We’re going to create our own statistic here and say that at least one in every two people who have read a Stephen King novel have quaked in their booties for weeks after. We would think that’s just about right…
King has taken recent sojourns into comic books, playwriting and political activism but this year he’s going back to his roots. 2013 will be the year King will write Doctor Sleep, the long-awaited sequel to The Shining.
In short, King has promised to “scare the sh*t out of people”.
The Shining told the story of Jack Torrance, a man who takes his family to the haunted Overlook Hotel only to descend into madness.
Doctor Sleep will be published on September 24th of this year and it picks up the story with Danny, Jack’s psychic son, who is now a middle-aged hospice worker. He becomes involved in trying to save a little girl afflicted with the evil power “the shining”.
It won’t be difficult to miss on the shelves…
King, 65, told Entertainment Weekly: “Basically, the idea of the story was to try and scare the sh*t out of people. I said to myself, ‘Let me see if I can go and do that again’.
“I wanted to go back to that real creepy scary stuff. We’ll see if it works.
“When I really got serious about it, I thought to myself ‘Do you really want to do this? Because most sequels really suck.
“The only two exceptions I can think to that is Huckleberry Finn, a book that is a sequel to Tom Sawyer but is really a much better book, and I think Godfather II is a much better movie than The Godfather.”
“I wouldn’t say I’d never go back and do a sequel to anything else. I do wonder about some of the characters.”
We’re looking over our shoulders already…
