Stephen King isn’t as scary as he used to be, but ‘Doctor Sleep’ is still a cracker

Though alcohol withdrawal is potentially fatal, booze has none of the media-confected glitz of heroin (imagine Will Self boasting of a Baileys Bristol Cream addiction). The 17th-century word for the sickness that follows excessive drinking — ‘crapula’ — effectively hints at the alcoholic’s sleazy kind of stupor. In his earlier years, Stephen King would drink himself daily into a wall-eyed hangover. His scariest novels — Carrie, The Stand, The Shining — were written in the 1970s when sobriety was a no-no for him. Jack Torrance, the author who goes off his rocker in The Shining, suffers the most horripilating of alcohol-tainted visions while holed up in the Overlook Hotel in the Colorado Rockies. King put something of his boozed-up self into Torrance.

King’s new novel, Doctor Sleep, picks up where The Shining left off four decades ago. While it does not rank with the best of King it remains very decent King nonetheless.