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billnienaber 's review for:
Doctor Sleep
by Stephen King
It's been a while since I read a King novel... I think the last one was The Dark Half, which I honestly had to set aside a few times because it was so fucking gruesome. I really felt like King had crossed some lines and become more interested in the extreme gross-out than in telling a great story. I've been intrigued by the descriptions of a few of his recent works, and decided to give this one a try when I learned that it's a sequel of sorts to The Shining, which was one of my favorites from his early catalog. It's a worthy follow-up and an engrossing story in its own right. In it, we find Danny Torrance, the little boy with the strong shining from the original story, all grown up and recovering from having followed in his father's alcoholic footsteps. We also meet a young girl named Abra Stone whose shining is even significantly stronger that Dan's, and who is being pursued by a group of beings who live off the essence of children like her. Once she contacts Dan through the cerebral network of the shining, they must help each other to defeat the evil that is consuming special children throughout the country. The plot is well laid out, with the surprises we've come to expect from King's best work, and there are plenty of great characters here, from good to evil and everywhere in between, but all well imagined and fascinating. I can't say there aren't some disturbing and violent moments, but they are actually fairly few and far between, and nowhere near as off-putting as some of the things I remember from The Dark Half. Now I may need to go back and check out a few more of those recent King offerings...