Doctor Sleep: A Novel

First off: I promise, NO SPOILERS. I apologize if there is some vagueness as a result. I'd like to write two reviews for Dr. Sleep: one on its stand-alone merits, and as a continuation of the story of the Shining, and one on its success as a continuation of the brilliance of The Shining. I'd give the first 5 stars, but the second only...3. Which is unfair, I guess, especially in light of Stephen King's afterward ("...people change. The man who wrote Doctor Sleep is very different from the well-meaning alcoholic who wrote The Shining, but both remain interested in the same thing: telling a kickass story. I enjoyed finding Danny Torrance again and following his adventures. I hope you did, too. If that's the case, Constant Reader, we're all good.")--which seems to say that my first 5 star review is the one King would care about, if I were to presume he cares what I have to say. And since I love Stephen King, that's what I gave it, officially, and that's the one I'll start with. This book is SUCH a fun read! The best kind of King book, the kind that leaves you hungover in the morning because you were up much too late reading, and almost makes you miss your bus to work because you get engrossed in it again while you brush your teeth. Several times I got a big giddy grin on my face and even laughed aloud with ridiculous delight at a super stephenkingy turn of phrase, words I imagined gave him a similar satisfaction as they left his fingers for the page. Some of these were even scary-creepy things, but they were so perfectly done, they were thrilling on that second level, too. It felt to me like King had a lot of fun with a lot of this book, just reveling in his own GoodAtItNess, long passages spooling out with gleeful sprezzatura. The story runs smoothly along, suspenseful questions answered with perfect timing, never leaving so much unknown at once that the complications are impossible to follow. The central characters are excellent. Grownup Dan surprisingly unlike 5 year old Dan in the way my own grownup children are surprisingly unlike their 5 year old selves--something of the little boy remains, but he didn't just stretch to man-size, he's a fully realized person, very changed. Abra is a great character on her own, and her relationships with Dan, her parents, and her friends, are all truthful and nuanced. Good on whoever talked King through the markers of early adolescent girlness that pepper her believability. The scary creepy horrors are scary, creepy, and horrible; turning off the light when I finally forced myself every night was just as unpleasant as it had been when I read The Shining. Loose strings of the original plot are nicely knotted up. I'd have maybe liked to know more about Wendy, but real grown men--as Dan is, in this novel--don't have the kind of insight or, frankly, interest, in their mothers' inner lives. Even if they're psychic. So it works, as a function of Grownup Dan being well done. Less likely, I thought, was the way Dick was written out of Dan's life, but I have to admit that works too, in the sense that Dan grew up in ways that were unpredictable when he was five. Expository backstory from the first book doesn't get the clumsy treatment it normally does in sequels, but is dropped in usefully and gracefully throughout the plot. It was very satisfying to have some things I thought I understood about the Overlook, and Dan, and Jack, confirmed, and equally satisfying to have some new details mixed in to deepen and thicken that foundation of the story. The final revisitation from The Shining gets a muted, subtle treatment in the narrative, and I hope it's not just sentimental over-imagination on my part to think King let it be so simple because it might have been unbearably moving otherwise. Five stars! Buy it, read it, you'll enjoy it! Now then. The Shining is one of my all-time favorite books. It's the one I wax rhapsodic about when I'm making an obnoxiously over-thought case for Stephen King as an underrated capital G genius of American capital L literature. It's the one I compare to Dickens and the one I compare to Steinbeck and the one I say doesn't need to lean on those comparisons because it's capital G greatness all by itself. I like to make people listen to me say that the only reason The Shining is not a genuine masterpiece, recognized or not, is that King was young and still growing as a writer. And still not so market-proven that his (now routinely over-indulgent) editors gave him free reign. I have always assumed those factors caused the flaws (I apologize for my cheek, Mr. King; I know I'm unworthy, but for lack of a better, more obsequious term, I have to go with flaws) in The Shining, and I was unrestrainedly thrilled to hear a sequel unaffected by those was in the works. I refused to entertain fears that I wouldn't like it as much as the original, the way absolutely everyone likes the sequel less than the original; when the first reviews came out and I read that Barbara Kingsolver loved Dr. Sleep, I went directly to Kindle, did not pass go, and Amazon collected my seven dollars. And it was, as I've already said, money well and unregrettedly spent. But this book isn't anything like The Shining. Not as a literary feat. Both books tell, as King says he intended, kickass stories. The Shining, though, spent its first half telling a fascinatingly ambiguous story, too. The Shining is about a man with demons we all recognize, and a lot of us live with intimately. For a good chunk of the beginning of the book, it is impossible to determine from the text alone whether or not those demons are the only demons in the Torrance family's life. The interplay between Jack and his family and the things in Jack's head is fantastic, and the aforementioned flaw is that the transition between "Is This Real or Is Jack Just Crazy" to "Oh, yeah, it's real. Jack's crazy, too, but that's secondary" is less smoothly done than the writing on either side of the divide. And Dr. Sleep has nothing at all like that. The kickass story is all out in the open and straightforwardly linear, as is the development of all the characters and the reader's understanding of who they are and what they're doing. Dr. Sleep is extragood pop culture writing. The Shining was that, with unrecognized actual literature icing its cake. Without the icing, I give it three stars.

I would give this great story 4.5 stars. I savored the book throughout and didn't want it to end. I actually rationed it so that I wouldn't finish it too quickly! I love Stephen King, but not everything he writes. I adore his early and mid-career horror novels, but I got turned off by a lot of his newer works starting with The Green Mile. Under the Dome gave me renewed hope, and Dr. Sleep shows that he's definitely still got it after all these years. This is a very different book than The Shining. While there is some overlap, this has nothing much to do with what happened when Dan was a little boy at the Overlook Hotel (even though the Overlook ruins feature prominently here, as do some memories about the malevolent creatures that lurked inside). This is instead a story about Dan and a new, charming main character, a young girl named Abra. Abra has "the shining" even more strongly than Dan ever did. Unfortunately, we come to learn that there is a group of very evil vampire-like creatures called The True Knot that murders children with the shining to "suck out their steam" (their shining) after slowly torturing them to death (torturing them "purified the steam"). Disguised as benevolent senior citizens in RVs, the True Knot wanders America's highways looking for "steamhead" children to kill. They use their steam as a fountain of youth, keeping themselves alive for thousands of years. Led by a stunningly beautiful woman called Rose the Hat (the members of the tribe use mobster names), these villains are very interesting and scary. As I said, I loved this book. The ending, however, slightly disappointed me. The book builds up to a spectacular showdown between Abra and Dan versus the True Knot. I was so excited for it, turning the pages on my Kindle with great anticipation. I was looking forward to a huge good vs. evil battle that King does so well (as in The Stand, for example, which had an ending I loved). I won't write any spoilers here, but I was disappointed. It wasn't terrible by any means, but it did leave me saying "That's it? Seriously?" At the same time, I went back and re-read the climax several times, proving it was still enjoyable. I also would have liked more history about the True Knot members. The story about their murder of the baseball boy was horrific and terrifying. It almost crossed the line into being "too much" (I am not a fan of torture porn horror stories), but in the end it thankfully gave us a break from that. Still, I wanted more! I wanted to know about each member of the tribe, where they came from, their history, and more stories about their murders and their victims. Aside from the baseball boy and their desire to harm Abra, however, we didn't get to know very much. Some people say in their reviews that they thought the True Knot members were too hammy. I disagree. I enjoyed their quips and didn't mind them being a little bit over the top sometimes. These weren't crude caricatures of villains. They had a softer side although it was never really explored. They loved each other and sometimes tried to justify their murders by saying they have to do it to live. I would have liked learning more about them. I guess something had to be cut from this already quite lengthy novel, but I absolutely didn't find the book too long as it was at all. I do agree with some of the reviews that say they got tired of all the AA sayings and focus on alcohol abuse and sobriety. Honestly, it got old. That said, I recognize this came from King's personal experience and heart, so I didn't mind it as much as I otherwise might. I just don't want to hear about it again in future King novels. All in all, I highly recommend the book without any hesitation. It isn't King's best, but in my opinion it is in his top 5. That's quite a compliment. I sincerely hope King keeps on writing these horror novels. If you're looking for a scary story, get ready for Dr. Sleep.

One warm, clear fall afternoon in 1977 in the far northern `super boonies' of Chicago, a friend--my next door neighbor--sat with me on my deck enjoying a beer. One thing we had in common was that we both enjoyed reading, and so as we sat there relaxing we shared some of our tastes in books and authors. As a boy, I always liked horror and science fiction, and cut my reading teeth on the likes of Edgar Allen Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, and HP Lovecraft. Then, as a young adult, I graduated to Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Fredric Brown and William Peter Blatty. My friend inquired if I had ever read any books by a guy named Stephen King. No, I replied, Stephen King wasn't familiar to me. He spoke a little about Stephen King's first book, `Carrie,' and then launched into a glowing description of King's then latest book `The Shining,' which he had just finished. He offered to lend me his copy. I accepted, and thus began my on-again off- again relationship with the works of Stephen King that has lasted from 1977 to this present day. I liked `The Shining' so much that I immediately started reading everything Stephen King I could get my hands on. That lasted for several years, until, in 1983, King published `Pet Sematary', a book I did not enjoy at all. After that I was more `off' with Stephen King than I was on. However, `The Shining' along with `The Stand' are the two Stephen King books that I enjoyed the most and consider to be his `best.' I give those two books five stars. Every other Stephen King book that I have read--including `Doctor Sleep'--will of necessity receive fewer stars from me than those two. `Doctor Sleep' is a `sequel' to `The Shining' in a narrow sense: the little boy Danny Torrance featured in the earlier book has grown up to be an, forty-something Dan Torrance, who is still psychically gifted, but is now carrying around a head full of haunting, scary memories and some very adult appurtenant problems. `Doctor Sleep' picks up many years after the end of the earlier book, and the story line and theme is entirely new. King keeps the pace a little slow in the beginning of the book as he lays down the setup for the story. We see little Danny Torrance back in the Overlook Hotel, where his father is going homicidally insane, and we briefly see his terrified mother Wendy and--oh yes--the malevolent spirits that inhabit the Overlook. Then we jump to grownup Dan, haunted now by his past and his memories, drinking alcoholically in a vain effort to medicate them away . After that we meet the True Knot, a group of flesh and blood but almost immortal psychic vampires who travel around in RV's. While these folk look like harmless retirees, most of them are actually hundreds of years old. They avoid aging by preying on psychically gifted children whom they abduct, torture, and murder in order to release and consume their psychic energy or, as the True Knot people call it, `steam.' Then we meet a very young girl named Abra who `shines' bigger and brighter than Dan/Danny ever has. Abra is both telepathic and telekinetic--a composite of younger Danny and King's famous character `Carrie'--and at a very young age, she `finds' Dan telepathically and connects to him by telekinetically writing on a blackboard. As the story line unspools, Abra reaches adolescence, and her powerful `shine' permits her to psychically witness, over a great distance, the True Knot in nefarious action. Of course, this gets Abra on the True Knot's radar screen, with just the kind of looming menace for Abra that readers of Stephen King expect. This is when `Doctor Sleep' really hits its stride as a page turner. One of the joys of reading Stephen King for me is how well he lays out and develops his characters. Dan is very believable as a grown up Danny. He still has `the shining' but it has matured and changed texture. I liked how Dan had learned from his old mentor from `The Shining'--Dick Halloran--to cope with the spirits and visions that his shining brings him. Also, King, himself a recovering alcoholic, goes into some very descriptive nitty-gritty's of just how bad Dan's alcoholism became, and how Alcoholics Anonymous helped turn him around. Some may find that part of the story a bit of a digression, but it does make Dan's character seem much more human and real, and some of the characters from Dan's AA group play key roles later in the book. The character of Abra is well developed and appealing. Her youthful exuberance and self confidence--indeed over confidence in her own ability--made her character come alive and also serve to put her increasingly in harms way as the story unfolds. Abra's overprotective parents, and her elderly grandmother were great foils for Abra as well. Unfortunately, the `True Knot' characters fell a little short, and were neither as vivid or as menacing as some of the villains King has conjured up in other books. Just recall Randall Flagg and Trashcan Man in `The Stand,' Jack Torrance in `The Shining,' and Annie Wilkes in `Misery.' The True Knot's bunch of older, gray haired retirees in Hawaiian shirts driving big expensive motor homes are a bit of a stretch to imagine transforming into creepy, vampire-like child murderers. The best of the True Knot characters is their leader, Rose, and King does make her memorable, but like the rest of the Knots, she needed a booster shot when it comes to creepiness and menace. Even with the shortcomings of the True Knot, the story line of `Doctor Sleep' holds together. The tension in the story is generated by the Knot's hot pursuit of young Abra and her `big steam' and Dan's battle with his alcoholic tendencies. There is room for improvement--the story would have been better if King had let the True Knot's evil have more of a romp--but he keeps the story rolling right up until the book's end in fine Dan Brown page turning fashion. Some other reviews I have read complained that King telegraphs the ending of the story early on. I mostly agree with that criticism but it didn't detract bother me, because the way the book needed to end was obvious to me. King delivered the ending in a dramatically satisfying way, and tied up the loose ends quite nicely, leaving little on the table story-wise to serve as a jumping off point for any future book. Somehow, I doubt that King, now sixty-six years old, intends to revisit Abra thirty odd years later like he did with Danny/Dan. To sum up, Doctor Sleep is not King's very best book--maybe not even in his top ten--but it is an entertaining and fun read, and well worth what I paid for the Kindle edition.

Stephen King's THE SHINING is a classic to which I never expected to read a sequel, yet DOCTOR SLEEP came seemingly out of nowhere and now that I've read it it's hard to imagine either complete without the other. This is a very different reading experience than the original, yet it dovetails beautifully with the first and emerges a modern epic that's so much more than the sum of its parts. Far more than a simple horror story, it picks up with Dan Torrance from childhood after his fateful winter in the Overlook (odds are, you already know that story), the follows him through the lowest rock-bottom of his young adulthood, to unexpected heroic redemption as he confronts the demons of his past. Ultimately the continuing history of Torrance family and their troubled history (both in battles with inner demons in the form of alcoholism and apparent weirdness-magnetism through the gift-curse of the shining) offers both a ripping modern supernatural adventure yarn while giving the original tale some extra full-circle closure and extra emotional resonance it (and a certain character who gets an unexpected final-say appearance) always deserved. In addition to further development of Dan Torrance up through middle age (with a welcome early reappearance by Dick Halloran), Abra Stone and Rose the Hat of the True Knot become equally fleshed-out, fascinating characters you will never forget. One of King's most fascinating (and often darkly comical) accomplishments is how in many ways the villains here become as fleshed-out and -in many ways--likeable as our heroes Dan and Abra. He never lets us forget that the Knot is a pack of corrupt monsters who need to be stopped, and their arrogant aloofness amidst the suffering they inflict calls to mind the hubris of society's all-too-real empowered, self-entitled villains. Yet evil people don't think of themselves as evil, something of which King is clearly maturely aware. Within their closed society, perpetuating their semi-immortality by torturing and murdering us "steam-head rubes" is as normal as eating a cheeseburger, and their interpersonal squabbling, their shared daily joys and sorrows, are as real as those between you and your own closest friends and family. When they suffer loss among their own, you feel the grief with them accordingly. That's not to be mistaken for King dealing in "moral ambiguity". You won't hesitate to cheer for for Dan and Abra as they learn together to embrace their power and take the bastards down. It must be addressed, much of King's work (particularly his later stuff, and there I'll largely be the first to agree) has been called to task for a self-indulgently bloated style, as though at some point he went "To hell with listening to an editor; I'm Stephen Freaking King!" Such is not the case here - This is a hefty chunk of reading, but make no mistake, there's no wasted space. King found himself a *lot* of story to tell here, and the gears click into place as they need to, a step at a time while at a snappy pace. There are lengthy asides of supporting character development, where a lesser writer would have me going, "Okay...okay...why exactly do I need to know all this?" yet King merely spurred me to turn the pages faster, eager to learn how this complex tapestry all ties together. That's how you know you're in the hands of a master. This is a tale rich in all the nuance and detail a great epic character-driven story needs, with nothing it doesn't. There's not much more I can tell you without giving too much away, but suffice it to say, by the ending of this, I could stand to spend another book or two with some of these characters. Certainly it's reminded me why I've loved Stephen King since I was Abra's age. This book shows him in top form, and it's a masterpiece.

I’m one of those people that started reading King at a very early age, probably in Jr. High, and _The Shining_ as well as most of his early work like _It_ and _Pet Sematary_ scared me, really scared me. I’m not so easily frightened anymore and find myself disappointed by most horror novels. While _Doctor Sleep_ wasn’t scary, though there were disturbing passages, the story was great. I enjoyed getting to know adult Danny Torrence and his dark past as he struggled with alcoholism. I mean, how effed up will a person be after being traumatized by ghosts and nearly killed by their possessed father? Danny’s development was realistic, given his past. But there were so many great characters. One of my favorite characters of all time is “Dick” Holleran, Danny’s mentor. Dick is also one of the strongest African American characters in King’s work, and I remember him more than others for his kindness and bravery; in _Doctor Sleep_, the wisdom he offered Danny was profound. When “Dick” teaches young Danny to trap ghosts that are still haunting him in a box, that was brilliant! Dick’s backstory of child abuse was one of the most horrifying sections of the novel. I loved that he had a role to play in this sequel. Likewise, I enjoyed the True Knot characters; they were monstrous, and their family-like culture was disturbing and fascinating. And of course, Abbra was a delight. Her anger made her such a dynamic character. I hope to see more of her in future work. The twist at the end of the novel and how Danny and Abbra were connected was brilliant and unexpected. I do have one bit of criticism. I made the mistake of watching the movie before I read the book (like six times), and the baseball boy death scene gives me chills every time I watch it. Even if I hadn’t done that, I was expecting more from the baseball boy death scene in the book. That would have elevated the horror for me. Yes, as I reader, I knew he was made to suffer and that it took a long time, Rose the main antagonist, liked blood from her hands after her heinous crime, but I would have appreciated more description of what the True Knot did to purify the steam. Overall, though, I really enjoyed binge-reading this book. I recommend it, especially if you’re a fan of _The Shining_. I look forward to reading the sequel to _The Talisman_ and _Holly_ which I already pre-ordered. King’s work just gets better and better.

This book feels like a special gift from Stephen King to his Constant Readers who have stuck by him faithfully through the long dark years from 1987 until now. If you loved almost everything Stephen King wrote from The Long Walk through the Big Four (Carrie, 'Salem's Lot, The Shining, and the original version of The Stand) to the magnum opus that was IT, and right up through Misery, and then felt like at that point aliens had kidnapped him and replaced him with an overly verbose imposter who had gained the power to reject any and all editing advice and had lost the ability to write anything with the raw, emotional power of the final scenes of IT, then this book is for you. If after reading the overly long natural disasters called the Tommyknockers, Needful Things, Dreamcatcher, Duma Key, etc., you stuck it out anyway, this book is for you. If you read the 1400+ page new version of The Stand and were dumbstruck at the ability of an author to destroy one of the best books ever written, but stuck it out anyway, this book is for you. If after finishing the last four books of The Dark Tower saga, you stacked the entire series on the barbecue grill in your back yard and purified them of the evil contained within by setting them on fire, this book is for you. If you read THE PASSAGE by Justin Cronin and thought to yourself, "This is the Stephen King book I have been waiting for since 1987," this book is for you. Most importantly, if you recoiled in fear when you heard that the alien who had replaced Stephen King was going to write a sequel to THE SHINING!!!, and were terrified beyond any scare you ever received from a Stephen King novel (even 'Salem's Lot) at the prospect that poor old Danny Torrance, who should have received enough punishment at the Overlook Hotel for any one lifetime, was about to be "Black Housed" and suffer the Lovecroftian fate ("it was too horrible to describe") of Jack Sawyer from the Talisman, THIS BOOK IS FOR YOU!!! It is truly safe to go back in the water. The Tommyknocker aliens have come back to earth, and put the original Stephen King back in his body again. Don't pass go, don't collect $200, go directly to your favorite bookstore and get this book! This book hops and moves from the very first page and never stops going. It's as if the best parts of Carrie, 'Salem's Lot, The Shining, The Stand, and Firestarter got mixed up in a bottle, shaken AND stirred, and then got poured out onto the page where they were melded together in a more mature tone and voice in which the life experiences (alcoholism, drug abuse, even the aftermath of the accident) of the Master inform the narrative in a gut wrenchingly honest way that isn't the least bit polemic. There is none of the 300 pages of bloated, unneccessary character development filler that characterized so many of the Stephen King books of the last 20+ years (did anyone else out there feel sick to their stomach that they actually waded through every page of INSOMNIA waiting for the payoff that never came???). And there are none of the horrible "don't turn the page if you can't handle the truth" endings like in Black House and The Dark Tower. This is a pure, stripped down sports car of a novel that feels like it poured out of the Master's typewriter in one long writing session. This book is so good it more than makes up for the sheer horror of reading The Regulators, 11/22/63, Under the Dome, and every other bloated mess of a novel we Constant Readers faithfully endured. I truly had given up hope that I would ever be able to read a real Stephen King novel again. It's the kind of feeling you get when you realize there will never be another Harry Potter novel ever again. Thank you, Stephen King, THANK YOU!!! This book was a trip down memory lane to being huddled under the covers with a flashlight and a King masterpiece you just couldn't put down. If any of the above struck a chord with you and you are still debating whether or not to read this book, debate no more - GET THIS BOOK NOW!! THE MASTER IS BACK!!!

I love a book that can elicit strong emotions from the reader. This is one such book. Several events within the story literally made me stop mid sentence from shock, go back, and reread certain passages. They were that shocking and amazing. At another point, later in the book, after having grown so attached to the characters, I came to a point that indicated an outcome so devastating that I got mad and put the book down - but only for about an hour before I was overcome by the temptation to read more. I finished the book yesterday, and I enjoyed it so much, I still feel the high from the adventure. Dan Torrence is now an adult. He is plagued by his past; the aftermath of the Overlook incident, his father's death, his Shining abilities, alcoholism, and chronic unemployment/homelessness. After hitting rock bottom, he finds himself in a small AA community in New Hampshire where he is able to get help. Eventually, he lands a job at a senior living/hospice facility where his abilities help the dying elderly as they pass and he earns the moniker "Dr. Sleep." It is during his tenure at the hospice that he is frequently visited by a mysterious entity... Abra Stone is a special thirteen-year-old girl who, like Dan Torrence, is born with psychic gifts - the Shining. Her powers are far greater than most with the Shining, even greater than Dan's. She has limited control over her abilities and when she uses them to investigate the death of a boy about her age that she is discovered by a group of inhuman, vampire-like creatures who feed off of children with the Shining. Fearful that these creatures (known as the True Knot) will come after her, she reaches out to the one person who can help her... King does an excellent job describing Dan's struggles and hardships. The reader feels compassionate towards Dan, hoping for the best for him. King also does a great job bringing Abra to life, describing an amazing young girl who is strong, yet susceptible to childhood/adolescent fears. She is smart, but also too young to face a small army of adversaries alone. She has an easily likeable personality. I highly recommend this book. It is well worth every penny. The reader is taken on an amazing adventure into Dan Torrence's adult life and the plots twists and turns keeps the reader on his/her toes, uncertain if all the heroes and heroines overcome the True Knot unscathed.

I really enjoyed this book, but perhaps I enjoyed it because I had different expectations than it seems some readers did. First, I'm not particularly a King fan anymore. I loved his early work, and I believe The Shining is my favorite of his novels (followed closely by The Stand), but I haven't followed him much since, and some of his later books I have not enjoyed. I reread The Shining last year, and I think I maybe enjoyed even more than I did on previous reads, when I was younger and read it for horror rather than for what I now think of as the subtleties of the book. Like another reviewer here, I see The Shining as a novel of psychological horror even more than being a ghost story: to me the scariest parts were the ways in which Jack Torrance's rage and alcoholism destroyed himself and almost destroyed his family. That was a real horror to me. While I love the rest of the story, especially the scary hotel itself, it is the characterization and the portrayals of an alcoholic that really stuck with me. So I was actually quite pleased to see that Dr. Sleep does the same thing: it dwells on characterization, especially of Dan Torrance. Another thing about me as a reader is while I enjoy some horror, I much prefer atmospheric, gothic horror to gore, and I tend to also be a reader of literary fiction. So I was not going into this novel looking for shocks or a certain kind of horror. I do see that this book is, perhaps, not typical of most horror novels, though, which was fine with me. That said, I found much to enjoy in this book. What this book does well is characterization, and Dan Torrance was a complex character. As some readers have noted, the early chapters hit on tough subjects: child sexual abuse, extreme alcoholism, etc. Dan, like his father, Jack, was not likeable when he was drinking. I will say I was a bit worried by those first chapters: I thought that if the book had to much about child sexual abuse, I didn't want to read it. But that was one character's history, and while certainly what the True Knot did to children with the Shining was awful, it was not in that realm, and also, it was not so explicitly described that I felt it was too much. Once I got past the opening, though, and once Dan found stopped drinking, it improved. While some reviewers here said Dan was boring, I didn't think he was at all; I actually felt invested him in a character, and so I was also invested in his sobriety. I felt the same about the AA parts--it's not a world I'm familiar with, but I found it interesting, and believable and it made him more of a compelling character to me, and I liked to think that this might also be the writer's experience, and I like to see the way writers integrate their personal history and experiences into fiction. As for his role as "Dr. Sleep," that was one of my favorite parts of all; I found Dan's work as psychopomp moving and intriguing, especially because it was the dead who had caused him so much trouble as a child. For me, reading this book was much like it seems King meant it: I was getting to find out what happened to a character that was almost like an old friend, and for me it was wonderful to see what had happened to that brilliant, wounded child, and to see the man he grew into, even with his flaws. But then again, unlike some readers, I always have found Danny the more compelling character of The Shining; I never found Jack Torrance that sympathetic. And as for villains, Rose and the True Knot were as good of villains as you may find, scary and rapacious. I do wish we could have found a bit more about their history through time, though. and I did love how King played with the idea of them being RVers....that was a witty touch. There were other witty touches too: references to other books and characters, and even authors--yes, we see their names. I'll always think of Eliot's "Hurry up Please, it's Time" in a different way now! There were some things I had problems with though. I wanted to love Abra, but.....I had to make an effort. She was a bit too much: too perfect, too beautiful, smart, the warrior queen. Could she have had one flaw other than the temper, something which she actually needed? She was not as complex to me as some of the other characters, even as some of the more minor characters. I also found the plot a bit.....slack? It seemed in some ways not enough was on the line, and while I didn't know the specifics of the ending before reading it, the outcome seemed a bit obvious. I didn't need great chills and gore, but a bit more narrative tension would have improved things. And there was also one rather major plot detail that was just too much of a coincidence for my taste. I won't say what it is, but it's related to Abra's "theory of relativity." And finally, while Dan's "secret" was not something to be proud of, it didn't seem quite as horrible as he played it up. Of course that's part of the point; the shame he carries is a weight somewhat unrelated to the long past action. However, I still found it not as interesting as it could have been. Some people have suggested it wasn't a sequel, which just puzzles me. Of course it was. It had many of the same characters, and knowing the first book (NOT the movie! You need to read the book!) makes this book much more powerful and resonant. No, we don't get some of the same characters/settings, but, um, the Overlook Hotel is gone, and of course it can't be the same. Anyway, while it wasn't the best book I've ever read, and not as good as The Shining itself, it is still a novel worth reading if you enjoyed the first one, and for me it was wonderful to spend a day or two with Danny, who seemed like an old friend, and old friend who'd been through terrible hardship (some of his own making), but had come through it older and wiser, a flawed man who still had something to give.