Doctor Sleep by Stephen King

Ever wondered what happened to Danny Torrance, the kid that the Overlook Hotel wanted in The Shining (The book, not the movie)?

Like father, like son; Danny grows up a drunk. Started drinking around age 14. Bounced from one menial job to the next, he was a mean drunk. Did his share of coke, too. Went home with this one coke-head, woke up with a world class hangover. Drags himself out of bed, steals her money, and just as he's about gone, a toddler in a droopy diaper appears, sees the remnants of their partying lined up on a table and mumbles, "Canny". Danny just leaves and tries to bury, unsuccessfully, that particular image. 

He heads north on a bus, knowing he'll be dead soon if his attempts to use alcohol and drugs to shake the nightmares of The Overlook and his father fail. Something about a small New Hampshire town beckons him where he is sort of taken in by a city employee working TeenyTown, the local summer tourist attraction. But a condition of employment is 90 in 90; 90 AA meetings in 90 days. 

Slowly, Danny gets sober, rents an apartment and starts working at the local hospice where, with time, his shining abilities become a bit more controllable. People dying are in need of someone to help them cross over and Danny's telepathic/empathic skills do just that, getting him the moniker of Doctor Sleep.

In the next town, however, Abra is born, and Abra's skills make Danny look like a sideshow barker. She reached out to Danny within hours of being born and by middle school, can leave messages on a blackboard where Danny lives. Think of her as Carrie on steroids. She and Danny can shine back and forth with each other even when separated by hundreds of miles.

Traveling around the country is a band of oldsters in motorhomes, going nowhere in particular. That's not quite accurate. This crowd, The True Knot, are a bunch of immortals, some date back over a millennia or more. The survive by sucking steam - that's the essence that leaves the body of someone with the shine when they die.

Their leader, Rose the Hat, can sense kids who can shine. The kid is tracked down, kidnapped, tortured (the more scared, the better the steam), killed, and their steam is captured in canisters for later use. After killing a kid in Nebraska, Rose starts to zero in on Abra, but not before returning to a campground they own up in the Colorado mountains. A camp that just happens to occupy the land of a former luxury mountain hotel by the name of The Overlook.

From here, we follow the Knot's attempts to find and grab Abra, Danny's attempts to block those attempts, finally leading up to the final confrontation between Danny and Rose on the still possessed grounds of the former Overlook hotel.

I've mentioned in passing here at MRB that I read a few early King books back in the late 70's, including The Shining (which scared the ever loving crap out of me). I tried The Stand, but couldn't get through that 1000 page monster and never went back to either the books or his supernatural movies (OK, I did see Shawshank and Stand By Me, both terrific, but never read either).

But this one intrigued me and decided to give it a go. And, for the most part, I liked it just fine. Yeah, it was a little heavy on the AA angle and came to find out from the 'about the author' segment that King wrote The Shining essentially in an alcoholic haze. Never quite got all that caught up in the Knot part of the plot triangle, but thoroughly enjoyed the Danny-Abra relationship with Danny working out the demons of his past while helping Abra and her family come to grips with just who Abra is and can be.

Monday or Tuesday night, I woke up around 3am for no reason so I started reading. Two hours later, I had finished the book - the final chase into the Rockies, setup, and eventual confrontation with Rose and the True Knot. Upon finishing, I went back to sleep for a couple hours.

In the morning, it struck me. There was no way I could've done the same thing reading The Shining - I would've been up for a couple days if I'd read that ending in the middle of the night. For that reason alone, I think I can say that, as good as the Danny-Abra story was, the overall book was just so-so for me. It just didn't have the soul or the shear terror of its predecessor. Maybe as a standalone, it might be better. But if, like me, you read The Shining, I'm going to bet you'll be thinking Doctor Sleep doesn't follow the same trail as that explored in The Shining.

East Coast Don