Book Review: Doctor Sleep

I've reached my reading goal for February, after finishing Stephen King's "Dr. Sleep", a book I'd been meaning to read for a few months. I enjoyed the book. It is probably middle of the road as far as quality compared to his other books. He has written much better and he has written worse, but he is such a talented writer that even a book that is average by his standards is very good.

I can't analyze the book too closely in its role as a sequel to "The Shining"--it has been over a decade since I read it. I'm sure that some moments in "Dr. Sleep" would have had a bit more emotional resonance if I were more familiar with the original novel. This is not a significant problem, as "Dr. Sleep" works just fine as a standalone book. It tells its own story, and while it does feature callbacks to and locations from its predecessor, they are presented in a way that anyone coming to this book fresh will experience no confusion.

The book spans about ten years, most of them in the first half. King uses this time to establish his characters, something he is especially gifted at. He deftly gets inside the heads of his protagonists and antagonists alike. Things happen during these pages, but they mainly serve to let us get to know the characters and to get them to the places they need to be for the novel's second half. It's like King is setting up a game board, but he's skilled enough to keep us entertained while he does it.

The second half of the novel is when the plot really gets rolling and the various characters that we've been introduced to start to come into contact with one another. While the story has the potential to be big and epic (it is about a roving band of nomads who have lived for hundreds or thousands of years by killing children who possess 'the shining') it is presented in a much more intimate manner. It's not about the hundreds of kids these people have killed, but about a single girl they have set their sights on. The scope of the novel feels much smaller than it could be, but that is not a bad thing. King has proven in the past that he has the ability to tell epic and intimate stories with the same skill. In a world where many books and movies try to be as "big" as possible, it is refreshing to see a sequel that is not afraid to go small.

King is often an unpredictable writer, and I found that to be true here as well. There were some cases where I was pretty sure I knew where the story was going. It would start to go in that direction, but then suddenly changed course. I was sometimes taken off guard by how easy things seemed to go for the good guys. While it may have been better for the book to throw a few more challenges their way, it was also interesting to read something where the protagonists plans worked pretty much exactly as they hoped. It somewhat diminishes the drama, and I wouldn't like it if this happened in every book, but since it happens so rarely, it was fun to read just for the novelty.

I don't have any serious reservations about the book. The only complaint I could air is that, as I said earlier, King has done better in the past. Are the main characters well drawn? Is the story compelling? Are the villains memorable? Objectively, the answer to all of these questions is "Yes". In the context of all of King's other books, the answer is still "yes", but not quite as emphatic.