Why Stephen King's The Shining is Literary

And a manifesto about what "literary" means

Stephen King’s house in Bangor, Maine.

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I posted a Note the other day that got a fair amount of traction. While reading Stephen King’s The Shining (1977), I wondered why there was so much bashing about King not being literary. Because The Shining definitely is.

The most liked comment on my Note, by far, was this one from Sherman Alexie:

The Literarian Gazette disagreed with me in a restack, which was also popular, so I interpreted that as a healthy chorus of boooos:

Of all the comments, Images of Broken Light offered my favorite sentiment:

And yet, worry I do, so I figured I’d write my personal manifesto about The Shining and what “literary” means.

First, a little backstory.

I spent decades turning up my nose at the mention of King. Word on the street – my MFA-literary street – was that King wasn’t literary. And my jam was, and still is, literary. Off the top of my head, some of my favorite living writers are Margaret Atwood, Olga Tokarczuk, Elena Ferrante, and Donna Tartt. In addition, I’ve never met a classic I didn’t love. Two years ago I read King’s Firestarter, then The Outsider, Holly, and The Shining, and I will definitely read more.

Second, a framework for understanding what follows.

I very much enjoyed Leigh Stein’s point about literary + [genre], but I actually think it might work better swapped, like this, [genre] + literary. In other words, the best genre novels have literary components: depth, style, and character texture and development.

When a book is set in a remote, haunted hotel-mansion in which a father loses his mind and tries to murder his whole family, lingering a fair amount on the gory bits throughout, we must say it is a horror novel. Therefore, The Shining is horror + literary.

If we can agree (and maybe we can’t) that “literary” means depth, style, and character texture and development, The Shining has it all, plus consequential action: this happens, then this happens, and because of that, this other thing happens (i.e., plot).

Third, the gristle.

Jack Torrance accepts an over-wintering caretaker job at a remote, upscale hotel, bringing his wife and young son with him. We learn the family’s backstory: Jack has a history of alcoholism and has been fired from his cushy teaching job in New England. Wendy has struggled with the fact that her husband has been physically and emotionally abusive, and wonders if she should have left him after Jack broke their son’s arm in a scuffle. Five-year-old Danny can communicate with other people using only his mind and has disturbing spells of premonition. (I’m checking the box for depth here.)

Each of these characters start the novel in one place (emotionally, physically, spiritually) and end in a different place. Along the way, we come to know them, their external histories and their interior lives. Along the way, they are changed. (Check, character texture and development.)

If real estate is about location, “literary” is about style. Style encompasses stuff like diction (unique or uniquely used words), interesting/beautiful/striking sentences and turns of phrase, unusual or inventive form, and bold imagery and metaphors. Literary merit helps a book stand the test of time. It’s no small feat that The Shining is almost fifty years old and yet still punches me in the face while I’m reading it.

Throughout the novel, King uses words we don’t see every day on the page: bazoo, roque, mewled, ruck, redrum, Lloydy-my-boy, el birdos, skinny-shanks wife, Overlookiana, knurled, squittering, and more. Wow but these are fun! Unique! Upon reading them, my wee little eyes shoneth with joy (in particular Overlookiana, which I mulled over while cooking dinner that night since in addition to being an avid reader, I’m a bit of an antiques whore. I love -iana everything). Joy is the beating heart of reading a great novel. A great novel engages all of your senses. You feel it. You smell it. You think about it while cooking dinner. Joy!

As for the sentences and turns of phrase, here are a few I found intriguing.:

• “His eyes were soaped windows.”

• “His relationship with his father had been like the unfurling of some flower of beautiful potential, which, when wholly opened, turned out to be blighted inside.”

In addition to these being lovely, they are also seamless. They don’t feel out of place or call attention to themselves. If they did, they would break the fictive dream, which would pull us out of the joyful experience of reading this terrific story.

As for inventive form, any time Danny or Jack hallucinate, the words on the page become unhooked from grammatical rules and sentences and more like free verse poems. King relies in these scenes on italics, brackets, all caps, and parentheses to convey the disorientation of the action. In fact, Danny’s mental journey is one of the most deep, disturbing, and memorable in the novel. Reading these scenes, my senses are once again alive. I’m delighted by what I see visually on the page and how it mimics what the characters are experiencing, a complete unhinging.

I’m getting tired and rushing now, so – quickly – on the topics of striking imagery and metaphors: the fire extinguisher (who is going to put out this family’s wildfire with this old thing?); Jack with the topiary (Jack’s becoming unglued); dead lady strangles Danny (Danny is not having a good winter); unmasking at midnight (each of these characters, and reality itself, will be completely unmasked by the end of the novel).

Ultimately, if you stripped away The Shining’s style, you’d have a different, lesser book and it wouldn’t have the same gut-punching, memorable, and lasting impact.

That’s the thing. Style, depth, and character, working well together, deliver strong emotional impact on the reader, which is the difference between, say, a pulp fiction novel you breeze through and a literary novel (whether it’s genre + literary or just straight up literary fiction). A pulp novel doesn’t typically achieve pyrotechnical emotional impact. It might deliver a surprising idea or a neat trick, but it doesn’t stay with you and rearrange your mind and heart in the same way. That’s why people love literary fiction (or genre + literary): it rewires you. It surprises and delights you page by page, even when a dead lady is strangling a little boy.

And with that, love until next time.