The Shining

The Shining is a horror novel by the American writer Stephen King, published in 1977. It was his third novel, and it was followed much later by a sequel, Doctor Sleep, in 2013.

Jack Torrance is a struggling writer and recovering alcoholic who takes a job as the winter caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, a large, historic hotel in the Colorado mountains that shuts for the season. He moves in with his wife, Wendy, and their young son, Danny.

Danny has a psychic gift, called the shining, that the hotel badly wants, and he sees things in the Overlook that the adults around him cannot. The hotel has a long and violent history, and as the winter isolates the family, it begins working on Jack.

King drew on his own visit to the Stanley Hotel in Colorado in 1974 and on his struggles with drink, and the novel is set partly against Jack's attempts to finish a play and keep his temper. It was adapted into a film in 1980 and a miniseries in 1997, and the sequel was itself adapted in 2019.