The Shining | Literary Precedents

The Shining Literary Precedents

What is generally considered to be the first gothic novel, Horace Walpole's The Caste of Otranto (1764), features at its heart a haunted castle, and of all the elements which have come to be regarded as conventional in the roughly 200 years of gothic tradition linking Walpole and Stephen King, the haunted house has surely been the most frequently employed. To note that King has written a haunted house novel in The Shining is thus to immediately place him in the distinguished company of such writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, and Shirley Jackson, to name but several, and in his or her own way each of them has contributed something vital to the texture of King's work.

King's frontispiece to The Shining includes a lengthy quotation from Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death," and he both quotes from and alludes to it on...
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