Back-Jacket hack-Job - The Shining

Hey everybody, it's me again - Kayleigh. I'm here to offer up my very first back-jacket hack-job, and for my grand entrance into this theme I thought I'd start with a story that everyone's heard of... The Shining, by Stephen King.

Now, many people think of this story as a haunted hotel horror, a location that corrupts Jack and terrorises his wife and child, and destroys his family. I have a different take.

The Overlook Hotel, a beautiful place that suffers total isolation every winter due to sitting in the heart of nowhere-up-a-mountain, eagerly awaits the caretaker that will keep it company for those long, dark months. Jack, a writer, a sensitive type, is just the companion the hotel and its formerly-living residents need to beat off those winter blues.

But Wendy, Jack's wife, has other plans...

Fuelled by unreasonable jealousy of her husband's purely platonic love of The Overlook, she sets about sabotaging his relationship with it. When he says the hotel is fine, she says it is "evil", and attempts to gaslight him into questioning his own judgment. When he makes new friends, she automatically thinks they're bad news. She overreacts every time she encounters one of the hotel's residents due to her prejudice of ghosts, and she manipulates her son into fearing them. It all comes to a head when she reads Jack's work-in-progress (without his permission), and isn't impressed with it. The book clearly doesn't live up to her impossible standards, and the altercation that follows ends in her attacking him with a bat.

Nothing is ever good enough for Wendy, their son Danny, or Danny's creepy imaginary friend - not the beautiful setting, nor Jack slaving away on his writing day and night because he's the family's breadwinner.

Will Jack free himself of his wretched life, with the help of his new friends at The Overlook Hotel, or will Wendy finally succeed in alienating them?