Monday, March 27, 2017

Go on an adventure ... simply by reading a book:


Forty years after its release, Stephen King's novel 'The Shining' still elicits frightening memories:





The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colo., was the inspiration for Stephen King's "The Shining." King stayed in the hotel on the final day it was open before closing for the winter. King wandered the empty hallways and he and his wife were the only ones in the dining room at dinner. "By the time I went to bed that night, I had the whole book in my mind," King later said. (Trine Tsouderos/Chicago Tribune/MCT)
Photo by Trine Tsouderos

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by Shawn Ryan
in Life Entertainment
Times Free Press
January 27, 2017

When Chris Dortch was an adolescent, he snuck a copy of Stephen King's "The Shining" into the house.

"Stephen King was someone that my parents didn't really police for me," he says.

A bit more investigating might have been in order.

"I read it when I was about 12 years old and absolutely terrified myself," Dortch says happily.

He took that terror and turned it into a lifelong love of horror in all forms — books, movies, TV.

"That book meant a lot to me," says Dortch, director of the Chattanooga Film Festival and founder and programmer for the Mise En Scenesters film club. "I'm a sucker for a good ghost story, and it's one of the books that put those hooks in me. It sent me down a major rabbit hole."

On Saturday, "The Shining" (novel, not film) turns 40 years old. When it came out in 1977, King was in the process of building the name that would become internationally synonymous with horror. It was his third book after the telekinetic teen in "Carrie" and the vampires of "Salem's Lot."

"What stood out to me about 'The Shining' was that it was a work that had so many levels so much going on," says Robert R. McCammon, a compatriot of King's who has written 22 novels, including such critically acclaimed books as "Boy's Life," "Swan Song," "They Thirst" and "Speaks the Nightbird."

"I think that right off the bat after reading it I thought it was truly a great piece of literature," he says. "I know that King's work has been described by some critics as being 'pop' for the masses and, while I don't think there's anything wrong with writing a book that everyone might like to read, I certainly disagree with that assessment of 'The Shining,' which I believe is a deep book about the nature of evil that stands out as a 'shining' example of what true literature is a book that can be appreciated on many levels.

"There are so many 'small' moments in the book that add up to the larger picture of evil," McCammon says.

King, dealing with his own drinking problems when he was writing "The Shining," used his personal issues as elements in the plot, which focuses on a family of three — father, mother, young son — who are caretakers and the only people in a huge, isolated hotel in the middle of the Colorado winter. The hotel, however, has its own designs on the family, or is it all in the head of the alcoholic father?

"Sometimes you confess. You always hide what you're confessing to. That's one of the reasons why you make up the story," King said in "The Stephen King Companion." "When I wrote 'The Shining,' for instance, the protagonist of 'The Shining' is a man who has broken his son's arm, who has a history of child beating, who is beaten himself. And as a young father with two children, I was horrified by my occasional feelings of real antagonism toward my children. 'Won't you ever stop? Won't you ever go to bed?'"

Local attorney Tracy Culver doesn't remember being terrified when she read the novel as a young adult, "but there are things in it that have stayed with me throughout my life."

"I've never looked at a hotel corridor the same way or, for that matter, a hotel shower. It doesn't matter whether it's a low-end hotel or high-end hotel; when I first go into the bathroom, there's always that moment of ," says Culver, a collector of Stephen King first editions who figures she has about 30.

Jen Litton recalls reading "The Shining" when she was about 24 and found it "more intense than scary."

"It makes you look differently at hotels, but it didn't make me lose sleep at night," says Litton, director of operations and trading with the Patten Group.

Still, she recognizes its standing in the world of horror.

"I definitely think it kind of set the course for the horror genre in this kind of supernatural or internal struggle motif," she says. "It upset the balance between reality and fiction in what could really happen inside someone's mind,"

"It's so rich with imagery and internal conflict and different interactions, it goes beyond just beyond a scary book."

The book was turned into a film in 1980, helmed by world-famous director Stanley Kubrick. But it raised serious hackles in the King universe. Some said it was masterpiece of horror while others, many of whom had read the book, trashed it, complaining that it downplayed the supernatural elements of the book in favor of the psychological. Right after it was released, King said he hated it but later softened that stance.

Nathan Bounds of Cleveland says "the book did a much better job of getting inside the main character's head, which isn't surprising, since that's one of the central advantages a book has over a movie.

"It made you feel his hangovers, his addiction, his obsession, his slow loss of the ability to distinguish reality from illusion," says Bounds, a recent graduate of Chattanooga State Community College. "The scares were less blunt, less dependent on surprise, more creeping and subtle.

"It's definitely worth the read, and now I'm thinking I'm going to reread it myself."

Daniel Griffith has read "The Shining," but "it's been a long time."

A local documentary filmmaker, film preservationist and owner of Ballyhoo Pictures which focuses on, as its web page says, "Making Movies about the Making of Movies," Griffith agrees that fans of book tend to "kind of disregard the Stanley Kubrick film because it added an element to the story that explored something much more psychological than supernatural." For his part, though, he thinks that decision made the film more interesting.

But for Dortch, it all comes back to the novel's scares. Reading "The Shining" compelled him to read Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House" and Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw," among many others.

"I read everything I could get my hands on," he says, but King remains at the top of his personal list.

"There isn't a day when I don't reference him. I referenced 'Cujo' just this morning."