‘The Shining‘, published in 1977, is nominally about a haunted hotel. Underneath, it is about a father whose drinking makes him dangerous to his wife and son, and King has acknowledged that he wrote Jack Torrance without fully recognising that he was writing about himself. His well-known hostility to Stanley Kubrick’s film rests partly on this. The adaptation, in his view, lost the man fighting and failing to stay sober, which was the only thing the book was really about.
