Stephen King Doctor Sleep (Paperback) - Common

The book I was sent had a different cover. The one star is not for the story. It’s for the seller. The story deserves five stars, the seller deserves one...I hate false advertising.

However, ordered a paperback version and received a hardback. While it isn't a HUGE deal, it certainly makes enjoying the book harder due to weird liking of reading only paperbacks.

I didn’t get the edition with the cover in the photo, but other than that everything was perfect.

Stephen King did not like Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of his book “The Shining” in 1980. He then supported Mick Garris’s TV miniseries based on the same novel in 1997, twenty years after the publication of the book. And later in his life, he produced a sequel to the first novel in 2013, Doctor Sleep, and then Mike Flanagan adapted this sequel to the silver screen in 2019. We are dealing here with this film adaptation.On December 14, 2013, I committed a long review of the book that is easy to find on Amazon. This film densifies the sequel of “The Shining,” and yet keeps the new elements of the book “Doctor Sleep.” We are dealing with supernatural beings, some might call them creatures, who kidnap children to kill them slowly with a lot of pain in order to recuperate the breath of these kids that carries their suffering. These creatures live on the pain they cause in these children. They are a caricature of pedophiles and their sadistic nature is excused in a way by them being non-human, plain bags of ashes. To make it worse Stephen King chooses to have a female ringleader, and, in the film, she is the worst possible fascinator that mesmerizes the children with some easy magic in order to captivate their attention and get them off the road easily, meaning without any shouting. The film insinuates at least two or three times that these suffering-eaters are not very well-nourished, as if in the USA there were not between 20,000 and 30,000 missing children every year any longer. Be reassured: there is a lot of fresh meat and a lot of suffering under torture in this juvenile flesh to satiate a band of seven or eight creatures of this sort. Let them go out hunting, and in fact, they are out hunting since so many children go missing without leaving any traces behind them.But Stephen Kling in this film manages to have the last third that is a remake of Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, including some actors like Scatman Crothers who is the Black cook that could communicate with Danny Torrance, the son of Jack Torrance who lost his marbles in the Overlook Hotel. It is weird to have that visual remake because it seems to show that there is some nostalgia, even if it is negative, about the old film. It is definitely not subtle at all and that makes this long final sequence slightly déjà vu, hence not that original. The only new character is Rose the Hat, but she is a little bit overrated. Her magic is slightly too simple, and it is easily neutralized by the other characters, including Abra Stone who is rarely real in the hands of Rose the Hat.The very end is a sloppy Christian collage with Abra Stone talking to Dan Torrance and her father who are both on the other side. I guess that is good solace for the girl who should be traumatized, and it is also a good way to deal with the trauma by making it into a mental psychosis. All that sounds sort of slightly easy, all the more since we are in the winter and the Hotel does not have a caretaker, which is definitely impossible because someone has to keep the furnace going. But that is in conformity with what Stephen King explained in the past. The Hotel is not inhabited by some demon of any sort. The Hotel itself is evil by nature. Not even haunted as some episode of the original novel and film could make us think, but really evil because the Hotel is a creature of some kind, a being of some sort. Stanley Kubrick insisted on the fact that some demonic beings inhabited the Hotel, and these were coming from the past and had been the victims and the actors of some drama. Hence their ghosts were haunting the Hotel. For Stephen King, the Hotel is evil in its own deepest essence. There is in the very structure of the Hotel an element that makes the building evil. In fact, it is typical of many Hotels: you could go around and around in the Hotel without ever coming to a dead end. In other words, it is built on a sort of circle and that circle is vicious. This is emphasized in this film by the kid, Danny Torrance as a child, pedaling around the hotel without any end, around and around. This is an important fear with many people, in their dreams but also in their finding themselves in a new city or building and having the experience of going around and around without ever getting to any place of interest, without ever being able to step out. But the fact this film is a sequel to another film – the same thing for the novels – is itself a vicious circle of that sort. We beat about the bush without really getting to the core of the problem and secret. It would be interesting to explore the various living-dead that are in Dan Torrance's mental boxes. It is not done and that is a shame. At the same time, the psychopomp dimension of Dan Torrance in the retiring hospital is hardly explored really. Just one fast case and no explanation, nor real human dimension. Once again Dan Torrance is like that and after all, everyone can be the same or some other type of witchdoctor or death-shaman.The film is well done but it does not really push any question to some deep reflection or even emotion. The pedophile dimension is varnished over with some vague frightening shining substance that makes it nearly normal, after all. In a way, these kids are even begging for it with their vicious curiosity. Don’t put your fingers in the cranking wheels of such impulsive desires, otherwise, you will normally get hurt and have no standing and no merit to ask for compensation of damages.Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU