The Shining // Stephen King
Is the sweltering heat not really your thing? Then The Shining should definitely be on your summer reading list.
One winter, recovering-alcoholic Jack Torrance finds a job as the caretaker of the Overlook Hotel during the off-season. It’s the ideal situation for the Torrance family – Jack gets time to work on his play away from any temptations, and spend time with his wife, Wendy, and five-year-old son, Danny (who seems to possess telepathic abilities referred to as “the shining”). But not long after moving in, Danny keeps having strange, premonitory visions involving Room 217 and “REDRUM” repeated over and over again. As the winter grows colder and fiercer, the Torrance family become snowbound, and with Jack’s slow descent into insanity from the sordid influence of the ghosts of the Hotel, Wendy and Danny find they have nowhere to run.
So, if you’re reading this while sweat drips from your every orifice, let Stephen King transport to you to the (much cooler) Overlook Hotel in mid-winter, where ghosts live in the room next door and unsettling, supernatural scares are all-inclusive.
Words by Eve Taylor