Trailer Park Tuesday: Doctor Sleep by Stephen King

Welcome to Trailer Park Tuesday, a showcase of new book trailers and, in a few cases, previews of book-related movies.

Wake up, everybody!  The new Stephen King is here.  Doctor Sleep brings us back into the life of young Danny Torrance, the finger-wagging "Redrum" kid from King's 1977 novel The Shining.  Now a middle-aged alcoholic, Dan Torrance has drifted through life, trying to shake the demons that haunt him from the Overlook Hotel (where his axe-wielding father crumbled into madness one snowbound winter) and dealing with his psychic abilities (his "shining").  "Finally," as the publisher's jacket copy tells us, "he settles in a New Hampshire town, an AA community that sustains him, and a job at a nursing home where his remnant “shining” power provides the crucial final comfort to the dying.  Aided by a prescient cat, he becomes 'Doctor Sleep.'  Then Dan meets the evanescent Abra Stone, and it is her spectacular gift, the brightest shining ever seen, that reignites Dan’s own demons and summons him to a battle for Abra’s soul and survival."   It's the usual King jazz riff of good versus evil.  Whether or not you dig it depends in large part on your personal history with King's novels.  I, for one, happen to dig it, Daddy-O, and can't wait to, um, dig into Doctor Sleep.  I posted a trailer for the novel earlier here at the blog, but this 30-second spot gives us a whole new set of disturbing images with which to decorate our nightmares: flies magnetically attracted to a man's face, silverware falling from a ceiling, a top hat blowing down the middle of a street, and, of course, the bloody scrawl of "Redrum" finger-painted on a wall.  This is primo King stuff, designed to rob us of our sleep.