with inner demons in the form of alcoholism and apparent weirdness-magnetism through the gift-curse of the shining) offers both a ripping modern supernatural adventure yarn while giving the original tale some extra full-circle closure and extra emotional resonance it (and a certain character who gets an unexpected final-say appearance) always deserved. In addition to further development of Dan Torrance up through middle age (with a welcome early reappearance by Dick Halloran), Abra Stone and Rose the Hat of the True Knot become equally fleshed-out, fascinating characters you will never forget. One of King's most fascinating (and often darkly comical) accomplishments is how in many ways the villains here become as fleshed-out and -in many ways--likeable as our heroes Dan and Abra. He never lets us forget that the Knot is a pack of corrupt monsters who need to be stopped, and their arrogant aloofness amidst the suffering they inflict calls to mind the hubris of society's all-too-real empowered, self-entitled villains. Yet evil people don't think of themselves as evil, something of which King is clearly maturely aware. Within their closed society, perpetuating their semi-immortality by torturing and murdering us "steam-head rubes" is as normal as eating a cheeseburger, and their interpersonal squabbling, their shared daily joys and sorrows, are as real as those between you and your own closest friends and family. When they suffer loss among their own, you feel the grief with them accordingly. That's not to be mistaken for King dealing in "moral ambiguity". You won't hesitate to cheer for for Dan and Abra as they learn together to embrace their power and take the bastards down. It must be addressed, much of King's work (particularly his later stuff, and there I'll largely be the first to agree) has been called to task for a self-indulgently bloated style, as though at some point he went "To hell with listening to an editor; I'm Stephen Freaking King!" Such is not the case here - This is a hefty chunk of reading, but make no mistake, there's no wasted space. King found himself a *lot* of story to tell here, and the gears click into place as they need to, a step at a time while at a snappy pace. There are lengthy asides of supporting character development, where a lesser writer would have me going, "Okay...okay...why exactly do I need to know all this?" yet King merely spurred me to turn the pages faster, eager to learn how this complex tapestry all ties together. That's how you know you're in the hands of a master. This is a tale rich in all the nuance and detail a great epic character-driven story needs, with nothing it doesn't. There's not much more I can tell you without giving too much away, but suffice it to say, by the ending of this, I could stand to spend another book or two with some of these characters. Certainly it's reminded me why I've loved Stephen King since I was Abra's age. This book shows him in top form, and it's a masterpiece.

King proves his writer chops once again in Doctor Sleep, his sequel to The Shining, in which we ever faithful readers (and those casual and occasional readers) not only find out what became of Daniel "Danny" Torrance after the incident at the Overlook Hotel, but also established a new character and a new threat in the world of Stephen King. Though some of the tropes are familiar territory for Stephen King books, I found Doctor Sleep very entertaining, and I give it a high recommendation for people who like this kind of subject matter (which is not the cup of tea brewed the way everyone may like it). The flaw in Steven Poole's thinking is that a book must be scary to have achieved its goal. Why can't a Stephen King book simply aim to entertain without the need to frighten beyond all possible reason? From the very beginning, Doctor Sleep has top speed rather than needing to build to top speed. It's 528 pages of a fuel-injected, intense nightmare. King begins the story a few years after The Shining and shows us a young Danny Torrance still dealing with the nightmare ghouls (IE the lady in the bath tub). Seeking the help of Dick Hallorann, now Danny's teacher for all things Shining, Danny defeats the demon lady as Dick lays the foundation for Danny one day being a teacher himself. Fast forward to Danny, now Dan, as a young man. His mother has died of cancer, and he has fallen victim to the same disease that caught his father: alcoholism. The strength of King's story is that he gives us these scenes in present time, advancing the narrative as needed to dramatize the groundwork needed for the time period in which the story will take place, which is yet to come. In this sequence, Dan makes a terrible choice that will haunt him for the rest of the story, his own personal demons that he will have to wrestle until they are disintegrated. Fast forward again as Dan has hit rock bottom. He crawls into Frazier, New Hampshire, where he settles, dries out, and begins to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. In his familiar New England territory, King builds his tale, alternating between three story lines, which will ultimately converge: Dan Torrance on the road to redemption still haunted by his bad choice that destroyed a mother and her son; Abra Stone, Dan's future pupil for the Shining, who catches the attention of some very bad people; and so, then, the bad people, known as The True Knot, the villains of the story. Unlike The Stand, which seems to veer off course when it switches gears from a post-apocalyptic survival tale to an almost Old West style show down between good and evil, here, the villainy is integrated from the start. The True Knot eat people's shine, which they call steam, and ultimately they want to eat Abra, as she has more shine than anyone they have ever encountered. King tells the story deftly and delivers many nicely turned surprises and twists as the story unfolds and marches toward the ultimate showdown between the True Knot, especially it leader, known as Rose, the Hat, and Abra, aided by Dan Torrance. In the end, Dan discovers that the lock box in which he stuffed the demons of his childhood are empty and that his own personal failure is not so terrible after all. Finally healed, his burdens vanish like steam out of a kettle. For someone like me, who considers himself a writer, reading Stephen King is a tutorial in how to shape character and story seamlessly, how to deliver the most fantastic elements of one's imagination simply and without too much flowery nonsense, and how to ramp up action and tension to keep a reader riveted. There were many times when, as I had to set down the audio edition, that I wanted to continue reading in the traditional way, scanning the pages, doing whatever I had to do to find out how it all ended. Read the full version of this review and more at http://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2014/07/doctor-sleep-review.html

One warm, clear fall afternoon in 1977 in the far northern `super boonies' of Chicago, a friend--my next door neighbor--sat with me on my deck enjoying a beer. One thing we had in common was that we both enjoyed reading, and so as we sat there relaxing we shared some of our tastes in books and authors. As a boy, I always liked horror and science fiction, and cut my reading teeth on the likes of Edgar Allen Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, and HP Lovecraft. Then, as a young adult, I graduated to Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Fredric Brown and William Peter Blatty. My friend inquired if I had ever read any books by a guy named Stephen King. No, I replied, Stephen King wasn't familiar to me. He spoke a little about Stephen King's first book, `Carrie,' and then launched into a glowing description of King's then latest book `The Shining,' which he had just finished. He offered to lend me his copy. I accepted, and thus began my on-again off- again relationship with the works of Stephen King that has lasted from 1977 to this present day. I liked `The Shining' so much that I immediately started reading everything Stephen King I could get my hands on. That lasted for several years, until, in 1983, King published `Pet Sematary', a book I did not enjoy at all. After that I was more `off' with Stephen King than I was on. However, `The Shining' along with `The Stand' are the two Stephen King books that I enjoyed the most and consider to be his `best.' I give those two books five stars. Every other Stephen King book that I have read--including `Doctor Sleep'--will of necessity receive fewer stars from me than those two. `Doctor Sleep' is a `sequel' to `The Shining' in a narrow sense: the little boy Danny Torrance featured in the earlier book has grown up to be an, forty-something Dan Torrance, who is still psychically gifted, but is now carrying around a head full of haunting, scary memories and some very adult appurtenant problems. `Doctor Sleep' picks up many years after the end of the earlier book, and the story line and theme is entirely new. King keeps the pace a little slow in the beginning of the book as he lays down the setup for the story. We see little Danny Torrance back in the Overlook Hotel, where his father is going homicidally insane, and we briefly see his terrified mother Wendy and--oh yes--the malevolent spirits that inhabit the Overlook. Then we jump to grownup Dan, haunted now by his past and his memories, drinking alcoholically in a vain effort to medicate them away . After that we meet the True Knot, a group of flesh and blood but almost immortal psychic vampires who travel around in RV's. While these folk look like harmless retirees, most of them are actually hundreds of years old. They avoid aging by preying on psychically gifted children whom they abduct, torture, and murder in order to release and consume their psychic energy or, as the True Knot people call it, `steam.' Then we meet a very young girl named Abra who `shines' bigger and brighter than Dan/Danny ever has. Abra is both telepathic and telekinetic--a composite of younger Danny and King's famous character `Carrie'--and at a very young age, she `finds' Dan telepathically and connects to him by telekinetically writing on a blackboard. As the story line unspools, Abra reaches adolescence, and her powerful `shine' permits her to psychically witness, over a great distance, the True Knot in nefarious action. Of course, this gets Abra on the True Knot's radar screen, with just the kind of looming menace for Abra that readers of Stephen King expect. This is when `Doctor Sleep' really hits its stride as a page turner. One of the joys of reading Stephen King for me is how well he lays out and develops his characters. Dan is very believable as a grown up Danny. He still has `the shining' but it has matured and changed texture. I liked how Dan had learned from his old mentor from `The Shining'--Dick Halloran--to cope with the spirits and visions that his shining brings him. Also, King, himself a recovering alcoholic, goes into some very descriptive nitty-gritty's of just how bad Dan's alcoholism became, and how Alcoholics Anonymous helped turn him around. Some may find that part of the story a bit of a digression, but it does make Dan's character seem much more human and real, and some of the characters from Dan's AA group play key roles later in the book. The character of Abra is well developed and appealing. Her youthful exuberance and self confidence--indeed over confidence in her own ability--made her character come alive and also serve to put her increasingly in harms way as the story unfolds. Abra's overprotective parents, and her elderly grandmother were great foils for Abra as well. Unfortunately, the `True Knot' characters fell a little short, and were neither as vivid or as menacing as some of the villains King has conjured up in other books. Just recall Randall Flagg and Trashcan Man in `The Stand,' Jack Torrance in `The Shining,' and Annie Wilkes in `Misery.' The True Knot's bunch of older, gray haired retirees in Hawaiian shirts driving big expensive motor homes are a bit of a stretch to imagine transforming into creepy, vampire-like child murderers. The best of the True Knot characters is their leader, Rose, and King does make her memorable, but like the rest of the Knots, she needed a booster shot when it comes to creepiness and menace. Even with the shortcomings of the True Knot, the story line of `Doctor Sleep' holds together. The tension in the story is generated by the Knot's hot pursuit of young Abra and her `big steam' and Dan's battle with his alcoholic tendencies. There is room for improvement--the story would have been better if King had let the True Knot's evil have more of a romp--but he keeps the story rolling right up until the book's end in fine Dan Brown page turning fashion. Some other reviews I have read complained that King telegraphs the ending of the story early on. I mostly agree with that criticism but it didn't detract bother me, because the way the book needed to end was obvious to me. King delivered the ending in a dramatically satisfying way, and tied up the loose ends quite nicely, leaving little on the table story-wise to serve as a jumping off point for any future book. Somehow, I doubt that King, now sixty-six years old, intends to revisit Abra thirty odd years later like he did with Danny/Dan. To sum up, Doctor Sleep is not King's very best book--maybe not even in his top ten--but it is an entertaining and fun read, and well worth what I paid for the Kindle edition.

I would give this great story 4.5 stars. I savored the book throughout and didn't want it to end. I actually rationed it so that I wouldn't finish it too quickly! I love Stephen King, but not everything he writes. I adore his early and mid-career horror novels, but I got turned off by a lot of his newer works starting with The Green Mile. Under the Dome gave me renewed hope, and Dr. Sleep shows that he's definitely still got it after all these years. This is a very different book than The Shining. While there is some overlap, this has nothing much to do with what happened when Dan was a little boy at the Overlook Hotel (even though the Overlook ruins feature prominently here, as do some memories about the malevolent creatures that lurked inside). This is instead a story about Dan and a new, charming main character, a young girl named Abra. Abra has "the shining" even more strongly than Dan ever did. Unfortunately, we come to learn that there is a group of very evil vampire-like creatures called The True Knot that murders children with the shining to "suck out their steam" (their shining) after slowly torturing them to death (torturing them "purified the steam"). Disguised as benevolent senior citizens in RVs, the True Knot wanders America's highways looking for "steamhead" children to kill. They use their steam as a fountain of youth, keeping themselves alive for thousands of years. Led by a stunningly beautiful woman called Rose the Hat (the members of the tribe use mobster names), these villains are very interesting and scary. As I said, I loved this book. The ending, however, slightly disappointed me. The book builds up to a spectacular showdown between Abra and Dan versus the True Knot. I was so excited for it, turning the pages on my Kindle with great anticipation. I was looking forward to a huge good vs. evil battle that King does so well (as in The Stand, for example, which had an ending I loved). I won't write any spoilers here, but I was disappointed. It wasn't terrible by any means, but it did leave me saying "That's it? Seriously?" At the same time, I went back and re-read the climax several times, proving it was still enjoyable. I also would have liked more history about the True Knot members. The story about their murder of the baseball boy was horrific and terrifying. It almost crossed the line into being "too much" (I am not a fan of torture porn horror stories), but in the end it thankfully gave us a break from that. Still, I wanted more! I wanted to know about each member of the tribe, where they came from, their history, and more stories about their murders and their victims. Aside from the baseball boy and their desire to harm Abra, however, we didn't get to know very much. Some people say in their reviews that they thought the True Knot members were too hammy. I disagree. I enjoyed their quips and didn't mind them being a little bit over the top sometimes. These weren't crude caricatures of villains. They had a softer side although it was never really explored. They loved each other and sometimes tried to justify their murders by saying they have to do it to live. I would have liked learning more about them. I guess something had to be cut from this already quite lengthy novel, but I absolutely didn't find the book too long as it was at all. I do agree with some of the reviews that say they got tired of all the AA sayings and focus on alcohol abuse and sobriety. Honestly, it got old. That said, I recognize this came from King's personal experience and heart, so I didn't mind it as much as I otherwise might. I just don't want to hear about it again in future King novels. All in all, I highly recommend the book without any hesitation. It isn't King's best, but in my opinion it is in his top 5. That's quite a compliment. I sincerely hope King keeps on writing these horror novels. If you're looking for a scary story, get ready for Dr. Sleep.

A fantastic continuation of Danny’s story! Simply could not put this down, do your self a favour and read the shinning first.

If you’re thinking about buying it go for it. It’s a pretty good price and much more interesting than The Shining. Buy it besties

Dan Torrence ist inzwischen 40 Jahre alt und muss sich dreier mächtiger Gegner stellen: seiner Vergangenheit, seiner Trunksucht und dem True Knot. Letzteres ist eine Gruppierung vampirähnlicher und fast unsterblicher Wesen, die sich vom „Steam“ derer ernähren, die das Shining haben. Um an den „Steam“ zu kommen, quälen und töten sie vorzugsweise Kinder, da bei diesen das Shining deutlich stärker ausgeprägt ist als bei Erwachsenen und der „Steam“ entsprechend nahrhafter. Neben Dan Torrence, der inzwischen seinen Lebensunterhalt als Doctor Sleep verdient, indem er in einem Hospiz Sterbenskranken ihre Reise in eine hoffentlich bessere Welt erleichtert, begegnet uns in einer Hauptrolle die 12-jährige Abra Stone, die aufgrund ihrer extrem stark ausgeprägten paranormalen Fähigkeiten die Aufmerksamkeit des „True Knot“ erregt und von deren superböser Chefin Rose prompt auf den Speiseplan gesetzt wird. Keine Frage, dass Dan alles dran setzen wird, der kleinen Abra zur Seite zu stehen und wenn möglich ihr Leben zu retten. DOCTOR SLEEP hat mir insofern ausgesprochen gut gefallen, dass es Stephen King gelingt, die Hauptfiguren lebendig und interessant zu beschreiben, vor allem auch vielschichtig und mit Stärken und Schwächen. Es handelt sich nicht um die genreübliche Abziehbilder, die nur die Handlung befördern sollen, sondern um Charaktere, die der Leser mit der Zeit tatsächlich kennen zu lernen glaubt. Interessant, dass auch die „Erzbösewichtin“ Rose und die meiner Meinung nach interessanteste Nebenfigur Snakebite Andi nicht nur oberflächlich und als das personifizierte Böse dargestellt werden, sondern ihre eigene Geschichte haben und wie jeder andere auch ihre Bürde tragen müssen. Eine mindestens so Prominente Rolle wie die einzelnen Charaktere nimmt das Thema Alkoholismus in DOCTOR SLEEP ein, das Stephen King nie loslässt, aber selten so zentral und ausführlich behandelt wurde. Dieser Kampf wird (auch) Dan sein Leben lang begleiten, einen echten Sieg kann es nicht geben, nur einen Waffenstillstand. Dieses macht King deutlich, und da es ihm eine Herzensangelegenheit ist, kann der Leser sich nicht entziehen. Und auch die Abhängigkeit der Kinder von ihren Eltern, wie einige unter schlechten Vorbildern leiden, andere misshandelt und missbraucht werden, und wie das eine wie das andere die Lebensläufe bestimmt, ist ein wiederkehrendes Thema, dass King in DOCTOR SLEEP in vielen Passagen aufnimmt und bewegend gestaltet. Erzähltechnisch ist King für meinen Geschmack absolut auf der Höhe, er erzählt witzig und anspielungsreich, bewegend die vor allem spannende Geschichte vom ewigen Kampf des Guten gegen das Böse. Einen Kritikpunkt muss ich aber doch ansprechen, und auch dieser ist meiner Meinung nach für King typisch: die Architektur seiner Romane weist oft Schwächen auf. Viele seiner Romane sind mir zu lang und King erzählt oft sehr umschweifig , kommt nicht auf den Punkt und erzählt gelegentlich am Höhepunkt der Handlung vorbei oder erschöpft sich und den Leser im Vorfeld. Bei DOCTOR SLEEP ist nun ironischer Weise das Gegenteil der Fall. Die ersten 450 Seiten bereiten den Leser auf ein unheimliches Showdown vor, doch dann geht plötzlich alles sehr schnell und ist vorbei, fast ehe man sich's versieht. Ich war ob des Tempos und der Geradlinigkeit, mit der die Handlung schließlich zum Ende kommt, ein wenig enttäuscht. Andererseits, auch ein Western endet mit einem Showdown, bei dem sogar ein einziger Schuss ausreichen kann, um alles zu entscheiden. Doch wer den Roman selbst gelesen hat, wird mir vielleicht Recht geben, wenn ich sage, dass King erzählerisch nicht ökonomisch mit den eingeführten Figuren umgeht. Insbesondere für Snakebite Andi hätte ich mir mehr Raum gewünscht (vielleicht sogar ein anderes Ende). Fazit: Sehr gut erzählter, spannender Roman. Dan Torrence als Hauptfigur überzeugt, ansonsten wirken die Bezüge zum Overlook Hotel aber etwas aufgesetzt. Abra wird in Erinnerung bleiben, auch viele der anderen Charaktere. Leichte Abzüge gibt es für Schwächen im Romanaufbau. 4 '1/2 Sterne und für King-Fans eine klare Leseempfehlung.

o Stephen King realmente não erra, livro muito bom

Dan Torrance has become an adult. He can help the shining Abra now.