Doctor Sleep (The Shinning #2)
Stephan King
Paranormal Horror
Published: 2013
Publisher: Scribner
4.5/5 stars

                On highways across America, a tribe of people called The True Knot travel in search of sustenance. They look harmless – mostly old, lots of polyester, and married to their RVs but as Dan Torrance knows, and spunky twelve-year-old Abra Stone learns, The True Knot are quasi-immortal living off the “steam” that children with the “shining” produce when they are slowly tortured to death.
                Haunted by the inhabitants of the Overlook Hotel where he spent one horrific childhood year, Dan has been drifting for decades, desperate to shed his father’s legacy of despair, alcoholism, and violence. Finally, he settles in a New Hampshire town, an AA community that sustains him, and a job at a nursing home where his remnant “shining” power provides the crucial final comfort to the dying. Aided by a prescient cat, he becomes “Doctor Sleep.”
                Then Dan meets the evanescent Abra Stone, and it is her spectacular gift, the brightest shining ever seen that reignites Dan’s own demons and summons him to a battle for Abra’s soul and survival. This is an epic war between good and evil, a gory, glorious story that will thrill the millions of devoted readers of The Shinning and satisfy anyone new to the territory of this icon in the King Canon.

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                Doctor Sleep is a great work of fiction, Stephan King did a fantastic job bringing to life the rest of Danny Torrance’s reality. How he develops and who he becomes, how his past circumstances helped and hindered him in his development in his formative years and how that crossed over into adult hood where he was a struggling alcoholic was all very believable and made perfect sense.   One thing of note, this is not a sequel in the traditional sense and in my opinion it comes across as more of a companion novel which made this all the more fun to read.
                Dan Torrance’s character was soft, gentle, but he was also hard, and kept to himself. It was interesting to read how he would spiral, then build himself back up again only to spiral out of control once again. I was definitely happy when he finally got sober and was very happy to see that he stayed sober throughout the novel. I was disappointed however that Dan lost some of his ability in regards to his supernatural powers and was happy to find that eventually they came back. It was surprising to me that as a main character that Dan wasn’t the strongest character however, I believe that made the story more engaging and believable.
                Doctor Sleep wasn’t as scary as ‘The Shinning’ and I found ‘The True Knot’ not nearly as scary as I had been hoping they would be. Beyond the odd scene here of there, the focus on their power and what they were was more lackluster than I would have hoped. They weren’t nearly as scary as the cover flap would have led me to believe. I was hoping for more of a ‘coven’ feel in terms of their group but they seemed a little disorderly and for some reason I kept imagining them as people with poor hygiene and broken down RVs although it was clear that wasn’t what they were like.
                I found Abra’s character engaging, she was spunky and head strong. She is a twelve year old girl with terrifyingly strong powers and she was aware of them. She also struggles with trying to be normal in a world where she can never be just like everyone else. She’s unique, talented and beautiful and stronger than anyone else in this universe that Stephan King has created with ‘Doctor Sleep and the Shinning’. I found it refreshing however that she had flaws because as we all know a perfect character isn’t interesting to read at all. Characters need strengths and weaknesses to make them relatable and more realized.
                Over all, I really enjoyed Doctor Sleep. It was a fantastic addition to my Stephan King collection and I’m very much looking forward to all of the books that he writes in the future though I am not sure if I’ll ever anticipate a book the way I anticipated ‘Doctor Sleep’.
                Doctor Sleep was a great way to start my October reading month.
                If you’ve read Doctor Sleep what did you think of it? Or perhaps if you’re not interested in reading Doctor Sleep why not?  Interested in what you all are thinking!

1. Black Creek Crossing – John Saul
      Thirteen-year-old Angel Sullivan has been on the outside looking in, enduring the taunts of cruel schoolmates and the angry abuse of a bitter father. Then Angel’s family moves to a quaint town of Roundtree, Massachusetts – where a charming house is available, a chance to make a new start beckons to the shy, hopeful teenager. When she is shunned by her new classmates, Angel falls deeper into despair. Until she meets Seth Baker, a fellow outcast – and a fateful kinship is forged.
      It’s Seth who tells Angel the unspoken truth about the legacy of murder that hangs over her family’s home – and the whispered rumors that something supernatural still dwells there. Uncertain whether the stories are true and desperate to escape the torment of their daily lives, Seth and Angel devote themselves to contacting whatever restless soul haunts the dark recesses of Black Creek Crossing. But once they have begun, there is no turning back.
     They uncover the shocking events and centuries-old horrors that lay buried beneath the placid veneer of Roundtree. Along with the ghastly revelations comes a terrifying power – one that feeds upon the rage of the victimized, turning the basset impulses and most dangerous desires into devastating weapons.

2.  Full Dark, No Stars – Stephan King
      A Collection of four never-before-published stories from Stephan King
      1922 – The Story opens with the confession of Wilfred James to the murder of his wife, Arlette, following their move to Hemingford, Nebraska onto land willed Arlette by her father.
     Big Driver - Following a last-minute invitation to a book club 60 miles away, she takes a shortcut home with dire consequences.
      Fair Extension- Harry Streeter, who is suffering from cancer, decides to make a deal with the devil but as always there is a price to pay.
     A Good Marriage – Darcy Anderson learns more about her husband of over twenty years than she would have liked to know when she stumbles literally upon a box under a worktable in their garage.

3. I am Legend – Richard Matheson
      Robert Neville is the last living man on Earth… but he is not alone. Every other man, woman and child on Earth has become a vampire, and they are all hungry for Neville’s blood.
     By Day he is the hunter, stalking the sleeping undead through the abandoned ruins of civilization. By night, he barricades himself in his home and prays for dawn.

4. The Road – Cormac McCarthy
      A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it’s gray. The Sky is dark; their destination is the coast and although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing, just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food – and each other.  

5. The Shinning – Stephan King
      Danny was only five years old but in the words of old Mr Halloran he was a ‘shiner’, aglow with psychic voltage. When his father became caretaker of the Overlook Hotel his visions grew frighteningly out of control.
     As winter closed in and blizzards cut them off, the hotel seemed to develop a life of its own. It was meant to be empty, but who was the lady in room 217, and who were the masked guests going up and down the elevator? And why did the hedges shaped like animals seem so alive?
    Somewhere, somehow there was an evil force in the hotel – and that too had begun to shine…

                                                                                                                                          6. Cold Skin – Albert Sanchez Pinol, Translated by: Cheryl Leah Morgan
       After WW1, a troubled man accepts a solitary assignment as a “weather Official” on a tiny, remote island on the edges of the Antarctic. When he arrives his predecessor he is meant to replace is missing and a deeply disturbed stranger is barricaded in a heavily fortified lighthouse. At first adversaries, the two find that their tenuous partnership may be the only way to survive the unspeakably horrific reptilian creatures that ravage the island at night, attacking the lighthouse in their organized effort to find warm-blooded food. Armed with a battery of ammunition and explosives, the weather official and his new ally must confront their increasingly murderous mentality and when the possibility of a kind of truce presents itself, decide what kind of island they will inhabit.

7. Cell – Stephan King
       In Cell King taps into readers fears of technological warfare and terrorism. Mobile phones deliver the apocalypse to millions of unsuspecting humans by wiping their brains of any humanity, leaving only aggressive and destructive impulses behind. Those without Cell phones, like illustrator Clayton Riddell and his small band of “normies,” must fight for survival and their journey to find Claytons estranged wife and young son rockets the book toward resolution.

8. The Haunting of Hill House – Shirley Jackson
      It is a story of four seekers who arrive at a notoriously unfriendly pile called Hill House; Dr. Montague, an occult scholar is looking for solid evidence of a ‘haunting’;  Theodora, his lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, a friendless, fragile young woman well acquainted with poltergeists; and Luke, the future heir of Hill House. At first their stay seems destined to be merely a spooky encounter with inexplicable phenomena, but Hill House is gathering its powers – and soon it will choose one of them to make its own.

9. We have always lived in the Castle – Shirley Jackson
      Taking readers deep into a labyrinth of dark neurosis, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possible murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate.