The Shining

Review

Notes

Chapter 18, pg 223 – The Scrapbook. Long chapter of backstory on the Overlook.

p335 – It was his father’s voice [on the radio]. ¶ “—kill him. You have to kill him, Jacky, and her, too. Because a real artist must suffer. Because each man kills the thing he loves. Because they’ll always drag you down. Right this minute. . . ” ¶ “No!” he screamed back. “You’re dead, you’re in your grave, you’re no in me at all!” Because he had cut all the father out of him and it was not right that he should come back, creeping through this hotel two thousand miles from the New England town where his father had lived and died.

p360 – Wendy felt her face burn yet knew with a kind of helpless finality that if the whole thing were to be played over again, she would do and think the same way. She carried part of her mother with her always, for good or bad.

p388 TB: this is the closing of a scene where Jack and Wendy have had a rather tense discussion. It ends with her apparently wanting to fuck him, which I find just baffling. I can understand cool-down from stress making people horny, but in the Overlook? With the fight they just had, and the stuff going on? I don’t know. I think not.

p393 – “No buts,” she said, shaking her head violently. . . “Next thing we’ll be seeing things.” ¶ “Don’t talk nonsense,”[Jack] said, and in the darkness of the room he saw the hedge lions bunching around the path, no longer flanking it but guarding it, hungry November lions. Cold sweat sprang out on his brow. ¶ “You didn’t really see anything did you?” . . . ¶ The lionswere gone. Now he saw a pink pastel shower curtain with a dark shape lounging behind it. The closed door. That muffled, hurried thump, and sounds after it that might have been running footsteps. The horrible, lurching beat of his own heart as he struggled with the passkey. ¶ “Nothing,” he said . . . TB: He won’t share. No trust – afraid of vulnerability. That’s the haunting, and why he can be haunted.

p425 TB: Danny in the concrete ring (I don’t know how to envision this, a literal tube of concrete for kids to walk through?), senses something, then: . . . Now, in spite of the snow dazzle, he thought he could see something there. Something moving. A hand. The waving hand of some desperately unhappy child, waving hand, pleading, drowning hand. ¶ (Save me O please save me If you can’t save me at least come play with me . . . Forever. And Forever. And Forever.) — That’s the closest we get to the twins in Kubrick’s version.

p435 – [Jack] looked at [Wendy] furiously, and then the fury collapsed. Suddenly, with pity and horror, she saw what Jack would look like as an old man. She had never seen him look that way before. ¶ (?what way?) ¶ Defeated, she answered herself. He looks beaten. ¶ He said: “I’ve always thought I could keep my promises.”

p526 – Loneliness surged over [Jack] suddenly and completely. He cried out with sudden wretchedness and honestly wished he were dead. His wife and son were upstairs with the door locked against him. The others had all left. The party was over.

p565 – “Your wife would object to that very strongly, Mr. Torrance. And she appears to be . . . somewhat stronger than we had imaged. Somewhat more resourceful. She certainly seems to have gotten the better of you.”

p619 – “Oh Tony, is it my daddy?” Danny screamed. “Is it my daddy that’s coming to get me?”

p653 – Now she was a woman, a human being who had been dragged around to the dark side of the moon and had come back able to put the pieces back together. But those pieces, Hallorann thought, they never fit just the same way again. Never in this world.

p657 – “Do you need to cry?”

p658 – “Danny? You listen to me. I’m going to talk to you about it this once and never again this same way. There’s some things no six-year-old boy in the world should have to be told, but the way things should be and the way things are hardly ever get together. The world’s a hard place, Danny. It don’t care. It don’t hate you and me, but it don’t love us, either. Terrible things happen in the world, and they’re things no one can explain. Good people die in bad, painful ways and leave the folks that love them all alone. Sometimes it seems like it’s only the bad people who stay healthy and prosper. The world don’t love you, but your momma does and so do I. You’re a good boy. You grieve for your daddy, and when you feel you have to cry over what happened to him, you go into a close or under your covers and cry until it’s all out of you again. That’s what a good son has to do. But see that you get on. That’s your job in this hard world, to keep your love alive and see that you get on, no matter what. Pull your act together and just get on.”