Future movie news alert: Stephen King has officially announced that he’s writing a sequel to The Shining, the seminal novel that was turned into Stanley Kubrick’s horror masterpiece with Jack Nicolson.
The book is called Dr. Sleep, and it takes place many years after the events of the original, and focuses on little Danny Torrance, all grown up.
According to the report from Torontoist… King breifly laid out his tenative plan for the novel, which would see the emotionally scarred Danny Torrance now a 40-year-old orderly at a hospice for the terminally ill in upstate New York. But Danny’s real job is to “visit with patients who are just about to pass on to the other side, and to help them make that journey with the aid of his mysterious powers.” And on the side, Danny bets on the horse races, a trick he learned from his old friend Dick.
King himself elaborates on the upcoming novel:
This is an idea that I’ve had for some time. I wrote a novel in the ’70s called The Shining… I always wondered what happened to that kid, Danny Torrance, when he grew up… and this story started to form. The book isn’t finished yet, it’s called Dr. Sleep. This kinda goes back to: what’s the worst thing you can think of? I knew that there were bad people in this story that were like vampires, only that what they sucked out was not blood, but psychic energy from special people like Danny Torrance. And I came to realize that these people were called The Tribe and that they move around a lot. Their leader is a woman called Rose [unintelligible] they all have these kinda pirate names, because pirates is sort of what they are.
So how long until this gets turned into a movie? I’ll give it three years.