Visions Realized

The last time we saw the Torrance family, the reader was really getting an insight into the family.  Daddy had some sort of demon that was driving him to drink to the point of being an alcoholic and commit violent acts.  Wendy had a domineering mother that blamed her for everything even the breakdown of her own marriage.  She kept coming back for more not only from her mother but also from Jack's bad treatment.  And Danny was psychic. 

So with the start of the 8th chapter it appears that Danny is having another one of his visions.  He wakes up and hears someone drunkenly yelling and at him and can't place where the sound is coming from.  He thinks it might be his imaginary friend Good Time Tony trying to communicate with him.  Nope.  Tony doesn't show up.  And Danny goes back to bed with the word redrum flashing in his mind before he succumbs to sleep.


The next chapter features the family driving and finally making it to the Overlook.  During the drive Wendy is basically being a nervous Nelly.  She wonders if the hotel is going to have enough food.  She even somehow manages to bring the Donner party into the story.  As they finally pull up to the hotel, Wendy gets over her nervousness because she thinks the hotel is gorgeous.  Danny on the other hand has and insight.  With one of his trips down the rabbit hole with Tony he had had a version of snow and redrum.  This is it.  Whatever redrum was it was hear.  One of Danny’s premonitions has been realized.

Life is better when your're drunk

When we left the Shining, Danny had fallen down the rabbit hole with his imaginary friend Tony.  He had visited visions of blood, skeletons you know normal things a young child would see every day.  And then the cherry on the sundae is Jack  pulling up to where Danny is seated on the curb with a mallet matted in hair and blood on the passenger seat of his car.   Just kidding.  It was a bag of groceries, Danny. 

The next chapter has Jack and Danny going to a drug store.  Jack runs in and buys some stuff and gets some quarters for change.  He goes to a now extinct closely located pay phone and tries to make a call.  It doesn't appear that the party on the other end is going to pick up.   Jack asks a real live operator on the other end to dial again and they get a hold of Jack's ex drinking buddy. 

Jack starts to have a flashback.  The family is living the sweet life.  They are saving money for a little house.  Then bad fortune befalls them and Jack has his tires slashed by a student at the school where he is teaching.  Because of Jack's normal reaction to this vandalism the board wants him to leave his job.  He goes home that night with the biggest urge to drink that he has had in a long.  He is afraid he is going to do something to Wendy and Danny, so he decides to visit a local bar.  But he does not gives into the temptation to drink.  I think that anger management counseling would have been a better way to solve his issues.

Then King uses the technique of a flashback within a flashback, which I found pretty clever.  Jack  remembered a time when he and his drinking buddy ran into a bike and didn't know if the bikes possible occupant went the way of the crumbled bike.  After that he decides no more drinking.  Wendy confronts him the next day.  He knows that she wants to divorce him but gets a reprieve from the talk she wanted to have.  He quits drinking and Wendy figures this out.

Flash forward to present day.  Jack finally gets a hold of his makeshift AA buddy.  They both reassure each other that they are not drinking.  He hangs up and makes his way back to the car.  Danny gets the feeling that Jack was thinking about The Bad Thing again. It leaves us to wonder again?  What is The Bad Thing?

We learn a little bit more about Wendy with our next chapter.  She has been estranged from her family and doesn't have a great relationship with her mother.  Her mother blames her for the unraveling of her mother’s marriage.  After Danny is born they try to patch up the relationship. 
During this time Jack  is not an alcoholic yet.  One night he gets $900 for a story and celebrates coming home drunk out of his mind the next day.  He drops Danny because of this intoxication.  Evidently Jack is not very good with babies.

Wendy thinks that her marriage is a failure.  She doesn't want to let her mother know this.  She's afraid that she will have to go live with her mother and endure her micromanaging especially with Danny. 
We flash back to when Danny was born as well.  Wendy is in denial but Danny being psychic.  She had a vision of Danny being that way while she was gassed out her mind when she is in labor.  She just thinks he knows things.

She loves Jack and Danny.  She thinks that the job will be the salvation of the family.  But the question is still looming because of the foreshadowing.  Will it really?

Red Rum Red Rum

When we last left The Shinning it looked like Jack's new position as the caretaker of the hotel might be what this family needed. We open chapter 3 with Jack taking a tour with Watson of the basement of the Overlook.  Included in this tour was a boiler that was on it's last leg.  As Watson was filling Jack in on some more of the history of the Overlook Jack had a flashback of the day he broke his son's arm.  Clever placement Mr. King.  Boiler boiling temper.
Jack was boozing it up and writing one evening when he had to leave his study for a phone call.  He comes back to his study and as what generally happens to your stuff when you have a toddler happened to Jack.  Danny ruined some of his pages.  I have last track of how many things my three stair step children have ruined.  I don't have enough fingers and toes.  Because Danny ruined pages to his script Jack becomes enraged.  He ends up breaking the boys arm.
Coming out of his boiler induced daydream, Jack hears Watson talking about all of the people that have died at the hotel.  Or about 40 or so not that many.  And he reassures Jack that no there aren't any ghosts at the Overlook.  No ghosts.
Chapter 4 involves a change in location.  We are back with Danny and his mother at the apartment on the wrong side of the tracks.  We find out that Danny has the ability to read minds.  And he seems to be obsessed with people doing The Bad Thing.  We are never told exactly what that is.  But from all the hints that King drops it involves some sort of violence.  Danny is also exposed to the idea of divorce from his parents and other adults.  No wonder he is hearing voices in his head.
But it gets even worse from here.   Cue the song "White Rabbit"  by Jefferson Airplane.  Danny has an imaginary friend named Tony.  Tony likes to take Danny on journeys that usually involve visions of death and blood.  Pretty much normal things for 4 or 5 years to imagine.  Danny eventually pulls himself out of his last vision that he has when he was sitting on the curb waiting for Jack to come home.  Jack pulls into the drive  of the apartment complex and Danny looks into the passenger seat of the family car.  Surprise.   A bloody mallet is sitting there.  Then it turns into a bag of groceries.  Oh  Danny you silly boy with your imagination.

Here's Johnny

Snowy labyrinths and axe wielding Jack Nicholson are a few of the first memories I have of the Shinning.  Just recently my husband and I sat down to watch this all-time classic movie by Stanley Kubrick.  I also made him suffer through the Documentary Room 237.  Were there any subliminal messages in this classic movie?  I'm not really a conspiracy theory believer so I wasn't sold on any of the theories.  Fake moon landings, Native Americans.  No.  Just a good old fashioned horror movie.

Chapter one and two of the Shinning sets up some of the back story for the reader. The reader learns a little bit of the history of the hotel as well.  Isolation, murder, booze.  Doesn't sound like a place I would check into any time soon.
Why would Jack Torrence and his family be so desperate to spend a winter baby sitting a huge hotel with almost no connection to the outside world? 
Besides learning the back story of the hotel we also learn a little bit more about the Torrence family.  Jack is a bit of a drinker and prone to physical violence. They use to have money.  And then one day Jack snapped and beat the hell out of one of the students at the school where was teaching.  Jack was fired from his job. They lost their nice house in Vermont.  And now they live in a crummy apartment that includes entertainment.  Their neighbors liked to imitate the Friday night fights.
So will this babysitting gig at the hotel be the salvation that brings the family back to their former moneyed self .
Stay tuned......

One Book One Month

I love the smell of a new book, old book any book.  I love buying old books and finding a postcard, a note something left behind from it's former owner.  I have had a love affair with books for the longest time.  But I don't read as much as a I use to. 
I am the busy mother of three.  My children are like stair steps almost 2 years apart all three of them. I am trying to pass my love of reading onto them.  So what better way for them to starting reading more then to see their mother enjoying a good book.  So I decided to read one book in one month for one year. 
The first book I'm going to tackle is "The Shinning" by Steven King.  It has been years since I have read any horror.  I saw the movie again recently and it peeked my interest in reading it.  So bring on the ghost bar, twins of death and rivers of blood.  I'm ready!


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