The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Stephen King · a novel in five parts · Doubleday, New York, 1977 · scored on King’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Haunted-house novel as a novel of addiction and family violence; Gothic siege, psychological study and popular horror in one roving narration
Mythos
The father who devours the son; Bluebeard’s forbidden room; the haunted house made a hotel, a house of money and transit; the masked ball of the dead; the child seer, the guardian from far away, and the house that must burn
Phase
From a job interview on the hotel’s closing day, through a winter in which the snow seals the family in, to the night the hotel burns, with a brief epilogue in Maine
Presentation
Fiction; five parts, from “Prefatory Matters” and “Closing Day” through “The Wasps’ Nest” and “Snowbound” to “Matters of Life and Death”; a roving third person among the father, the mother, the son and Dick Hallorann, with intrusive thoughts and the hotel’s voices in italics and parentheses; an epigraph from Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”
Register
A plain American vernacular, a working man’s inner speech with its brand names and grievances, rising into set pieces of dread: the bath, the hedges, the elevator, the ball, the hunt with a mallet
Scale
One family in one building over one winter, with three generations behind it and the hotel’s history of money and crime around it
Governing Proposition
A man who broke his son’s arm when drunk, and lost his teaching post for beating a student, takes the winter caretaker’s job at an empty mountain hotel as his last chance, with his wife and his small son, who can read minds. Snowbound, the hotel works on exactly what is already in him: his thirst, his resentment of his betters, and the father who beat him and whom he loved. The wager of the novel is that a ghost story can be a novel of addiction and domestic violence, that the haunting and the drink can be one thing, and that a father’s love can be the channel through which his own father’s violence returns.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The novel opens on a job interview. Jack Torrance sits across a desk from Ullman, the manager of the Overlook, a resort hotel in the mountains, and his first thought is “Officious little prick.” Jack wants the post of winter caretaker, alone in the hotel with his family from the closing day of the season until the spring, and he needs it more than Ullman knows. The first line of the book is a grievance, and the grievance is a class one: a man of talent and failed ambition, humiliated by a manager in an office.
What Jack brings to the job the first part sets out plainly. He drank. Drunk, he broke his small son’s arm. He taught at Stovington, a preparatory school, and lost the post for beating a student. He has stopped drinking, and is not free of it: his grievances run on in his head, against his betters and against the patron who rescues him and so controls him. He is writing a play he cannot finish. This is his last chance.
Behind him stands his father, who beat him and whom he loved. The book shows the love and the cane as one inheritance, and Jack’s love for his own son as the channel through which it passes on. His wife Wendy has her own inheritance, a mother whose contempt she still hears, and her own knowledge that she should leave; but the family has nowhere else to go. They are the house the hotel will work on, and the first part has shown every fault it will use.
Movement II
They arrive as the season ends and the guests and staff leave. The boy, Danny, can read minds; the gift is called the shining, and the book gives him the understanding of a child, without condescension. Danny is told to keep out of Room 217. Dick Hallorann leaves for Florida as the season ends, and the family is alone in the hotel.
The roving third person moves among the three of them and shows them reading one another wrongly. Jack rehearses his grievances, Wendy thinks of leaving and hears her mother, and the child hears them both, so that the narration’s own method, the passage from one mind to another, is what the boy can do. Their intrusive thoughts break into the lines in italics and parentheses, and later other voices will break in the same way.
Closing day plants the end. The old boiler in the basement must have its pressure dumped twice a day, and the duty is set down plainly among the caretaker’s chores. It is the book’s best-laid piece of machinery: a domestic duty, small and dull, that will join the house and its ghosts in the last pages.
Movement III
The siege advances by objects. There is the wasps’ nest, which gives the part its name. In the basement, among the old papers, Jack finds a scrapbook of the hotel’s history: its owners, its millionaire, its parties of the rich and its mob killings. The haunted house has become a hotel, a place of transit and of money, and its ghosts are the history of a nation’s money.
Room 217 is the forbidden room, and the book names Bluebeard within it. Danny has been told not to enter, and he enters. In the bath is a dead woman, and she rises toward the boy. It is the most strongly built of the book’s scenes of dread.
Outside, the topiary animals of the hedge garden move, but only when no one is watching them, and Danny flees them across the snow. A fire hose waits in a corridor. These are the hotel’s assaults on the boy, built one after another, and each is strongly made; the series is long, and some of them restate rather than raise what has gone before.
Movement IV
The snow comes and seals the house. The roads close, the mountain winter shuts the family in with the hotel, and the hotel turns its attention to the father. Its voices enter Jack’s inner speech in the same italic as his own thoughts, so that the reader cannot always tell which are his, and possession is rendered as a change in the texture of a mind. The hotel offers him his own resentments as reasons. It is the bottle with walls.
At night the elevator runs, with confetti in it. Then the ballroom fills with the dead of the hotel’s history, and the masked ball of Poe’s epigraph is held, and the cry is to unmask. The scene is the book’s fullest set piece, and its law is the law of the whole: the dead of the Overlook can reach the man only through his thirst, his grievance and his father.
The word REDRUM appears, and it appears in a mirror. Far away, in Florida, Hallorann starts back toward the hotel. His journey is the guardian’s journey from far away, and the book follows it at length, repeating its urgency.
Movement V
Jack hunts his son through the hotel with a roque mallet. It is the father who devours the son, the oldest of the frames, made particular in a man with a mallet and a hangover and a play he could not finish. Hallorann’s long journey brings him back. The siege that began in a manager’s office ends inside the house.
Near the end the father comes back to himself for a moment and tells his son to run, before the hotel takes him again. It is the one moment of terrible grandeur in the book, and it holds the finding open as long as it can: whether the man is innocent of what the house makes him do. For a page the book rises above its machinery, and then it answers the question.
The boiler that Jack was told to tend on closing day has not been tended, and the plumbing he neglected destroys the hotel. It burns with its revellers, and the masque of the epigraph has its end. An epilogue in Maine is warm, and relaxes the law the book has kept. King returned to the boy in Doctor Sleep, thirty-six years later, from his adult sobriety; the novel itself ends in Maine, with the house gone.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and the spine is required and well laid. A man who broke his son’s arm drunk and lost his post at Stovington for beating a student takes the caretaker’s job as his last chance, and the hotel works on exactly the faults the first part has shown. The boiler that must be dumped twice a day is planted on closing day and pays out as the end; the wasps’ nest, the scrapbook in the basement and Room 217 each advance the siege. But much else could go. Hallorann’s journey back from Florida is long and repeats its urgency; the hotel’s assaults on the boy come in a series, the hose, the hedges, the bath, the elevator, the party, and several restate rather than raise; Jack’s grievances are rehearsed in his head well past need. The length is permitted by the genre’s pacing, not compelled by the argument, and that holds the axis lowest of the twelve.
Score: 7.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it is the book’s best claim. Addiction is a possession that speaks in the drinker’s own voice and offers him his own resentments as reasons; the man who has stopped drinking is not free of it, and the hotel is the bottle with walls. Violence descends: Jack was beaten by a father he loved, and the book shows the love and the cane as one inheritance, and Jack’s love for Danny as the very channel through which the violence returns. The marriage is drawn truly, in Wendy’s knowledge that she should leave, her mother’s contempt and the trap of a family with nowhere else to go; so is a man of talent and failed ambition humiliated by managers and patrons. Held below the bar because much of this is told and retold in Jack’s and Wendy’s heads rather than found in action, and because the supernatural lets the book divide the guilt between the man and the house.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Elevation here is dread, and it comes often. The woman in the bath in Room 217, rising toward the boy; the hedge animals that move only when unwatched, and Danny’s flight from them across the snow; the fire hose in the corridor; the elevator running at night with confetti in it; the ballroom filling with the dead of the hotel’s history and the cry to unmask; Jack’s hunt for his son through the hotel with a roque mallet. These are strongly built, and their frequency is high. Their height is lower than their frequency: the effects are of fright more than of awe, and the climaxes are pushed along by explanation and italics rather than left to stand. One moment reaches terrible grandeur. Near the end the father comes back to himself for a moment and tells his son to run, and for that page the book rises above its machinery.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Myth built, and in the structure rather than laid over it. The father who devours the son is the book’s frame: Saturn in a hotel, made particular in a man with a mallet, a hangover and a play he cannot finish. Bluebeard’s forbidden room is named within the book and enacted in Room 217, which the child is told not to enter and enters. The haunted house is made a hotel, a place of transit and of money, so that the house of one family’s sin becomes the house of a nation’s: mob killings, a millionaire owner, the parties of the rich. Poe’s masque structures the ball and the end, where the hotel burns with its revellers. The child seer, the guardian who comes from far away and the house that must be destroyed by fire carry real weight. Held below the bar because several of these are evoked as allusion as much as built, and the seer and the guardian stay types.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The inheritance is the haunted-house novel, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House above all, with Poe and the Gothic behind it, and the popular horror novel of the early 1970s. The turn is real. King put a modern working family at the centre of the haunted house, with its drinking, its money troubles and its marriage, and made the haunting and the addiction one thing, so that the ghost story becomes a novel of domestic violence. He wrote it in a plain American vernacular with brand names and inner speech, which brought the genre’s register down to the kitchen. The stake was modest. King was a commercial novelist working the path that Carrie and ’Salem’s Lot had opened for him, and the form, the plot’s shape and the set pieces are the genre’s own. It is a strong accent on a proven path, not a wager.
Score: 7.3 / 10
The form does work. The roving third person, slipping in and out of each member of the family, is the instrument by which the book shows the three of them reading one another wrongly, and Danny’s gift makes that form literal: the child who can read minds hears what the narration shows the reader. The hotel’s voices enter Jack’s inner speech in the same italic as his own thoughts, so that possession is rendered as a change in the texture of a mind. The five-part arc, from the interview to closing day to the snow, is the siege shape the matter needs. Held at the threshold because the form is mostly the genre’s container: take away the italics and the roving viewpoint and much of the knowledge survives in a film or a play, as a famous film shows; and the parenthetical inner voice is used so often that it becomes a habit rather than an instrument.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Evidence over forty-nine years, real but not deep. The book has been read as an allegory of alcoholism, which King said later, in On Writing, he had not seen while he was writing about himself; as a study of inherited abuse; as a Gothic of American class and money; and above all against Kubrick’s film, which has generated a large literature in which the novel is often the foil. Doctor Sleep reread it from Danny’s adult sobriety. Within the single book the open questions are fewer than in the works above it on this desk. Whether Jack is innocent of what the hotel makes him do is the one it holds open, and the ending largely answers it. The book is explicit; on a second reading it yields more pleasure than meaning.
Score: 7.4 / 10
The field is American fiction of the 1970s, with popular fiction within it. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the book showed that the horror novel could carry addiction, domestic violence and the psychology of a family with seriousness, and it set the pattern for the modern haunted-place novel as a family under siege by its own history. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: very wide in popular culture and in the genre, and particular. “The shining” became a word for a psychic gift; the haunted hotel and the possessed father became a template; Kubrick’s film of 1980 is itself among the most influential horror films; a television serial followed in 1997, and King’s own Doctor Sleep in 2013. In literary fiction the reach is slight. Scored on both: wide in the genre, narrow in the field as a whole.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Survival over forty-nine years, at the top of the span in which decades begin to demonstrate and short of the next. The text survives whole, has been in print throughout and has been widely translated, and its presence is wide and continuous: King’s readers, school and university courses on horror and popular fiction, and the steady pull of the film. A tenth is charged on presence, since much of the book’s presence is carried by Kubrick’s film and by its author’s name, and the academy reads the film more than the novel. The surface is somewhat fixed to its moment, in the brand names and the period vernacular, though the matter has outlived it. That leaves the axis the highest of the twelve, and exactly at the bar.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Judged on King’s English, with no translation between. The command is of momentum and of voice. King writes a working man’s inner speech with exactness, gives the child’s understanding without condescension, and builds a siege with real control of pace across the long middle; several set pieces, Room 217, the hedges and the ball, are as well made as anything in American horror. The charges are several and visible at the sentence: over-explanation of what scenes have already shown; the italic and parenthetical interjections, used to the point of tic; clichés and brand names in place of seeing; padding in the Hallorann chapters; and a prose that is vigorous rather than exact. The charges are particular, not about register: the vernacular is credited, and so is the pacing. Above the floor of 7.0, and well below the sentence-level exactness the highest marks require.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the opening interview with Ullman, a scene of social humiliation in an office, and the ballroom of the dead calling on a man to unmask. One law governs them. The hotel works only through what is already in the man, his resentment of his betters, his thirst and his father, so that the comedy of manners in the first chapter is the same force as the ghost in the last. The boiler joins the domestic and the supernatural at the end without a seam: the plumbing Jack neglected destroys the hotel. The law holds across a fair range, from the office and the kitchen to the topiary and the party. Charged because the supernatural rules are elastic where the plot needs them to be, in what the hedges can do and what the hotel can and cannot touch, and because the warm epilogue in Maine relaxes the law the book has kept.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Several orders, joined through one family. Consciousness, in three minds and a fourth, the hotel’s. The family over three generations: Jack’s father, Wendy’s mother, and the child who inherits both. Addiction, and the hope of recovery. Work and class: the caretaker’s job, the preparatory school, the patron who rescues and controls. American history and money, through the scrapbook’s record of the Overlook’s owners, its mob killings and its rich. Childhood and the child’s knowledge. The natural order, in the snow that seals the house and the mountain winter. The supernatural as the frame. They are integrated through the one house more than listed. Held where it is because the history is told by scrapbook rather than lived, the world beyond the hotel is thin, and the book encompasses less than the novels of a whole society.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.5, then The Archetypal Deep at 8.0 and The Unconcealment at 7.8. A text whole and in print for forty-nine years, with a presence wide and continuous, a tenth of it charged to the film; a myth built into the plot, the father who devours the son, the forbidden room and the masked ball of the dead in a hotel of money; and a disclosure that can be stated, addiction as a possession that speaks in the drinker’s own voice, and a father’s love as the channel of his father’s violence.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.2: a spine required and well laid, from the interview to the boiler, with a long middle the genre’s pacing permits rather than the argument compels, the hotel’s assaults coming in series and Hallorann’s journey repeating its urgency. Next above it, The Swerve at 7.3, a strong accent on a proven path rather than a wager; then The Bottomless Well, The Made and The Encompassed at 7.4: a book explicit enough to answer most of what it asks, a vigorous prose charged at the sentence for explanation, tics and padding, and a world beyond the hotel drawn thin.
The Necessity Cap is unmet: The Inevitable at 7.2 falls three tenths short of the threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Inner Law at 7.6, The Living Form at 7.5, The Made at 7.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four axes: The Imperishable at 8.5 meets the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.0, The Unconcealment at 7.8, Pressure on Tradition at 7.6 and The Swerve at 7.3 each fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Inevitable, 7.2, The Swerve, 7.3, The Bottomless Well, 7.4, and The Made, 7.4, all below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.4. Two of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.6, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Stephen King’s The Shining, published by Doubleday, New York, in January 1977: his third published novel, after Carrie (1974) and ’Salem’s Lot (1975). It is scored as the novel published in 1977, in its five parts, “Prefatory Matters”, “Closing Day”, “The Wasps’ Nest”, “Snowbound” and “Matters of Life and Death”, with its epigraph from Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”. By King’s own account the book was written in Boulder, Colorado, after he and his wife stayed at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park in the autumn of 1974, when the hotel was nearly empty at the end of its season. Stanley Kubrick’s film of 1980, which has its own page, the television serial of 1997 and King’s sequel Doctor Sleep (2013) are not part of the work; they are named as evidence of its reach and of the readings it has drawn. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand: nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on King’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain: Jack Torrance’s first thought, “Officious little prick.”, and the word REDRUM. Facts that could not be verified, among them the number of chapters, the page count of the first edition, the wording of the dedication, the father’s last words to his son, and the novel’s influence on particular horror writers of the 1980s, are not given. Citations are by part and episode.