Doctor Sleep involves an ancient train running again. In a way that’s a metaphor for the whole thing. King’s seminal novel The Shining – first published in 1977 – finally has a sequel. Two questions arise: is Doctor Sleep a good book? And is it a good sequel to the Shining?

Let’s face it, The Shining is one massive locomotive. In a way, it’s not even a Stephen King creation. It’s now also a Stanley Kubrick creation, and a Simpsons creation, and a creation of every single person who’s adapted it, parodied it, referenced it, ripped it off, etc. The Shining is such a ubiquitous part of our culture that, ironically, we’ve destroyed much of its value as a horror novel. Getting scared by the Shining now seems like getting moved by “Luke, I am your father.”

Jack Torrance’s psychic son Danny has grown into a man haunted by events at the Overlook Hotel. He drifts around the country, drinking and getting into bar fights, until he joins Alcoholics Anonymous and finds work at a nursing home. There, he finally finds a positive use for his “shining” ability…comforting the dying as they pass over to the other side. People start to call him Doctor Sleep.

He also meets a young girl called Abra Stone, and realises that she has the most powerful “shining” ability he’s ever seen. She can levitate a piece of chalk and write messages on a blackboard miles away. She can potentially kill with her mind. Unfortunately, a shadowy group of individuals called The True Knot has also become aware of her abilities. The True Knot are like the Manson family mixed with vampires (a town called Salem’s Lot gets name-checked, by the way), except instead of blood, they feed on “shine”.

This isn’t the same kind of book as the Shining, which took place almost entirely at snowbound hotel. There’s lots of travel here, lots of movement from place to place (and time to time). That might seem like a small detail, but the first book got a lot of mileage out of its feeling of claustrophobia and confinement, and if that’s what you liked about the Shining, you won’t find it here. Doctor Sleep is The Shining with a drivers license and a lot of tollbooth ticket stubs.

There’s a lot more violence, but also a lot more humanity and character development. Again, that might be good or bad. What really worked about the The Shining was its coldness, and how it felt like Jack Torrance was losing his humanity. Here, even the villains unambiguously think they’re in the right, and they have fairly solid reasons for doing so.

Some parts really work. The early scenes with Danny and Mr Halloran, the deathbed scenes (I got strong nostalgia for the Green Mile reading Doctor Sleep), the way the True Knot are introduced. Other parts aren’t as strong…often because King suddenly starts trying to force connections to the Shining. Midway through the story he remembers “hey, didn’t Danny have an imaginary friend called Tony?”, and then we get Tony jammed into the plot so aggressively King might as well be using a shoehorn.

And there’s a few hideously boring scenes where we meet Abra Stone’s Italian family. This is the first time (from memory) that King has written an Italian family that isn’t made up of gangsters. Frankly, if this is the best he can do, he should go back to making us an offer we can’t refuse.

So does it work as a sequel? Maybe it’s better to ask, does it want to work as a sequel? Doctor Sleep is really its own thing, and it’s not bad for what it is. King’s been in gradual recovery mode since the early to mid noughties, and this continues the trend. You’ll find a lot to like here, if you’re willing to leave the Overlook behind.

Reader’s advisory: old news + I was not involved.

A few months ago, a promising science fiction author called Benjanun Sriduangkaew was exposed as the secret identity of notorious troll/cyberbully Requires Hate (who has also gone by the name of Winterfox, ACrackedMoon, and several others).

I was a regular reader of Requires Hate. I actually planned to submit one of my books for a Requires Hate review, but I didn’t have any ready in time. Everyone’s shocked that this person gained so much traction in “da scene”. Nobody can see the truth: that the problem lies with them, and the community they created.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen the rise of the “social justice” movement, which combats sexism, racism, and oppression (or thinks it does). For years, it was a harmless tumor, confined to places like LiveJournal and SomethingAwful. But Tumblr and Twitter shot it full of steroids, and it has metastasized into a proud, fierce, non-gender-binary cancer.

In CS Lewis’s city of Tashbaan, the less important bow and scrape for the more important. In the social justice, the less oppressed bow and scrape for the more oppressed. There’s not much more too it. If you have light skin, or a penis, disagreement with a minority (or someone who claims they’re a minority) is very unwise, as you are silencing them, erasing them, forcing them out of the discourse, denying their lived experiences, et cetera.

Obviously, these kinds of communities are very vulnerable to sociopaths, and manipulators, and Requires Hate leveraged her Oppressed Person status to the full. She was a woman, she was queer, and she was Asian. That’s a pretty strong hand. Maybe the ace-high straight Social Justice Poker. You had to listen to her, because you were privileged and she was not.

One of the victims of Requires Hate’s taunting was Kari Sperring, who apparently attempted suicide because of it. I find that…unhealthy. Abnormal. Why would you let an internet troll have that much power over you? I think it’s because of social justice. Sperring wasn’t able to brush those comments off, because Requires Hate outranked her. Arguing with a member of THREE marginalised groups? No way. That would have made her a bad person, an oppressor. Only one way out…the medicine cabinet.

4chan wish they had a trolling thermonuke this powerful. All they can do is leak your naked selfies.

Hopefully people will have learned a lesson from Requires Hate…that societies should not act like the saddest, most downtrodden class of saps deserves to be running things. There’s men who volunteer at rape shelters and women who’s biggest concern is shopping for oversized sunglasses. And being black – even an actually oppressed black – doesn’t mean you know a damn thing about racism, just as getting shot doesn’t confer understanding of ballistics or catching a cold doesn’t make you an expert on immunology. These are complicated topics, and I want to hear smart viewpoints, wherever they come from, not “lived-in” viewpoints. The idea is got-a-cool-toy-banned-by-rectally-inserting-it grade stupid.

As for Benjanun Sriduangkaew, I wish she’d stuck around. She got busted, posted a groveling apology, and is now keeping a low profile. I think she should have stuck to her guns. “Yeah, I was Requires Hate, and here’s news: I regret nothing. You’re trash, your favorite books suck, and if that makes you try to kill yourself, take a fucking seat. You haven’t seen anything yet.”

Ah, unrequited love. Boy signs his name on a love letter. Girl signs her name on a restraining order. I used to think that only humans experienced one-sided attractions, but lately I’ve realised that words do, too.

Sentences that mention Megadeth often also mention Metallica, but the reverse doesn’t apply: sentences that mention Metallica almost never mention Megadeth. One is far more famous than the other, so the attraction only flows one way. Likewise, sentences that mention The Hidden Fortress also usually mention Star Wars, but sentences that involve Star Wars almost never mention The Hidden Fortress.

This same rule applies to early 20th century weird fiction author Algernon Blackwood. It’s hard to find anything about him that doesn’t immediately compare him to HP Lovecraft. Perhaps not the strangest comparison in the world: they wrote about the alien, the eldritch, the unknowable. And they were both masters at keeping unspeakable terrors offscreen while not leaving the reader feeling cheated.

But Blackwood was different to Lovecraft. He wrote more ghost stories. He could be playful and mischievous. But most of all, his stories sometimes had a sense of quiet, unpretentious realism, as though he was writing about things that really could happen. His real life fascination with sorcery and the occult shines through in his fiction. When man is pitted against monster, Blackwood takes the side of the monster.

This collection has nine of Blackwood’s tales. “The Wendigo” and “The Willows” are very famous stories about brushes with the unknown. “The Man the Trees Loved” is a curious, whimsical offering – more similar to Lord Dunsany than anything in Weird Tales. “An Episode in a Lodging House” is about a renter using an ancient spell to bring down the boundary between worlds.

But my favorite two stories are two of the lessor known ones. “The Man Who Found Out” is a brilliant wind-up and release about a secret that causes anyone who learns of it to kill themselves. And the horrific “The Insanity of Jones” is about someone who begins to suspect that his boss murdered him in a past life. Both of these stories are tight, lean, and spellbinding.

Blackwood’s writing has aged well, and he’s well worth reading for reasons other than the fact that HP Lovecraft liked him. There’s more complete volumes of Blackwood’s stories, but this has enough to give a good introduction to his work.