I came late to the Stephen King party.   His books first hit the national consciousness when I was a teenager and at the time, I decided they were bad.  Not because of the subject matter; I’ve been terrifying myself with stories since I first picked up a book.  No those early stories were poorly written, in my opinion, fiction man-handled onto a page by someone without subtly or regard for language.  Except for the film adaptations, I ignored the man’s output until 1999 (which is a separate tale in itself) when I found the author everyone else had been yakking about for decades.  I am sure some of Mr. King’s writing skill improved through sheer practice and I hope he’s had help from the best editors in the business but I’d guess the single greatest factor that improved the man’s work is his sobriety.  His later books have a focus that was missing in his earlier work.. Nothing shows the change more than comparing the two stories of Danny Torrence: The Shining and Doctor Sleep.

The Shining is, of course, the account of the Torrence family’s tragic adventures in the Overlook Hotel.  Jack Torrence tries to turn his life around by abstaining from liquor while he takes care of the closed hotel and writes a new work.  Danny is the precious child who can “see” the malevolent spirits that inhabit the Overlook.  Unfortunately, Jack’s sobriety  and anger are contained solely by his internal resolve and those disintegrate under the pressure of the hotel’s supernatural forces.  Jack’s death is the last merciful gift he can give to his son.

Doctor Sleep is more about the problems of sobriety: how do you grab it and how do you keep it.  By the time Dan (formerly Danny) Torrence reaches the age his father was when they saw the Overlook, Dan is sleeping under a bridge.  The compulsion to drink is part of what drives Dan but another part is self-medication:  booze puts a damper on the visions he still gets from “the shining”.  Caught between the misery he’s made of his life with the bottle and the horrible visions that still come visiting, Danny takes the chance his father never really grabbed on to.  Dan finds a sponsor and a support group and starts the long grind of learning how to exist without booze.

Dan has a long road to travel both with his sobriety and with his visions but it’s shorter on drama than The Shining.  Getting sober is a choice made moment to moment for millions of moments at a time but a lot of those moments are quiet.  There’s not a lot of ongoing drama.  Oh, King has a reasonable horror plot to keep the reader interested and it has ties into Danny’s sobriety but it doesn’t have the inexorable draw of the Overlook.  The “Big Bad” is not as central to the story.

Judged side by side, The Shining is the stronger story. There’s enough in the novel (forget the Kubrick movie) to make you like the Torrence family and hope that they survive.  Jack’s wife, Wendy, isn’t a complete nebbish and Jack’s anger, in the end, is not his own.  This decent little family, already stressed by disease, has no chance against the monolithic hotel.  What they achieve is against great odds and that makes a compelling story.

Still, I reread Doctor Sleep more than The Shining because it’s a pleasure to read.  I’m not counting cliches on the pages or waiting for the plot to coalesce.  Danny’s journey may have less drama than his father’s but Dan is easier to understand and relate to, shining powers not withstanding.  At the end of the famous novel, I pitied Jack Torrence; I trust his grown son, Dan.

Part of this is due to skills Mr. King has polished in the thirty-six years between these books but most of it must be from his own sobriety.  With a less linear story, King manages to build a compelling tale in Doctor Sleep and keep a balanced narrative that lets the reader follow multiple plots until the point they converge.   That takes a bit of doing.  The author that loves pop references and slang is still here but the vernacular doesn’t overwhelm the prose. And the writer’s insights are clearer in Doctor Sleep.  In execution, the sequel is better.

In the end, it doesn’t matter which the reader prefers, the early book or the later one.  But it matters when any human being was able to face a life-threatening compulsion and step away from it, one day at a time now for decades.   As the old saying goes, “where there’s life, there’s hope.”  And where’s hope, there’s creation.  Enough creation and eventually you may find art.