Heeeeeere's Johnny

I love Stephen King. No one writes characters that are more believable than his. They are real people, caught up in surreal situations. They are as vivid to us as we are to ourselves - even the ones that chop their families up into little pieces and that is what is so damned scary about his books. He makes us understand the madness.

I was thinking today about The Shining. There are so many classic images from the movie - the little girls in the hallway, dear Jack's face poking through the hole he chopped in the door - that I think people sometimes forget how much better the book is than the movie. Go ahead, refute this claim if you can. The book kicks ass. Dude, while I was reading the book, I was freaked out by the topiary. Stephen King made me afraid of plants. The man has mad skills.

Anyway, so I was thinking about The Shining and I had a moment of, gee, I wish I were going to an isolated lodge in Colorado to do nothing but write until spring. Remember, in The Shining Jackie-boy is a writer. An alcoholic, borderline-abusive, messed-up-in-the-head writer, but a writer nonetheless. And so today, when I was having trouble focusing on my spreadsheets and lamenting the fact that I spend my days sitting on my butt in front of a computer just so I can afford to spend my nights sitting on my butt in front of my computer... The Shining started to sound pretty darn appealing. Isolation... peace... quiet... inspirational insanity...

Of course, I wouldn't be bringing a spouse and kid along for me to massacre and my fantasy of isolation doesn't match up entirely with the illustrious Mr. King's. My version of The Shining would be a romance, complete with a hunky cabana boy. But I'd probably keep the living topiary and paranormal mayhem.

So what's your Shining? Agatha Christie or Dan Brown? Are we finding dead bodies or hidden mysteries of religion? A Twlight vampire den or Harry Potter's passage from the muggle to the wizard world? What would you find if you were stuck at the Overlook?