The Shining centers on Jack Torrance, a struggling writer and recovering alcoholic who accepts a position as the off-season caretaker of the historic Overlook Hotel in the Colorado Rockies.

His family accompanies him on this job, including his young son, Danny, who possesses "the shining", an array of psychic abilities that allow the child to glimpse the hotel's horrific true nature.

Jack is a recovering alcoholic with anger issues which previously caused him to accidentally break his son Danny's arm and lose a teaching job after assaulting a student.

Jack hopes that the hotel's seclusion will help him reconnect with Danny as well as his wife, Wendy, and give him the motivation needed to work on a play.

Unknown to his parents, Danny possesses psychic abilities referred to as "shining", which include reading minds, premonitions and clairvoyance.

While moving into the hotel on closing day, the Torrances meet the chef, Dick Hallorann, who possesses similar abilities to Danny's and forms a connection with him.

The Overlook has difficulty possessing Danny, so it turns its attention to Jack by frustrating his desire to work and by enticing him with the dark history of the hotel through a scrapbook in the basement.

Jack starts to develop cabin fever and becomes increasingly unstable, destroying a two-way radio and sabotaging a snowmobile, the family's only means of escape.

After a fight with Wendy, Jack sees the hotel's bar fully stocked with liquor despite being previously empty and finds himself attending a party of ghosts.

Meanwhile, Hallorann, having received a psychic distress call from Danny while working at a winter resort in Florida, rushes back to the Overlook, only to be attacked by the topiary animals and severely injured by Jack.

Hallorann, who has taken a chef's job at a resort in Maine, comforts Danny over the loss of his father as Wendy recuperates from the injuries Jack inflicted on her.

[5] King opened an atlas of the United States on his kitchen table and randomly pointed to a location, which turned out to be Boulder, Colorado.

[7] In King's words: "That night I dreamed of my three-year-old son running through the corridors, looking back over his shoulder, eyes wide, screaming.

Naomi is fifteen and Joey is thirteen and Owen is eight, and they're all super kids, and I don't think I've laid a hand on one of my kids in probably seven years, but there was a time...[5]The Shining was also heavily influenced by Shirley Jackson's 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House,[10] Edgar Allan Poe's short stories "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839) and "The Masque of the Red Death" (1842),[8] and Robert Marasco's 1973 novel Burnt Offerings.

[12] Bill Thompson, King's editor at Doubleday Publishing, tried to talk him out of The Shining because he thought that after writing Carrie and 'Salem's Lot he would get "typed" as a horror writer.

[13] The prologue was later published in Whispers magazine in August 1982, and an abridged version appeared in the April 26–May 2, 1997 issue of TV Guide to promote the then-upcoming miniseries of The Shining.

"[16] The story would follow Danny Torrance, now in his 40s, living in New Hampshire, where he works as an orderly at a hospice, where he uses his powers to support terminally ill patients at their death.

[17] Later, on December 1, King posted a poll on his official website, asking visitors to vote for which book he should write next, Doctor Sleep or the next Dark Tower novel: I mentioned two potential projects while I was on the road, one a new Mid-World book (not directly about Roland Deschain, but yes, he and his friend Cuthbert are in it, hunting a skin-man, which are what werewolves are called in that lost kingdom) and a sequel to The Shining called Doctor Sleep.

[19] In Doctor Sleep, published in September 2013, the plot includes a traveling group of psychic vampires called the True Knot.

[22][23] Although King himself remains disappointed with the adaptation, having criticized its handling of the book's major themes and of Wendy's character, it is regarded as one of the greatest horror films ever made.