What the critics are saying about Stephen King's sequel to The Shining
He continues, "The Shining was a yell of despair from the darkest of places. Doctor Sleep is a warm, entertaining novel by a man who is no longer the prisoner of his demons, but knows where to look when he needs to call on them."
Vulture's Kathryn Schulz describes her experience reading Doctor Sleep as “strange fun”. "It’s less scary than The Shining, and, bluntly, less good—but also funnier, slyer, and less genre-bound. This is a novel where the so-called hero starts out a derelict and ends up mostly just a mensch.
"What a strange and interesting book Stephen King has given us: a work of horror that promises, of all things, a good night’s sleep."
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The New York Times commandeered novelist Margaret Atwood to review King's latest effort. She calls it "a very good specimen of the quintessential King blend", warning readers that "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."
According to The Scotsman, "The Shining, book and film, were claustrophobic; Doctor Sleep is expansive but thinner."
"This is indubitably a page-turner, but it might not be a re-reader," writes Stuart Kelly. "I was horrified and impelled, aghast and aching to get back to the story. That said, King is not and has never been a wordsmith – there are passages where cliché and easy simile would stand out were you ever to read it again. But that’s not, in many ways, what we are there for. The simple dash of the prose is there because the plot is more important."
And finally, Esquire's Chris Jones writes, "Doctor Sleep, in some ways, reads like a tearful AA confession, like a letter from a father who wants to apologize for the curses of genetics, for the well-intentioned failures of family. It's as though Danny Torrance is Stephen King, or vice versa, a man who has been followed all these years by his mistakes and terrible visions and wants finally to be free of them, made innocent."
Doctor Sleep is published on 24 September 2013
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