The Shining sequel announced

One of the most terrifying thrillers of all time, The Shining – published in 1977 – is going to be revisited more than 25 years later by the master of horror himself.

 

King says he wanted to know what happened to Danny Torrance, so Doctor Sleep picks up the story of the now middle-aged Dan, who works at a hospice in rural New Hampshire, and the very special 12-year-old girl he must save from a tribe of murderous paranormals.

 

On highways across America, a tribe of people called the True Knot travel in search of sustenance. They look harmless – mostly old, they travel around in trailers. But as Dan Torrance knows, and 12-year-old Abra Stone learns, the True Knot are quasi-immortal, living off the ‘steam’ that children with the ‘shining’ produce when they are slowly tortured to death. 

 

Haunted by the inhabitants of the Overlook Hotel where he spent one horrific year in his childhood, Dan has been drifting for decades, desperate to shed his father’s legacy of despair, alcoholism, and violence. Finally, he settles in a New Hampshire town, an AA community that sustains him and a job at a nursing home where his remnant ‘shining’ power provides the crucial final comfort to the dying. Aided by a prescient cat, he becomes ‘Doctor Sleep.’

 

Then Dan meets the evanescent Abra Stone, and it is her spectacular gift, the brightest shining ever seen, that reignites Dan’s own demons and summons him to a battle for Abra’s soul and survival. Doctor Sleep is described as an epic war between good and evil, a gory, glorious story that will thrill the millions of hyper-devoted readers of The Shining and readers new to King, too.

 

Doctor Sleep will be released next September, and an audio sampler of King reading the already-written prologue to Doctor Sleep is on the CD or digital download of The Wind Through the Keyhole (out now).

 

 

 

Photograph: Ronald Grant. The Shining is out now, published by Hodder.