A Year in Reading: Jacob Lambert

I took The Shining down from its shelf a few days before Halloween, as it seemed a seasonally-appropriate read. It had sat there for years, Danny Torrance’s blank face staring out from its silver spine, asking me what I was afraid of, what I was waiting for. This will be much different from the movie, it said. Everybody knows how much Stephen King hated Stanley Kubrick’s film. “I think he wants to hurt people with this movie,” isn’t that what King said? And besides, it went on, you haven’t seen it in 15 years.

Book-jacket Danny had a point. And not only was it almost Halloween, but I’d just finished Jack Handey’s brilliantly asinine, irresponsibly funny The Stench of Honolulu. Among the books I’d recently read were Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers, Dean King’s Skeletons on the Zahara, and Bill Beverly’s Dodgers. None of these were exactly “fun,” but they were entertainments, with none of the claustrophobic dread I associated with The Shining. I needed a change of pace, and I couldn’t avoid King’s novel any longer. It was time to get down to brass tacks.

And within the first few chapters, it became clear that The Shining was all brass tacks — sharp, blunt, and efficient. I most enjoy King when he scraps his leavening impulses — inexplicable mysticism, mediocre humor, saccharine endings — and lets the darkness rip. The Long Walk and Gerald’s Game are two of his best because almost no light shines through them, and even The Stand — in which, after a trillion pages, good ultimately prevails — ends on a demoralizing note. As a fan of Kubrick’s film, I knew what I was getting myself into, but King’s book was entirely different, a much more human — and therefore, more unsettling — family drama.

As I made my way through, another unsettling drama — the 2016 presidential campaign — was mercifully winding down, and until election night, The Shining was just a way to escape the noise. What better way to distance myself from Donald Trump’s noxiousness than to read about an eerily quiet, snowed-in hotel, written decades before the terms “basket of deplorables” and “nasty woman” entered the vernacular?

Then, early on November 9th, Donald Trump fucking won. I was about 80 pages from the end of The Shining, and like everything else — large and small, consequential and irrelevant — in the hours and days afterwards, the tenor of the novel changed. I was so unmoored by his victory — by the very notion that someone so vile could be so richly rewarded — that the book and reality engaged in a queasy merge. In The Shining, King conjured a world — albeit limited to the grounds of the Overlook Hotel — in which everything was wrong. Hedge animals came alive; dead guests reappeared; fathers tried to kill their families. Having a sociopathic pussy-grabber as president had more in common with that world than the one I’d been living in.

The Shining is about many things — parental love, the strictures of family, alcohol abuse — but it is mainly about the perils of the mind. In The Shining, there is nothing more dangerous than an unstable thought allowed. And in the wake of the election, it became clear that our minds — both individually and collectively — had become territories as unsafe as anything King could muster. Trump’s more cartoonish supporters had become no less delusional than Jack Torrance, who spends the latter part of The Shining piss-drunk on imaginary gin. Those voters’ nihilism “sent a message,” we were told — as if that message would improve a goddamn thing.

Those of us crushed by the nation’s turn, meanwhile, became dazed Wendy Torrances, at once unwilling to believe what was happening and unable to dismiss it. The hornet’s nest that had sat empty and fumigated — The New York Times puts Clinton’s chances at 85 percent, you know — was suddenly abuzz. All of us — Trump and Clinton supporters both — had become untethered from reality. Or, more accurately, we were all now yoked to a reality that couldn’t possibly be real.

In the end, King’s Shining was much more hopeful than the film, the shadow of which it deserves to escape. This isn’t surprising; King seems, at heart, a warm and caring person, while Kubrick was by all accounts a petty tyrant of his own. So amid my post-election grief, I was heartened by the novel’s ending, which qualifies as “happy” without, as often happens in King — I’m looking at you, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon — cheapening its preceding horrors. And that seems about as good as I can ask for from the next four years: to emerge from the ordeal damaged but still whole. This is the limit of my optimism at the end of 2016. Because we’re all in The Shining now.