Stephen King on 'The Shining' sequel and the novel he co-authored with his son

NPR's Book of the Day

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Arts, Books

4.2 • 671 Ratings

🗓️ 31 October 2025

⏱️ 16 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In today’s episode, "King of Horror" Stephen King reflects on his sobriety, the sequel to The Shining and a novel he co-wrote with his son. First, The Shining came out in 1980, but King didn’t publish the sequel – Doctor Sleep – until more than 30 years later. In a 2013 interview, the author spoke with NPR’s David Greene about revisiting his iconic characters. Then, King and his son Owen co-wrote Sleeping Beauties after Owen approached his father with an idea for the book’s premise. In today’s episode, we revisit a 2017 conversation between the father-son duo and NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. We're a book's podcast doing a whole week on horror for Halloween,
0:09.2	so of course we've got to do something on Stephen King. I think that's somewhere in the bylaws of
0:15.4	horror fiction. In a bit, we'll hear about the book he co-wrote with his son, but first, I wanted to play you
0:21.2	this conversation from 2013.
0:23.5	It's with King and then NPR host David Green, and they're talking about King's book, Dr.
0:28.3	Sleep, which is a sequel to The Shining.
0:31.4	And in this interview, King talks about being a pretty heavy drinker back when he wrote The Shining,
0:36.8	and he wrote Dr. Sleep with more than
0:38.7	two decades of sobriety under his belt. And in some ways, the book is a meditation on what
0:44.6	alcoholism does to a person, to a family, to future generations. That's after the break.
0:52.2	Remember the first time you were really, really scared and you liked it?
0:57.0	Maybe it was when you picked up a book by Stephen King, like The Shining.
1:01.1	An awful lot of the people who read The Shining were like 14 years old.
1:05.8	They were at summer camp.
1:07.1	They read it under the covers with a flashlight on.
1:09.8	And, you know, in a way, being scared is like sex.
1:15.1	There's nothing like your first time.
1:17.1	Okay, that's Stephen King describing the challenge that he has taken on,
1:21.1	writing a sequel to such a terrifying and memorable novel.
1:25.2	The Shining, which later became a film starring Jack Nicholson, is the story
1:28.4	of Jack Torrance, a man struggling with demons, from alcoholism to writer's block. And to make matters
1:34.9	worse, he takes the job of caretaker at an isolated old hotel in the Rocky Mountains. He snowed in
	...

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