The Shining
King's first hardcover bestseller and the modern benchmark for the possession-by-place narrative; Kubrick's 1980 film is canonical cinema and the subject of King's most enduring authorial grudge — both versions now permanent fixtures.
Book Entry · Horror
What is Ghost Story about?
The Chowder Society — four old men in snowbound Milburn, New York — meet to tell ghost stories and not to discuss the thing they did in 1929, the dead woman who was not quite a woman and did not quite die. Now their members are dying of dreams, the snow is closing the roads, and what calls itself Alma Mobley or Eva Galli — a shapeshifting intelligence older than any name — has come back to finish the town. Straub builds the book as a hall of nested narratives (the title is a manifesto: every great ghost story is retold here, Hawthorne and James included) and closes it like a vice. The benchmark literary horror novel of its era.
Why it matters
The book that, with King's early run, defined the late-70s horror boom's upper register — King has called it one of the finest horror novels of the century — and the modern model for the guilt-returns ghost narrative; filmed, reductively, in 1981.
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