By Stephen King
Scribner (544 pages, $30)
Mrs. Massey, the decomposing woman from Room 217, shows up on page five. Tony, the little boy who lives inside Danny Torrance's mouth, appears soon afterwards. And REDRUM is just around the corner. Stephen King's eagerly awaited sequel to his seminal 1977 novel "The Shining -- his most popular work and one of his best -- picks up immediately after the end of the first book.
The young Danny and his mother Wendy received a large settlement from the corporate owners of the Overlook Hotel and wound up living in Tampa. The Overlook's former head chef, Dick Halloran, lives in Key West and drops in on them from time to time. The memories of that horrible winter -- when Danny's alcoholic dad Jack lost his mind and went after his wife and son with a croquet mallet -- are still fresh. And some of the ghosts and monsters that terrorized the family at the Colorado resort have followed them to the East Coast.
Anyone who knows "The Shining" only from Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation, which made radical departures from the text, may be a bit confused at first. But after that brief prologue, "Doctor Sleep" jumps ahead two decades and sets out on its own narrative path. Wendy, a lifelong smoker, has died of lung cancer. Danny, who is now 30 and goes by Dan, has become his father's son, an alcoholic loser who can't hold down a job. In one of the book's best and earliest chapters, "Mama," he wakes up hung over in the shabby apartment of a woman whose name he can barely remember, his face bloodied and bruised, his wallet empty, trying to figure out where he is.
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