Doctor Sleep by Stephen King

Mr Psychic Alcoholic

Doctor Sleep by Stephen King is a follow on to his 1977 horror masterpiece The Shining.  It carries on with the life of Danny (Doc) Torrence, who struggles in his father's shoes as an alcoholic.  Working through recovery, he makes contact with a little girl who has a strong 'shine', a beacon of delicious for a gang of psychic vampires hell bent on tracking her down.

Content Warning: This book contains graphic horror, substance abuse, and child abuse and murder.

Story  ☆☆☆★★

In a previous life, I was very interested in local amateur dramatics, even going so far as to co-write a pantomime.  I never do anything without a healthy day's work researching on the internet, and pantomime has a very simple formula to the story.  It goes: introduction -> complicating event -> bad guy wins (temporarily) -> good guy wins finally.  Sometimes there might be a second round of the bad guy winning, if your panto needs more filler, but that's mostly the way it goes.

Now I've ruined the narrative complexities of panto for you forever, I hate to say that I've also ruined Doctor Sleep for you.  For while this might be a dark and gruesome book, as one would expect from Stephen King, in terms of plot points it is a pantomime.  The plot plods along, achingly predictable, and gently grinds to a halt at the end.

But most people won't be reading Doctor Sleep for it's shining plot twists and delicate character arcs.  Most people will want a sequel to The Shining, and to know what happened to Danny Torrence.  In that respect, it delivers.  We briefly meet up with Danny a year or two after The Shining, then fast forward to his twenties and thirties.  There are plenty of throw-backs -- one might argue too many, and the book suffers from the need to occasionally spend an exposition paragraph explaining something that will be obvious to any reader of the original.

In terms of gross factor, Doctor Sleep delivers on a parr with the original, and King seems to have learned to keep the scares vaguely realistic.  There are no moving topiary here.  But it all feels like something we've seen before.

Style  ☆☆☆★★

I have a memory of Stephen King being a very quick read.  I'm not a massive fan, but I'd say I've been through a lot of the popular hits.  I read The Shining at the age of fifteen, mostly in a dark empty school (which I do not, incidentally, recommend!), and whizzed through it.  I've not read any of King's more recent works, so couldn't say if it's him that's changed or me.  

This book was a massive grind for me.  Perhaps because I read the first half in brief fits and starts, and so it was a while before I had a chance to really sit with it and get used to the style, but even in the latter half I struggled.  

This is where I think the problem lies.  I have developed since I was fifteen.  I am very much a creature of the 21st Century.  Much like the things that held me up in Ian McEwan's Nutshell, it feels like Stephen King has not moved with me.  There are grudging references to the internet, to iPhones, to emails, but they are not a part of the life of his characters as much as they should be, especially teenaged Abra.  The book reads like it might have been written in the '70s -- '90s at the latest -- and an editor has pinned on some technological references to make the whole thing scan for a younger generation.

Substance  ☆☆☆☆★

Now this is where I'm going to piss some people off: I don't like how King treats women in his books.  There has been various criticism of male authors writing about women like they've never really met one, and I will say that only sometimes applied to King.  The issue is, he still treats female characters the way they would be treated twenty or thirty years ago.  I'm not going to labour the point, but just a couple of examples:

Abra is one of the heroes of this story.  She is a massively powerful psychic teenager, but is constantly belittled.  Since Joss Whedon said he wanted the dumb blonde in the horror movies to be the one fighting the vampires, there's been a trope of taking apparently weak women and making them unexpectedly strong.  But this isn't subversive any more.  In fact, it's getting kind of old now.  It would be nice to recognise that, it doesn't actually matter what a woman looks like, we're all basically strong in our own way.  And when you have a young girl who is basically the most psychic kid ever, and you're describing how she's like a Viking on the inside, but a blonde blue eyed little girl on the outside, that's a trope that's getting a bit old.

Another issue I have is Snakebite Andi, a character included to provide a contrast to Dan Torrence, despite Dan being a contrast himself to his father.  She's a woman that's suffered terrible childhood abuse, and has reacted with a blanket hatred of all men.  She is described as unsaveable and becomes a child murdering psychic entity because she can't see any life for herself without her psychic ability to sedate and therefore abuse men.  At the same time, the reader is told she must have enormous force of mind to survive her transition -- but this force of mind was not enough to help her grow through her pain, as many traumatised women do, as Danny does.

It won't be a big deal to most people, but it bugged the hell out of me right the way through.  Add to this a general lack of diversity, it just compounds the feel of Doctor Sleep being a product of a time that is now (thankfully) passed.

The Verdict  ☆☆☆★★

For those looking for a good hard shot of nostalgia, there is a lot of classic horror and fun Shining references in Doctor Sleep.  Readers looking for a little more will wear through this veneer pretty quickly, and might not enjoy the skeleton of a story and retro style of narrative that lies underneath.