So it would appear that Stephen King, god of pulp horror novelists, has started writing a sequel to one of his more famous stories: The Shining. Now, I love The Shining, and normally I sneer at sequels to popular properties – moreso when the property is decades old – but I’m strangely okay with this. Maybe it’s because King wrote The Shining, so he’s sequelizing his own work, which he has every right to do. Maybe it’s because the quality of King’s work is already a matter of some debate. Or maybe it’s different when the sequel is a book and not a movie. Here’s a blurb from King about the book:
“This is an idea that I’ve had for some time. I wrote a novel in the ’70s called The Shining … I always wondered what happened to that kid, Danny Torrance, when he grew up … and this story started to form. The book isn’t finished yet, it’s called Dr. Sleep. This kinda goes back to: what’s the worst thing you can think of? I knew that there were bad people in this story that were like vampires, only that what they sucked out was not blood, but psychic energy from special people like Danny Torrance. And I came to realize that these people were called The Tribe and that they move around a lot. Their leader is a woman called Rose [unintelligible] they all have these kinda pirate names, because pirates is sort of what they are.”
What do you think? Are book sequels less offensive than movie sequels?