I had a very Stephen King-heavy childhood. My mother, whose maiden name was King and who has always been a huge fan of horror, loved him and his work. Since her preteen years, she has collected his books and watched nearly every film and television adaptation based on his stories. She also made sure to pass this love of Stephen King on to me at a young age.
My first “grown-up movie”—at least, the first grown-up movie that I was deliberately sat down and asked to watch and didn’t just wander in and see by accident—was Misery. I saw Cujo at a young enough age to instill a soul-deep fear of Saint Bernards that has yet to be remedied, no matter how cute and wholesome everyone says the Beethoven movies are. The Shining was one of my favorite holiday movies, which I loved to watch from October straight through until New Year’s—no Nightmare Before Christmas for me, no, sir. I liked watching Jack Nicholson chop his way through a bathroom door and proclaim, “Heeeere’s Johnny!” more than I did seeing Jack Skellington dress up as Santa Claus and sing merry tunes.
But I never actually read The Shining until last June. I knew Stephen King didn’t like the Stanley Kubrick film because it strayed from his vision for the story, which had been deeply personal to him. When he wrote The Shining, King was deep in his struggle with addiction, and he was greatly worried about how his dependence on drugs and alcohol affected his wife and young son. As a young father, he was also trying to terms with his relationship with his own father, who hadn’t been the most positive influence in his life when he was a child. As a result, he viewed the creative license Kubrick took with many details of his story personally, and he understandably felt that Kubrick wasn’t treating the story with the respect it deserved.
That was what held me back from reading the book for so long; I loved the movie, and was worried that I wouldn’t like it anymore once I had a better understanding of what it was supposed to be. But once I read it, I found that there were many things that weren’t actually all that different. The premise was the same, the characters felt very similar, and almost all of the scenes shown in the film were scenes pulled from the book to some degree.
The main difference that I noticed was that Kubrick almost completely removed the supernatural. In the novel, the Overlook Hotel was very much a haunted place where strange, unexplainable things occurred. Things moved on their own, wasps came back to life, ghosts made appearances and manipulated their surroundings. Kubrick scrapped all that. The only thing he kept (which he couldn’t very well get rid of because it was the whole point and was even in the title) was Danny Torrence and Dick Hallorann’s “Shine,” their paranormal connection to the universe which allows them to pass along messages telepathically and, apparently in Danny’s case, manipulate space-time a little bit (I still don’t understand what exactly that was about). However, Kubrick’s decision to keep that might be attributed more to the theory of extrasensory perception (ESP), also called “second sight” or the “sixth sense,” which was, in the mid-20th century, studied as an actual scientific occurrence rather than viewed as something paranormal as it is today.
In 2013, nearly forty years after The Shining was published, Stephen King wrote a sequel: Doctor Sleep. This novel introduced readers to Dan Torrence as an adult, now fighting his own battle with the same addiction that plagued his father and nearly destroyed his childhood. King was nearly twenty-five years sober at this point. He had seen both sides of addiction, and he knew how addiction could affect the children of addicts, so he came back to this story, and he showed that part of the journey through Dan, who he wrote leaving his own addiction behind and working to put his life back together.
In Doctor Sleep, King also introduced readers to the bad side of the Shining, and the way that ability could be used for evil, through a group of characters called The True Knot, who discovered a way to steal the souls of children who Shine and use them to prolong their own lives. Dan was made aware of The True Knot by a little girl named Abra, whose ability was somewhere between foresight and astral projection, allowing her to see things happening in other places both while they happened and before they happened (One of the first times she uses her Shine is in a scene where she seems to predict 9/11. Crazy stuff!). Dan also learned in passing of a man who Dick Hallorann, his friend from the Overlook, heard of as a child, named Charlie Manx, who apparently practiced the same kind of child-soul-stealing as The True Knot. Dick’s grandfather claimed to know Manx, and would use him as a boogieman-type figure to threaten Dick with to get him to behave—it was only after he and Dan learned about The True Knot that Dick considered that maybe Manx was actually real.
And here’s where things get really interesting.
The same year that Stephen King published Doctor Sleep, his son Joe (who writes using the surname Hill, a shortened version of his middle name, Hillström) published a book called NOS4A2 about a girl named Vic who has a supernatural connection with a ghost bridge that can help her find lost things. The main villain of NOS4A2 is—hold for suspense—Charlie Manx, who drives a 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith with a vanity license plate which reads, you guessed it, NOS4A2 (pronounced like Nosferatu, the cheesy knockoff Dracula movie). Manx’s Wraith, it turns out, can not only help him steal the souls of children, but take them to a magical place that exists only in his mind, which he calls Christmasland. This makes for a novel that is both frightening and absurd, jolting the reader from cringing in horror to wondering what the heck they’re reading in a matter of mere sentences.
It’s hard to tell who’s referencing whom here, but if I had to guess, based on the fact that Joe Hill is a much slower writer, something he admits freely and which is to be expected based on how prolific his dad is, as well as the fact that NOS4A2 was published about five months before Doctor Sleep, I’d wager that Stephen King was referencing his son’s work when he name-dropped Manx in his own novel. Nevertheless, Hill’s book is also rife with King references, paying homage and tying this book into the broader King universe in a fascinating way and seeming to tell readers that nearly every book his father has written, and some of the ones he’s written, exist within microcosms of the same universe. On a map of all the inscapes (essentially, pockets in the universe created by and often inside the minds of people who Shine, called “Strong Creatives” in Hill’s book) in America, for instance, there are references to IT and King’s Dark Tower series. Manx also mentions that he is aware of the existence of Doctor Sleep’s gang, The True Knot, and implies that they might have even visited Christmasland, but that he and they don’t see eye to eye, and so they mostly just stay out of each other’s way.
Further, while the NOS4A2 novel was dedicated to Hill’s mother Tabitha King, and various characters’ relationships with their mothers are highlighted, the father-child relationships in this book are probably the most complex. Vic adores her father, Chris, and looks up to him more than anyone in the world despite his faults, which include choosing his addiction over his family and, at times, being physically and verbally abusive. As she gets older, Vic falls victim to the same cycle of abuse and addiction as her father, but later fights to get better in order to be a good mother to her son, Wayne. Conversely, Charlie’s daughter Millie chooses to go to Christmasland with her father, but she never leaves his shadow, and she struggles with the role she’s forced to occupy as an extension of her father’s legacy. It seems evident, then, that not only was NOS4A2 Joe Hill’s continuation of his father’s Shining/Doctor Sleep universe, it also functioned for him in the same way as the original two novels did for his father: as a way to work through personal and family struggles, as well as generational trauma.
Charlie Manx said that the road to Christmasland is paved with dreams. So, too, was the road to NOS4A2. Dreams, and the bond between a father and son.
Happy belated Father’s Day to all the different kinds of dads out there, and to my mom, Chris Hauer (née King), who was also my dad for a long time.
Oh, and The Shining is still one of my favorite holiday movies. (Sorry, Mr. King.)