racial prejudice, but the plot is not consistently
strong enough to hold the reader’s attention. Thor’s
Hammer(2000) is for children. Shetterly has never
been prolific at shorter length but has produced
several very fine short stories, including “The
Princess Who Kicked Butt” (1993), “Oldthings”
(1994), and “Taken He Cannot Be” (1995). He is
not likely to build a stronger following unless he be-
gins to appear more regularly. His most recent
novel, Chimera(2000), is science fiction.
The Shining Stephen King(1977)
With his second novel, ’SALEM’S LOT (1975),
Stephen KINGproduced a vampire novel that was
also a major best-seller. With his third, The Shining,
he did the same for the haunted house story, in this
case an entire hotel, although the ghosts are not
necessarily those of the dead. The hotel is more
properly speaking a “bad place,” a physical location
that has become a kind of gathering place for evil,
where past events and present tensions can gener-
ate physical manifestations as well as psychological
pressure on those who venture within range.
The Overlook is a large resort hotel cut off
from the outside world by snow during the winter
and is therefore closed and tenanted only by a
caretaker and his family. The previous caretaker
became unbalanced and murdered his family, so
Jack, a frustrated, alcoholic writer, and his wife and
child move in as their last desperate attempt to
allow Jack to write his novel. The manifestations of
evil start almost at once, although it is only the
boy, Danny, who is aware of them at first. Danny
has a psychic power that the departing hotel cook
refers to as the “shining,” an ability to see things
invisible to the rest of us, and to communicate
telepathically with others, such as the cook, who
shares his talent.
Danny becomes increasingly disturbed by the
manifestations—a rotting animated corpse in one
room, visions of twin girls drenched in blood, topi-
ary shapes that change position, warning messages
from an older version of himself—but it is his fa-
ther, Jack, who becomes most affected by the
hotel, his personality seduced by its ingrained evil.
The change is slow and insidious, exploiting Jack’s
flaws and suppressing his good side. He eventually
becomes insane and attempts to murder his family,
who escape only because of Danny’s resourceful-
ness and the intercession of the sympathetic cook.
The Shiningis a powerful book because Jack’s
collapse and subversion are a genuine tragedy.
Through it all he continues to love his son, even
when he is driven into fits of insane, murderous
fury. Two film versions have appeared. The first, re-
leased theatrically in 1980, takes rather cavalier
liberties with the plot but is considered one of the
great horror films. The second, produced for televi-
sion in 1997, is more loyal to the original but dra-
matically less interesting.Shirley, John(1953– )
John Shirley has built a strong reputation for him-
self in both science fiction and horror, although it
is in the latter direction that he has been moving
most recently. Although most of his short fiction
during the late 1970s was for science fiction mar-
kets, Dracula in Love(1979) is a vampire novel, a
very unorthodox variation on the original story by
Bram STOKER. Shirley concentrates on the ritualis-
tic side of Dracula’s bloodletting, with fairly strong
sexual content for that time. His leanings toward
both genres became more obvious in City Come A-
Walkin’(1980), set in a future in which the city of
San Francisco has become a hotbed of violent
forces rapidly descending toward chaos. The spirit
of the city manifests itself as a physical being and
takes a hand in its own future in a very original, al-
though not entirely convincing, fashion. The novel
did garner him considerable attention, however,
and is often cited as an early example of cyber-
punk, a trend toward urban-based, nihilistic sci-
ence fiction.
Cellars(1982) is a much more conventional
horror tale. Another city is torn apart as a super-
natural force possesses literally scores of children,
evidence of the reawakening of the cult of Ahri-
man. It is less original than his previous novels but
technically very well done and genuinely scary.
Shirley really hit his stride with In Darkness Waiting
(1988), in which a new cult is revealed to be the
offshoot of the awakening of a creature that lies
dormant in every human mind, a holdover from
prehistory. That same year saw publication of his318 The Shining