Review: Doctor Sleep

Nostalgia has played a huge part in Stephen King's work over recent years. In narrative terms, both Joyland and 11/22/63 take a mostly-fond look (though with a hint of the bittersweet) back at the past, set in sepia-toned bygone eras. This is King entering the latter part of his life and glancing back at periods long gone. And in more meta ways, nostalgia has also played a role in his output, with The Wind Through The Keyhole seeing a return to the Dark Tower series, Under The Dome (and to a lesser degree 11/22/63) bringing to paper an idea that King had harboured for decades, and Just After Sunset seeing the long-overdue publication of 'The Cat From Hell'.

So while the choice to create a sequel to The Shining, King's most famous work, a full thirty-six years after the original may seem somewhat out of left field, it actually makes a perfect kind of sense. King has been looking back lately, both over hs life and his career, and Doctor Sleep stands as the logical, perhaps inevitable, culmination of this period.

Doctor Sleep sees us rejoin Danny Torrance, not long after the traumatic events at The Overlook, and when we meet up with him again, he is still plagued by the demons that haunted him over that terrible winter. The Overlook may be gone, but the ghosts of The Overlook still haunt him - metaphorically and literally. What is surprising is just how easily King slips back into the characters of Danny, Dick and Wendy; we really do feel like we're meeting with old friends again after a long absence - at first it's a little strange to be back in their company, but within moments the old feelings are all back, and it is as if we haven't been parted.

We then watch as our protagonist grows from "Danny" to "Dan", from "Doc" to "Doctor Sleep", over a sequence of chapters that is genuinely, achingly painful to read. Because while Dan may have finally banished the ghosts from his past, that other demon that threatened the boy during The Shining proves far more persistant, and with an almost heartbreaking sense of crushing inevitability, we see Dan Torrance fall into the alchoholism that claimed his father.

As Dan drunkenly stumbles towards his lowest point - and beyond - we also become acquainted with The True Knot, a group of travelling quasi-vampires that horror fans have been keen to meet ever since their brief cameo in Joe Hill's NOS4R2 earlier this year (this is a favour, incidentally, that King is more than happy to return on more than one occasion in Doctor Sleep, making the two novels feel very connected - almost "Twinners" in Dark Tower parlance). The True, under the leadership of the beautiful-but-revolting Rose The Hat, traverse the highways and byways of America in their fleet of RVs, finding and killing children that have The Shining, and feeding off of the "steam" that these children produce upon their death. In one of the most chilling lines of the novel, Rose muses on the fact that the more the child is tortured before they die, the better the steam is.

And as Dan begins to fight his addictions, taking on a job in a hospice where he uses his abilities to aid terminal patients in their passing (hence "Doctor Sleep"), the final piece of the puzzle is introduced, in the form of Abra Stone, a young girl who possesses a Shining brighter than even Dan's own. For the True Knot, Abra presents the feast of a lifetime. For Dan Torrance, she presents something that he needs just as badly - a shot at redemption...

This opening third of the novel is simply magnificent. At heart Doctor Sleep is entirely a novel about alchoholism, with Dan's struggle and need to drink brilliantly mirroring The True's need to feed, a comparison that in lesser hands could have been something rather twee but under King's masterful craftsmenship becomes delightfully underplayed. Dan's struggles with the bottle, and the events that form his "rock bottom moment" are genuinely difficult to read at times, obviously drawn from King's own battles with addiction. But even in his lowest moment - stealing the last money from a single mother while her abused son is in the room - there is a ghost of hope in Dan, a sense of making the best of what he has, or at least wanting to. This poignant mixture of deep sadness and hope seeps into every aspect of the story, right down to the locations that Dan passes: an art gallery that boasts "the finest prints and reproductions"; a building that has lost one of its turrets ("So what? It'll happen to you, too" the building says wih defiance). Narratively, the pace is slow, but at the same time this is the novel at its most compelling - as with 11/22/63 the pages and chapters fly by while watching these characters just get on with their day to day lives.

It's almost a shame when the various players begin to meet. Abra and Dan turn out to have several aquaintances in common - most excitingly for fans of The Shining a certain "imaginary friend" called Tony - and the middle third of the novel deals with Abra and Dan becoming aware of each other, aware of The True, and most chillingly The True becoming aware of Abra. The pace of this section is still rather sedate, and naturally played (Dan and Abra spend a significant amount of time being understandably nervous about the way their friendship would look to "outsiders"). But some of the atmosphere of the opening act is sadly sacrificed in favour of "getting down to business" and positioning the characters for the inevitable final-act showdown.

A final act which hurtles along at breakneck speed. King may have taken his time setting up these events, but when they arrive the pace never relents. While this closing third opens with an extended section that is unfortunately rather similar - in narrative if not tone - to a sequence that appears at a similar point in NOS4R2, the following battle at the remains of The Overlook manages to be tense, surprising, and more than a little heartbreaking. It's not perfect - the final resolution feels a little too quick and easy, and when the Chekov's Gun that was cocked in the prologue is finally fired, it goes off with a "pop" rather than a "bang" - but it is satisfying. It also occurs with a surprisingly high page count still to go, reaffirming the sense that the novel is more about demons of the personal, rather than literal nature. King has a reputation for fudging his endings, but the true ending to Doctor Sleep is simply beautiful.

What is most remarkable about this novel is just how much it truly feels like a sequel to The Shining, as opposed to simply a second adventure with Dan Torrance - the final confrontation may take place at the site of The Overlook, but the shadow of the hotel is cast over the proceedings from the very first page. And as well as Dan, Dick and Wendy, we are reaquianted with many other refugees from the events of the first novel, ghosts that are with us from the prologue to the climax: there's the infamous fat woman from Room 237, there's Horace Derwent, and in a short but tearjerking moment in the closing pages, there's a reappearance that feels both surprising and absolutely inevitable. Make no mistake, Doctor Sleep is a continuance of The Shining, rather than of Dan Torrance. While the plot and tone are different, this is at the end of the day a novel that just wouldn't work were it simply about some random psychics rather than about Dan. And that's all you can really ask for in a sequel.

It may lose some of its atmosphere along the way, the middle-aged "RV people" nature of the villains shows that this is definitely not the return to "pure horror" (whatever that is) that the novel was touted as prior to release, and it may ultimately be at its best when nothing is happening, but Doctor Sleep is a deeply moving and surprisingly low-key and personal novel (and with a shockingly small body count for King), and one that proves to be a very worthy follow-up to its illustrious predecessor.

For the best King novel of 2013, you should check out Joyland. And for the best horror novel of 2013, you should visit NOS4R2. But you should miss Doctor Sleep at your peril.

Geekin' Out Verdict: 8.5/10