The Shining

"I’m a Halloween baby so being scared is in my blood, and Stephen King is the first person I ever read who really, really frightened me. The Shining is about a small family who go to stay in a hotel over the winter as caretakers. If you think you know the story because you’ve seen the film then you’d be wrong. This book is an absolute classic and a great way into the vast King oeuvre."

"I chose The Shining because it was the first book which impinged on me and made me so aware of the emotive power of literature. I was orphaned at seven and I went to different state-run institutions and I ended up at a boarding school in the Oxfordshire countryside. While I was there I contracted chicken pox and I was quarantined in a sanatorium and I was alone in a 12-bed dormitory with the door locked, with a circular window in the door that looked out on to a black and white chequerboard floored corridor off which were six doors on each side which led into different wards for children who had other diseases. I would hear footsteps in the corridor and I would run to the window to see who was out there but by the time I got to the window whoever had been there was gone. So I constantly heard footsteps of people who were not there and while I was quarantined for a week or two I read The Shining . Aged 12 – half of the book I didn’t understand, half of it scared the living Jesus out of me and I would wake up in the middle of the night, restless, agitated and terrified, and have to go and read some more. It was almost like reading it was an exorcism from itself. It was a bizarre experience with a fever, and just horrible, but at the same time brilliant and compelling and strange and surreal. Yes, I have always rated Stephen King . I think he is so much more than just a commercially successful horror writer. I think the guy is a great humanist and a great writer of character and I think that is the key to his success. Prior to King we had H P Lovecraft , we had Bray, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Hammer and Vincent Price and so on. And then King comes along and essentially creates an entire new genre. He says, I can take a regular blue-collar working guy from Pennsylvania and stick a clown in his garage and scare the crap out of him or I can take a teenage girl with psychokinetic powers and literally frighten the hell out of you. I can take the banal and present it in such as way that it becomes actually terrifying. And he did that by getting you to believe in the reality of the characters that he created. And I think that is his true strength."