We all shine on

DOCTOR SLEEP

By Stephen King

528 pages

Available at National Book Store

What’s a steamhead? It’s a young person who possesses certain psychic abilities — such as Danny Torrance, the young boy plagued by supernatural visions in Stephen King’s 1977 novel, The Shining.  Of course, that book spawned its own term for those with psychic abilities (see the book’s title), but decades later, author Stephen King still found himself wondering: whatever happened to little Danny Torrance after his father went batcrap crazy in the Overlook Hotel and blew the place up?

Doctor Sleep brings us up to date. Danny, in the aftermath of the Overlook, found himself plagued by visitations from unfriendly spirits — the bad ones that occupied the evil grounds of the Overlook. His pal Dick Hallorann, the African-American cook at the hotel who also has the shining, teaches Danny how to lock up those pesky spirits in a mental safebox; most of them never come out, but some do, enough to lead Danny down the path his father took: alcoholism. Alcohol blunts his shining abilities, and makes it easier to live, if not easier to live with himself. Eventually, Danny finds himself at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in New Hampshire, and successfully works the program for 10 years — also working at a nearby hospice where his ability to help terminal patients transit peacefully earns him the nickname “Doctor Sleep.”

That’s when things get weird. Danny, now 28, begins receiving messages on his blackboard from a tweener named Abra (as in “cadabra”) Stone. She also possesses psychic abilities, and when she senses that a young baseball-playing boy in the Midwest has been tortured and killed by a band of maniacs in a caravan of RVs, she sends out a psychic S.O.S.

Danny picks it up, and Doctor Sleep soon introduces us to a diabolical tribe called the True Knot. Headed by a tophat-wearing femme fatale named Rose the Hat, they have lived for centuries, preying on kids who possess the shine — or, as they call them, “steamheads.” What the True Knot does to procure steam and how their paths intersect with Danny and Abra’s make for a decent late entry to King’s massive canon of horror.

Sure, Doctor Sleep has some built-in steam of its own going for it: The Shining, in all its various guises, has become a cultural touchstone. We all know about the Overlook, and Danny’s little imaginary friend Tony, and Jack Nicholson lumbering around with his insane leer, axe in hand. From King’s novel, to Kubrick’s movie — very different from the book, opting to chill and disturb us rather than truly frighten us — to King’s own TV-scripted version, to this sequel novel, The Shining has had a pretty impressive lifespan. We’ve even seen a documentary dedicated to decoding the movie’s “inner” meanings (Room 237). The only thing missing is a musical version.

For King, perhaps, the hard part over the years has been to erase people’s persistent memories of Kubrick’s film. He’s gone on record as hating the movie, which erased any possibility that Jack Torrance actually tries to save his family from the possessed Overlook Hotel in the end. See, King is a softie at heart, wrapping his tales in dark, godless horror on the outside, but injecting human frailty and forgiveness at their centers. (Carrie was perhaps an exception: a nasty tale in which everybody ends up dead or worse off.) The man who wrote The Shining in his own alcoholic haze has had decades to process things like AA, and a near-fatal road incident involving a reckless Maine driver has perhaps reinforced his belief in faith and healing. In short, King has earned his right not only to question religious beliefs, but to subscribe to certain of them. Clearly, delving into imaginary supernatural worlds has not killed him; it’s only made him stronger.

Over its relatively short length, King fires up the old boiler and works his old pro magic in Doctor Sleep. Characters are instantly likeable, or hateable, and always comprehensible. What’s of interest, as in many King novels, is how he works in modern references and cultural phenomena. The True Knot are described as being “invisible”: the type of bland, tax-paying Americans who move from state to state on the highways, living in trailer park campgrounds, never leaving a paper trail or a lasting impression. Like vampires, or terrorist sleepers, or Tea Party voters, they manage to fly below the radar. And that makes them 10 times more dangerous.

King links their gathering of steam and power to horrible real-life events — 9/11, Columbine, and the murder spree at a midnight showing of a Batman movie — to remind us that real horror does exist, and to suggest that just below it, real monsters might as well.

Meanwhile, the psychic connection Danny and Abra share has some similarities to SMS messaging and online chat. They mentally exchange words, even graphics and emoticons, reminding us of instant online activity. Their relationship — an older man paired with a 13-year-old girl — is also the type of thing that sets off warning bells and red flags in our modern age of community watches and pedophile posts, so they keep their exchanges under the radar as well.

There are some interesting touches. The novel refers to a certain Charlie Manx, a bad guy who collects little children, and who happens to be the antagonist in his son, Joe Hill’s, recent novel NOS4A2. It’s not exactly a crossover episode, more like a nod to his offspring’s growing inventory of evil.

Ultimately, in Doctor Sleep, King manages to expand and broaden the world of the Overlook he created 35 years ago, showing how evil attracts evil, while tipping his hat to things that help people cope with life’s uncertainties, doubts and fears: AA meetings and hospice care, chiefly. Ultimately, on some level, Doctor Sleep is a grown-up, sober man’s deconstructed rereading of the horror classic that first imprinted Jack Torrance, Danny and Wendy on our psychic map forever.