[The Shining] has flaws, some minor and some serious…. But when all's said, the novel works! It makes one tremble in anticipation of the day when King gets it all together and writes a 'perfect' book…. King's style … is his most obvious fault. It's all good writing, it's all pertinent, but it goes on and on…. Setting a realistic scene and creating believably complex characters are laudable traits, but King seriously overdoes it.

The haunted hotel [of The Shining] is a stock sort of device, left over from the days when people were still writing straight ghost stories. The struggling family offers the pathos that no doubt is in part responsible for the book's popularity—real characters, beautifully handled for the most part, though some of the development toward the end is a bit too hasty. Even the child with the "gift" is a common theme of Stephen King's…. But herein they are combined, redev...

To say that Stephen King is not an elegant writer … is putting it mildly. But inelegance is not precisely the problem in "The Shining."… [In] "The Shining," memories and fantasies often find themselves pretentiously enclosed in parentheses. Sometimes non-punctuation or italics are used—quite arbitrarily—for gimmicky stream of consciousness effect. Occasionally we are subjected to all capitals in parentheses with triple exclamation points (!!! ON BOTH M...