The Shining

Jack Torrance, a recovering alcoholic and failed writer whose temper has already cost him a teaching job after he beat a student he caught slashing his tires, and who once broke his own son's arm in a drunken rage, takes a five month job as winter caretaker of the isolated Overlook Hotel in the Colorado mountains, moving in with his wife Wendy and their five year old son Danny once the hotel closes for the season and the roads snow shut behind them. Danny has a psychic gift the hotel's cook, Dick Hallorann, recognizes and calls the shining, and Hallorann warns him before leaving for the winter that the empty Overlook is itself a kind of battery for old, bad energy, particularly around room 217, where a previous guest died. Isolated and drinking again despite his promises, Jack grows increasingly obsessed with the hotel's violent history, especially an earlier caretaker who murdered his own family there, and starts hearing the building's old tragedies replay themselves, drawn by a possessive influence Danny senses building around his father toward violence of his own. The topiary animals outside appear to move when no one is watching directly, the hotel's long closed ballroom fills with a ghostly party only Jack can fully see and eventually join, and the boiler, which Jack has been repeatedly warned needs regular venting or it will explode, goes increasingly unattended as his sanity collapses further. Jack finally attacks Wendy with a roque mallet and pursues Danny through the hotel's corridors while the topiary animals close in outside, and it is Danny, using both his own gift and what remains of his father's real love for him, who reaches Jack for one last moment of clarity before the hotel's influence reclaims him completely. The unattended boiler explodes soon after, destroying the Overlook with Jack still inside it, and Wendy, Danny, and Hallorann, who has driven back through a blizzard sensing Danny's danger, escape the fire together.

The novel builds dread through claustrophobia and isolation rather than through jump scares, unfolding slowly across an entire winter and staying almost entirely inside the family's disintegrating point of view, so a reader watches Jack's mind go before the rest of his family fully does. King wrote much of it while drinking heavily himself and has said since that Jack's collapse drew directly on things he recognized in his own life at the time.