John Daniel Edward "Jack" Torrance is a fictional character and the main antagonist of Stephen King's horror novel The Shining (1977).

Later, Jack's drinking nearly ends his marriage to his wife, Wendy, after he breaks his son Danny's arm in a blind rage.

He finally decides to quit drinking after a drunk driving crash in which he and a friend run over an abandoned bicycle in the road and realize they could have killed a child.

Jack accepts a position maintaining the isolated Overlook Hotel in Colorado for the winter, hoping this will salvage his family, re-establish his career, and give him the time and privacy to finish a promising play.

The Hotel is haunted by the ghosts of those who died violently within it and is itself host to a being of unknown origin, who wishes to coerce Jack into killing Danny.

Apparently, the Hotel believes if it can harness the boy's "shining", then it can gather enough power to "break free" of the building in which it has somehow become trapped.

Jack finds and confronts Danny, and is about to kill him when his son reaches through the hotel's power and brings out his father's true self.

Shortly before he was fired from his teaching position, and unbeknownst to Wendy, Jack had a brief sexual encounter with a student teacher Sandy Reynolds at a party that led to Lucy's conception.

In the climax of the novel, Jack's ghost intervenes to help Dan's friend Billy Freeman, and Lucy and Abra Stone defeat the main antagonists, Rose the Hat and the True Knot, at the site where the Overlook once stood.

In the film, Danny walks backwards in his own footprints to mislead Jack, then jumps to a side path and slips out of the maze.

The film ends featuring an old photograph of a ball at the hotel from July 4, 1921, that shows a man who strongly resembled Jack at the event.

Paul Moravec and Mark Campbell planned to design their opera to adhere to King's novel, unlike the 1980 film adaptation.