Since The Shining was published in 1977, it has become an American classic, thanks not only to the book itself but also to the Stanley Kubrick film that it spawned, and King has become one of the most successful horror writers of all time. His latest novel, a highly anticipated sequel to The Shining, marks a return to form for the old master, who reunites loyal readers with Danny (now Dan) Torrance. Decades after the events at the Overlook Hotel, Dan is wrestling with his own demons and putting his psychic abilities to work at a series of nursing homes where he provides comfort to dying patients. When he finally finds a home-and sobriety-in a cozy New Hampshire town, Dan meets a young girl with a shining even stronger than his own. Together, he and young Abra Stone must take on a tribe of people called the True Knot, whose innocent, RV-driving appearance belies their true nature. VERDICT This is vintage King, a classic good-vs.-evil tale that will keep readers turning the pages late into the night. His many fans won't be disappointed. [Previewed in "A World of New Titles," LJ 7/13; see Prepub Alert, 3/4/13.]-Amy -Hoseth, Colorado State Univ. Lib., Fort Collins (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

King, not one given to sequels, throws fans a big, bloody bone with this long-drooled-for follow-up to The Shining (1977). The events of the Overlook Hotel had resounding effects upon Danny Torrance, and decades later he's a drunk like his father, wondering what his battle with the ghosties was even for. Dan still feels the pull of the shining, though, and it lands him in a small New England town where he finds friends, an AA group, and a job at a hospice, where his ability to ease patients into death earns him the moniker Doctor Sleep. Ten years sober, he telepathically meets the great white whale of shining 12-year-old Abra who has drawn the attention of the True Knot, an evil RV caravan of ­shining-eating quasi-vampires, one part Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show and one part Manson's dune-buggy attack battalion. Though the book is very poignantly bookended, the battle between Dan/Abra and the True's Queen Bitch of Castle Hell is relegated to a psychic slugfest not really the stuff of high tension. Regardless, seeing phrases like REDRUM and officious prick in print again is pretty much worth the asking price. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Even for a King book, this is high profile. The Shining is often considered King's best novel, so even lapsed fans should come out of the woodwork for this one.--Kraus, Daniel Copyright 2010 Booklist

He-e-e-e-r-e's Danny! Before an alcoholic can begin recovery, by some lights, he or she has to hit bottom. Dan Torrance, the alcoholic son of the very dangerously alcoholic father who came to no good in King's famed 1977 novel The Shining, finds his rock bottom very near, if not exactly at, the scarifying image of an infant reaching for a baggie of blow. The drugs, the booze, the one-night stands, the excruciating chain of failures: all trace back to the bad doings at the Overlook Hotel (don't go into Room 217) and all those voices in poor Dan's head, which speak to (and because of) a very special talent he has. That "shining" is a matter of more than passing interest for a gang of RV-driving, torture-loving, soul-sucking folks who aren't quite folks at all--the True Knot, about whom one particularly deadly recruiter comments, "They're not my friends, they're my family...And what's tied can never be untied." When the knotty crew sets its sights on a young girl whose own powers include the ability to sense impending bad vibes, Dan, long adrift, begins to find new meaning in the world. Granted, he has good reason to have wanted to hide from it--he still has visions of that old Redrum scrawl, good reason to need the mental eraser of liquor--but there's nothing like an apocalyptic struggle to bring out the best (or worst) in people. King clearly revels in his tale, and though it's quite a bit more understated than his earlier, booze-soaked work, it shows all his old gifts, including the ability to produce sentences that read as if they're tossed off but that could come only from someone who's worked hard on them ("Danny, have you ever seen dead people? Regular dead people, I mean"). His cast of characters is as memorable as any King has produced, too, from a fully rounded Danny to the tiny but efficiently lethal Abra Stone and the vengeful Andi, who's right to be angry but takes things just a touch too far. And that's not to mention Rose the Hatless and Crow Daddy. Satisfying at every level. King even leaves room for a follow-up, should he choose to write one--and with luck, sooner than three decades hence.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

"DOCTOR SLEEP" is Stephen King's latest novel, and it's a very good specimen of the quintessential King blend. According to Vladimir Nabokov, Salvador Dali was "really Norman Rockwell's twin brother kidnapped by gypsies in baby-hood." But actually there were triplets: the third one is Stephen King. The Rockwell small-town rocking chair, the old-fashioned house with the welcome mat, the genial family doctor, the grandfather clock: there they are, depicted in all their lifelike, apparently cozy detail. Both Rockwell and King know such details intimately, right down to the brand names. But there's something very, very wrong. The rocking chair is coming to get you. The family doctor is greenish in hue and has been dead for some time. The house is haunted, and the welcome mat is alive with things. And, pace Dalí, the clock is melting. "Doctor Sleep" picks up on the story of Danny, the little boy with psycho-intuitive powers in King's famous 1977 novel, "The Shining." Danny survived both his evil-infested dad, Jack Torrance, and the ghouls that inhabited the grisly Overlook Hotel in Colorado, escaping by the hair of his chinny-chin-chin just before the clock struck midnight and the hotel's infernal boiler blew up, incinerating the forces of bad and leaving readers hiding under the bed, but cross-eyed with relief. In "Doctor Sleep" Dan has grown up, but he retains his "shining" abilities. Having wrestled the demon drink to an uneasy standstill - his father had that problem too, as we recall - he's attending A.A. and working at a hospice facility, where, with his mind-probing talents, he helps the dying to reconcile themselves to their often misspent lives. Thus his nickname, Doctor Sleep, which echoes his childhood nickname, "doc." (As in the "What's up?" of Bugs Bunny fame. What, indeed?) Enter another magic child, Abra - as in "cadabra," the text helpfully points out - who's even better at the shining stuff than Dan is. She alarmed her parents early on by predicting the 9/11 disaster while still in her crib, and has since caused dismay by sticking all the spoons to the ceiling during her birthday party. The two shiners soon find themselves in spiritual communication, which is a lucky thing, because young Abra is going to need big help. She is the target of a rackety, entertaining bunch called the True Knot, who lust to drink her spiritual mist, or "steam." (This is a whole new twist on steampunk.) The Knot members have been alive for a Very Long Time - not usually a good sign, as those who know their "Dracula" and "She" can testify - and, disguised as vacationers roaming the countryside in RVs, they kidnap and torture their victims, then imbibe their essences. They also bottle these in case of shortages; for if they run out of steam they evaporate, leaving their clothes behind, like the Wicked Witch of the West when melted. They're led by a beautiful woman named Rose the Hat, whose main lover is a gent known as Crow Daddy. (From "craw-daddy," we assume. King loves wordplay and puns and mirror language: remember redrum, from "The Shining"? Who could forget?) The names of King's characters are frequently appropriate: Daniel "Lions' Den" Anthony (the tempted saint) Torrance (it never rains but it pours) is a case in point. Rose is a sinister Rosa Mystica, a negative version of the Virgin Mary. (For starters, she ain't no virgin.) As for the Overlook Hotel - on the site of which the True Knotters have pitched their main encampment - its name has at least three layers : the obvious one (it looks out over the landscape), the semi-obvious (the bad folks overlook something) and the deeply embedded, which I'm guessing has to do with the old song about the fourleaf clover and the somebody I adore; for King's good-and-evil arrangement is usually yin and yang, with a spot of darkness in every goodie and a tiny ray of sunshine in every baddie. Even the True Knotters are sweet with one another, though their status as human beings is dubious. As one new recruit says, "Am I still human?" And as Rose replies, "Do you care?" Wild ectoplasmic partly decayed vampire horses would not tear from me the story of what happens next, but let me assure you King is a pro: by the end of this book your fingers will be mere stubs of their former selves, and you will be looking askance at the people in the supermarket line, because if they turn around they might have metallic eyes. King's inventiveness and skill show no signs of slacking: "Doctor Sleep" has all the virtues of his best work. What are those virtues? First, King is a well-trusted guide to the underworld. His readers will follow him through any door marked "Danger: Keep Out" (or, in more literary terms, "Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here"), because they know that not only will he give them a thorough tour of the inferno - no gore left unspilled, no shriek left unshrieked - he will also get them out alive. As the Sibyl of Cumae puts it to Aeneas, it's easy to go to hell, but returning from it is the hard part. She can say that because she's been there; and, in a manner of speaking - our intuition tells us - so has King. Second, King is right at the center of an American literary taproot that goes all the way down: to the Puritans and their belief in witches, to Hawthorne, to Poe, to Melville, to the Henry James of "The Turn of the Screw," and then to later exemplars like Ray Bradbury. In the future, I predict, theses will be written on such subjects as "American Puritan Neo-Surrealism in 'The Scarlet Letter' and 'The Shining,"' and "Melville's Pequod and King's Overlook Hotel as Structures That Encapsulate American History." Some may look skeptically at "horror" as a subliterary genre, but in fact horror is one of the most literary of all forms. Its practitioners read widely and well - King being a pre-eminent example - since horror stories are made from other horror stories: you can't find a real-life example of the Overlook Hotel. People do "see" some of the things King's characters see (for a companion volume, try Oliver Sacks's "Hallucinations"), but it is one of the functions of "horror" writing to question the reality of unreality and the unreality of reality: what exactly do we mean by "see"? But dig down below the horror trappings, and "Doctor Sleep" is about families. The biological families of Dan and Abra, the "good" family of A.A., to which "Doctor Sleep" is a kind of love song, and the "bad" family of the True Knot. High on the list of King sins are the maltreatment of children by male relatives, and the brutalizing of women, mothers in particular. Righteous anger and destructive anger both have their focus in the family. As Doctor Sleep himself says to young Abra, "There's nothing but family history" : often the narrative glue that sticks a King novel together. The family dimension, too, is quintessentially American-horror, all the way from "Young Goodman Brown" and "The Fall of the House of Usher" on up. What will King do next? Perhaps Abra will grow up, and become a writer, and use her "shining" talent to divine the minds and souls of others. For that, of course, is yet another interpretation of King's eerie, luminescent metaphor. Some may look skeptically at 'horror' as a genre, but it's one of the most literary of all forms. margaret atwood's latest novel, "MaddAddam," has just been published.

Iconic horror author King (Joyland) picks up the narrative threads of The Shining many years on. Young psychic Danny Torrance has become a middle-aged alcoholic (he now goes by "Dan"), bearing his powers and his guilt as equal burdens. A lucky break gets him a job in a hospice in a small New England town. Using his abilities to ease the passing of the terminally ill, he remains blissfully unaware of the actions of the True Knot, a caravan of human parasites crisscrossing the map in their RVs as they search for children with "the shining" (psychic abilities of the kind that Dan possesses), upon whom they feed. When a girl named Abra Stone is born with powers that dwarf Dan's, she attracts the attention of the True Knot's leader-the predatory Rose the Hat. Dan is forced to help Abra confront the Knot, and face his own lingering demons. Less terrifying than its famous predecessor, perhaps because of the author's obvious affection for even the most repellant characters, King's latest is still a gripping, taut read that provides a satisfying conclusion to Danny Torrance's story. Agent: Chuck Verrill, Darhansoff & Verrill Literary Agents. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.