Krishna
We have reviewed so many books of this author earlier - See Revival and Duma Key for two samples.
The story takes off right where the first part (The Shining) ends. If you read this one right after the prequel, it is the book reading equivalent of binge watching! However, you soon realize that this is a totally different story after a few pages of continuity abruptly ends and the story leaps forward many years.
On that note, yes, this book can be read as a standalone story but to get the full enjoyment of the book, I would strongly recommend that you read the earlier book first as multiple references in this book hark back to the events in the previous book.
And this one is breathtakingly beautiful.
The story starts with Danny Torrence and his mother Wendy, the survivors in the previous novel settling down in an apartment. The man who rescued them, Halloran, comes to visit as the boy and Halloran specifically share a deep mental bond and also share the extrasensory perception that they share (‘The Shining’).
Danny realizes that the dead woman in the hotel room (the first book has the details) has followed him to the apartment. He freaks out and his mom sends for Dick Halloran who comes promptly.
Dick tells his own story to Danny. His grandma who was the White Grandma who was his mother’s mother (not because of skin colour but her good intentions) and his Dark Grandpa (his father’s father) who was drunk, and physically and mentally abusive to Dick.
When that man died, he ‘came back’ and Dick was told by his White Grandma, who also had a strong ‘Shining’ how to lock him in. Danny successfully uses it against the old lady and also another of the older book’s hotel’s occupant who had come calling. He assumes that he now does not have to fear the resurrected spirits. Ever. He was very wrong.
The story shifts now to a girl Andi Steiner, who uses men to get free meals and movies in a ‘date’. At the crucial moment in the theatre, where the man tries to get too close, she simply ‘makes him’ fall into a trance akin to sleep instantly. She takes his money and putting him in deeper sleep slashes his cheek with a knife - as a lesson for those perverts who go around looking for young girls in bars to seduce when they have a family elsewhere.
Rose O’Hara and Barry Smith watch from behind. Barry has seen her do this before. Once she prepares to leave, Andi feels restrained inside her head and loses consciousness. Only to wake up inside Rose’s EarthCruiser later.
They convince her to join them and become immortal. They ask her to “take the steam”. She does and becomes ‘something more than human’.
Meanwhile, Daniel, now grown up, has gone to seed. He wakes up after another huge drunken night and a brawl in the company of a girl he barely knew, with a massive hangover. He steals the money she had in her purse before slipping away. He is traumatized to know that she was probably underage and had a son who was abused to boot and neglected.
He roams from city to city, unable to kick his drinking habit or keep his job as an unskilled worker.
Later, he settled down in a small tourist town and gets a job as worksman in an amusement park with a toy train. He gets the shining back in that town.
When he starts seeing things (both the girl he stole money from as well as the small kid were killed and come back to his room at night) he weakens and tries to go back to his booze. The man who he met (Freeman who has a little bit of shining) stops him on time.
Meanwhile grandma Concetta and parents Dave and Lucy find that a newborn girl Abra seems to have powerful abilities. She seems to feel the Twin Tower catastrophe of Sep 11 in her bones. She knows that the old lady in the opposite house, Wanda, fell and hurt her head and gets their parents to take Wanda to the hospital in time to save her life. She seems to play piano (before she could even walk) from afar; She makes all channels on TV play Simpsons at one time. And so on.
Dan once finds his blackboard contents in his room erased and replaced by a single word ‘Hello‘. He gets the name ‘Abra’ in his mental space.
Abra in the meanwhile - during her birthday - has made all the spoons in the kitchen stick to the ceiling. She was far away from the kitchen, in the backyard, in a party, watching a clown stick a spoon on his face.
Meanwhile there is a Cat in the old people’s home which unerringly comes into the room of the ‘guest’ at the time of his death.
Concetta falls down at her home, breaks her hip and when she reaches the hospital, finds that she has but a few weeks to live. She has Stage IV cancer. Abra seems to know it already - she is far away in a summer camp - calls her mom Lucy and wants to come home immediately!
Lucy moves in with Concetta to look after her. Meanwhile a missing person’s photo is seen by Abra bringing back all memories of the boy who was murdered. She uses her growing psychic powers to see where the event happened and goes back in time and travels with the group to see where the boy’s body was buried. (Exciting descriptions of what she experiences and how she can rewind and slow down as needed to read the signs). Oh yes, Abra now is much older - still a kid but pre pubescent kid.
She then is drawn into Rose’s body and realizes with a panic that Rose is now trying to look into her head. She violently cuts Rose off, making Rose stagger and almost fall (she was shopping in a supermarket). Rose is shocked at the power and is now determined to find the ‘child’ who tried to get into her head! She also realizes that the “steam” that they can get by killing this child would feed them for a very, very long time!
The True Knot, the group of vampire-like people who live very long and are rejuvenated by the life force of tortured kids are led by Rose the Hat. (She wears a hat at an impossible angle and is the true leader of the group). Every time they take ‘steam’ or the white life force, they become younger instantly. If the person being killed has a strong power (shining) there is enough steam to store in canisters and use for a very long time.
They take the life of a young, baseball loving kid called Brad Trevor. When they are torturing him and dying, Rose feels being watched. The girl who is doing the watching from far away is Abra. Rose is surprised but decides to keep the girl in mind - she wants to go after the girl when they need steam again.
Abra is stricken to find a boy being killed and buried with the baseball glove. She decides not to do anything about it - at first. But when the boy’s picture turns up in a local newspaper as missing, and Abra sees it, she knows she needs to act.
She goes through the mental picture, even stopping and rewinding their trip with the boy until she knows precisely where they buried the boy. The glove was worn (when Brad thought that Barry was a good man and a friend) by Barry and she realizes that if she had the glove, she can reach into the minds of others just like she did Rose’s.
When Abra tries to enter Rose’s head while the latter is in a supermarket - she is simply seeking the guy Billy who the boy thought was a friend - but got sucked into the head of the powerful lady Rose - Rose is in a supermarket.
Abra sees what Rose sees and is then absolutely astounded to feel Rose trying to peek into her head. She violently shoves Rose, psychically of course, causing Rose to lose balance and crash into a supermarket shelf. In addition, she causes a very small earthquake in her street. Dave, who is downstairs working on his novel, is surprised at the earthquake.
Rose realizes that she needs to get the girl right away. Just then things start going bad for True Knot. Grandpa (‘Gramps’) gets measles - probably from the steam they had from xxx). This is supposed to be impossible as rube (that is common folk) diseases are not supposed to afflict True Knot.
Abra is now scared and appeals to Dan. He asks her to put a psychic alarm to know if Rose comes but Abra decides to put a trap.
In an exciting scene, Rose tries to get into Abra’s mind when she is asleep by using the connection forged earlier but gets her arm hurt badly and bruised before she escapes. She now knows that the kid (she still does not know the name of Abra) has to be eliminated and quickly. She wants to keep her alive and ‘milk’ her with torture and terror for repeated steam.
Rose could narrow the area of search based on what she saw through Abra’s eyes - a mountain range, and guessing correctly that the mini earthquake reported on a particular street was caused by their encounter. They have narrowed the target to one of the three girls, based on Rose’s description - what she saw during the mental raid - and looking into the school records of the nearby public school. Illegally of course. One of them is Abra.
Rose sends the team to find the girl and get her. On the way, they find that their best locator, Barry, also caught measles and is suffering.
Meanwhile, Dan enlists the help of Dr John and another friend Frank Bannerman and goes to the girl’s house. Dan convinces Abra that she has to come clean with Abra’s parents, in case the baddies harm them in their pursuit to reach Abra. Abra agrees. They take the glove (after digging the boy’s body out and then, after retrieving the glove, reburying him) to Abra. Wearing it, Abra realizes that four of the ‘vampires’ are coming right then towards her house.
She also describes the group’s location for Dan to realize that they are exactly at the place where once Overlook stood - tie into the previous book, The Shining )
He has a nebulous plan in his mind. What follows is pure brilliance. Dan, Dave and Dr John go in a van to Camp Gap - Dan carrying Abra’s favourite bunny with him. They leave Billy Freeman to watch over Abra in a van while Abra is with a friend. Abra stays in the mind of Dan while also focusing on her friend’s games. The tracker, Barry, feels Abra on the Camp Gap. Abra watches the van through Barry’s eyes. When momentarily she sees the porno video that the True Knot is watching, she gets rattled. This briefly gives Barry a pause because he seems to sense Abra in two places at once! One in a van going towards Camp Gap and the other at Anniston, where they know that ‘the girl’ lives. He is suspicious and asks Crow to drop off at Anniston and investigate. Soon after Barry dies - rube diseases prove deadly to True Knot.
Right at that moment, Abra decides to go from her friend’s house to her home, much to the unease of the watching guard Frank Bannerman.
Meanwhile there is a spectacular scene where the four of them - Andi Snakebite, Walnut, and Jimmy Numbers all come to the Camp ground and are confronted by a prepared team of Dan, eee and Dave! Andi almost makes Dan sleep - with the needle in hand to administer - but Abra makes him aware.
In a spectacular shootout, the team manages to kill all of them!
Crow goes to meet Frank and pretending to ask for directions, and being a man with the nicest manners and the most charming smile, makes him hesitate and reach for the map to show him. This was enough to inject him and make him unconscious. He then goes to get Abra - to her house.
At this very moment, Rose, far away, feels the death of each member every bit and screams into the mind of Abra. Abra is unprepared this time and is disoriented. By the time she manages to push (yes, push!) Rose out and gain clarity, it is too late. She is syringed and in a dopey state is abducted in Frank’s van with both of them strapped to the backseat. With the threat over Frank, he makes Abra compliant.
And in another spectacular section, Abra and Dan manage to switch bodies and Dan and a newly awakened Frank manage to (mentally) overpower Crow and use the gun in Crow’s own hand to turn towards Crow himself and shoot him dead!
Abra gets into Rose’s head and says ‘Don’t bother coming for me, I am coming for you!’
When Stephen King gets into the groove, the pages fly!
After this, they execute a plan for a nail biting climax; Rose has a lot of strategies to ensure that the girl, who foolishly promised to come alone, never leaves with her life. She has all the other True Knots in the main hall - but the girl does not know that she can still stay connected; she also has one of the True Knot members, who has the gift of being almost invisible wait in a shed with its door open - so that if the girl peeks in, she cannot see her and will think Rose is alone.
Dan and Frank leave to meet her there and Abra uses her considerable powers to deceive Rose. They have a really brilliant plan to outwit and Rose, being extremely sharp realizes too early that there is something fishy about “Abra” in the van - which Frank her ‘uncle’ is driving while Dan sneaks back through the rear of the campgrounds.
What follows is a cat and mouse game (with Dan getting a premonition that he will not get out of it alive but still bravely going to help Abra) and a lot of action and surprises.
I will not give away the end, but this book is truly brilliant if you are comfortable with all the supernatural (‘Shining’) stuff in the story.
8/10
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