In Stephen King’s new novel, Sleep doctor, King recovers the character of Danny Torrence, the boy from The glow. In interviews, King says that when fans ask about the fate of specific characters (those who actually live horror), he has become more interested in those who question Danny’s fate. I think most people who have seen the movie remember the cute little boy on a tricycle with a bowl haircut running through the empty corridors of The Overlook Hotel. Later to run away from a mad “white knuckle alcoholic” who was her father.
Sleep doctor it is, in my opinion, semi autobiographical. What Duma Key, which deals with the aftermath of a man who suffers a terrible accident (like King), Sleep doctor is about the reality of what it is like to be a recovering alcoholic. I didn’t know that King was an alcoholic, but he has been recovering for more than twenty years. So he knows the depths to which one can dive, as well as the difficulties in trying to stay sober. On Sleep doctorDanny is an alcoholic like his father and a chain smoker like his mother (who, in the novel, has died of lung cancer). In writing the book, King’s son Owen told him that the “plunge” he had given Danny, now Dan, was not enough to match the plunge Dan’s father Jack had taken. King takes their advice. So if you don’t want the gross, read the speed ahead of time. Dan, after picking up a girl, getting into a fight, spends his entire salary on cocaine, wakes up still drunk and has to go to the bathroom. Another jolt of his unhappy gut … That released all the vomit triggers: the vinegar smell of hard-boiled eggs in a large glass jar, the taste of barbecue-flavored pork rinds, the sight of potato chips drowning in a Nosebleed. All that stuff got into his mouth last night between takes. He was going to throw up … “And he does it spectacularly. But that leads to the main reason for the scene … the downfall of Dan. When she comes out of the bathroom, a small child in a loose diaper full of everything a baby discards comes out of another room, sees the coke on the table and runs to her crying: “cunning, mom, cunning!” Danny prevents him from getting “sneaky” and the boy falls asleep with his drunken mother. Danny notices bruises on the boy’s body. As the mother passes out, he checks her wallet and takes all her money. Justifying this by saying that she was the one who made him spend his salary on coca. Taking the money torments Dan. And the boy’s bruises haunt Dan. This, for me, is the true heart of the novel. Dan cannot go beyond the demons of his past, his murderous and alcoholic father, the dead but not the dead of The Overlook who visit him leaving pieces of their rotting and rotting bodies and the mother with her bruised baby. Dan discovers “that the memories are the real ghosts” and that “you take with you wherever you go.”
Of course, in every King novel there has to be some kind of supernatural forces wreaking havoc. In this novel, King expands on the concept of “the shining.” It is the ability to read other people’s minds, move objects, or project outside of oneself. Dan has it and so does a young teenage girl named Abra. On Sleep doctorThey have to fight a group of century-old serial killers, the True Knot, disguised as retirees who drive RVs and literally feed off the pain of others. They only feed on those with “the glow” and make their deaths particularly brutal. Makes a better “steam”. They have a lot of fun with 9/11 and other tragedies. The leader of this group, a woman named Rose, has a fang. On Sleep doctorDan fights his past with far more dread and a sense of dread than the woman with the fang. Dan, through AA, “comes to know a new freedom and a new happiness.” He also realizes that “he will not regret the past or want to close the door on it.” With this novel King, apparently, does not close the door to his past.