‘The Shining’ sequel due next year, says King

More than three decades after The Shining was first published, the sequel to Stephen King’s classic horror novel is finally coming out next year.

Doctor Sleep is due for publication on Sep 24, 2013, the US author said on his website.

The original book was published in 1977, and its success helped establish King’s fame as a horror novelist.

In 1980, The Shining was adapted into a film directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Jack Nicholson in the role of Jack Torrance, the troubled writer who moves his wife and psychic son, Danny, to the isolated Overlook Hotel in the Colorado mountains.

In the sequel, Dan Torrance — no longer a boy but a middle-aged man — is still haunted by his father’s legacy and the horrific year he spent at the Overlook Hotel, according to a synopsis of the book posted on the author’s website.

He uses his gift — the shining — to comfort the dying in a New Hampshire town but his life is upset when he meets a 12-year-old girl who also has the shining and whom he “must save from a tribe of murderous paranormals”.

King has written some 50 novels, including Carrie, The Dead Zone and Misery.

The publishers explained the story to be “an epic war between good and evil” that would “thrill the millions of hyper-devoted readers of The Shining”.

One of King’s most loved works, The Shining has sold more than a million copies since it was first published.

King famously disliked the big screen version of The Shining.

He said: “Parts of the film are chilling, charged with a relentlessly claustrophobic terror, but others fall flat. Not that religion has to be involved in horror, but a visceral sceptic such as Kubrick just couldn’t grasp the sheer inhuman evil of The Overlook Hotel.

“So he looked, instead, for evil in the characters and made the film into a domestic tragedy with only vaguely supernatural overtones.

“That was the basic flaw: because he couldn’t believe, he couldn’t make the film believable to others.”