The Shining, by world-renowned author Stephen King, is one of the greatest horror novels ever to be written. The book interweaves psychological and physical violence, is easy to comprehend, and provokes complex emotions, making it a must-read novel.
The Shining is the story of Jack Torrance, a writer, and alcoholic, who accepts a job as a caretaker at a hotel in Colorado and takes his wife, Wendy, and his son, Danny, who seems to have psychic abilities. The hotel is not ordinary, as it terrorizes Danny with visions and nightmares that begin to spread to the rest of the family, eventually making the group insane.
Most traditional horror novels contain violence. Most of these books, however, strictly limit their violence to physical harm. However, King excels past average novels by including psychological terror. There is just as much physical agony as there is mental suffering. This is seen through Jack Torrance who is trying to quit his alcohol addiction, but his lack of socialization and his isolation due to being snowed in at the hotel envelops him in complete insanity. Torrance begins to have delusions and develops an unhealthy obsession with his occupation, and starts to believe he needs to kill his family to be “of the managerial timber” (King 388). The psychological subjects offer a fresh take in the horror genre, a category that is typically dominated by brutish violence by characters with shallow motivations.
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While some novels try to impress and confuse readers with grandiose vocabulary, King possesses the ability to make the plot enjoyable while being comprehendible. The Shining lexile rating, a metric used to assess the difficulty of a text, sits at around 840, which is around the reading ability of an 8th grader. Readers can clearly receive King’s message and enjoy the novel rather than being lost within its