In the book, "The Shining" by Stephen King a father takes a needed job to be the caretaker for a well known hotel called the Overlook Hotel. The father named Jack as had some prior issues controlling his temper and anger. While he is taking care of the hotel during the winter he loses his mind on a count of the strange events occurring around him. His son and wife feel unsafe around Jack and Danny (Jack's son) feels that Jack will try and hurt him and his mother Wendy. Danny who has a special ability to see images that are sometimes portrayed in the past or the future is guided by a friend in his hallucinations he calls Tony. Tony guides him through images and actual parts of events that happen in the hotel and as time goes by at the hotel each image becomes real. Danny and his family meet the cook for the hotel named Dick Hallorann and he and Danny seem to have the same ability Hallorann calls shining. Although the images seem very real I think that all these people Stephen King describes as the hotel itself are just images the characters are seeing from being stuck all together at once.
For example when Danny and his family are being given the tour of the hotel they are introduced to the presidential suite. Inside Danny sees dried blood and brains and he thinks it looks very real but then he closes his eyes and opens them again and the blood is gone. He is clearly just imagining this if the blood disappeared when Danny opened his eyes. Danny should have been influenced to say something about not staying at the hotel. Another example of why it is not logical for these "people" of the hotel to be real is that Danny thinks that he is getting chased by a hedge animal also known as topiary. He is running away from a lion that is chasing him but then he falls and claims that the lion scratched him but Jack thinks it was the thorny bush right next to him. I think that Danny saw the bush and his head that has gone crazy thought that he was being chased then Danny simply falls and scrapes his leg on a bush. Every character seems to have this frame of mind especially Jack and Danny, both people seem to see images from the hotel frequently, Danny has more self control than his father Jack so Danny while he gets scared he will not hurt anyone. On the other hand Jack has short temper and cannot control his anger very well therefore the hotel images manage to "take over" Jack's body and Jack hurt his wife the very friendly cook Hallorann and attempts at hurting his son. This proves that while the images are not real and are all made up inside their heads they have proven very affective to Jack.
Also Danny and Jack are not the only ones seeing things, the hotel cook sees images from the hotel, but the images are not trying to take over his body in any way but to kill and/or send him away from the hotel when he comes to save Danny and Wendy. Hallorann thinks he is being chased by a hedge lion just like Danny but he is hurt even more. I think that his brain saw the hedges and saw Jack coming to try to kill him. I think that the hedge is Jack because he leaves Wendy when he is about to kill her when he hears Hallorann come but when the story is told from Hallorann's point of view he fights with the hedge lion and never Jack. Wendy also sees something, in the night she goes outside of the room with Jack and Danny to check out the elevator and Wendy sees confetti in the elevator. I think that at first Wendy is the only one who sees it then Danny and Jacks messed up brains process it as well and they then think that they see it. This further proves that the images are not real and that they are all made up in the screwed up minds of the characters in the story. The only way to truly know is to ask the one that created the whole thing in the first place, Stephen King.
This book is about a great family with little flaws like all families in the world that then gets torn apart because of the need of this job to be able to survive. The Overlook Hotel is manipulating Wendy, Danny, Jack, and Hallorann and is pushing them to hurt each other and tear the love they had for each other into little pieces. The qualities of each character really get shown in their full light throughout this book whether they are positive or negative. This can apply to all families because when you get locked in a hotel all together it can bring out all the good and bad qualities in a person.
