The Shining

This is not so much a review, but reminiscing about how this was the absolute first novel I ever read that wasn't for school back in grade 8 in the early nineties. A friend lent it to me, a book that belonged to her mother who was a teacher and thus began a lifetime of reading all of his works. On the cusp of becoming a teenager, I clearly remember reading it in my closet inside my sleeping bag with a little lamp and munching on sunflower seeds, scared of leaving the security of the closet. I would end up sleeping in it until the morning. My bedroom was in a windowless basement of an old house. It got suffocatingly dark in that basement and I liked it in my closet!

My friend lent me more of her mother's Stephen King novels and that became a ritual, reading Stephen King in my closet with a lamp and sunflower seeds. It annoyed my mother, for some reason, that I wasn't sleeping in my bed.

This is a must-read classic ghost story, the best of its kind. I reread it a few years ago because I had planned to read the sequel, Doctor Sleep, and it was just as good outside of the closet! ;)