Culture September 19, 2013

The scariest thing about Doctor Sleep, King’s sequel to The Shining, is the possibility that it will turn out to be dreadful. That fear dogs all sequels, and especially sequels to iconic stories—and, for fully fifty pages, King does little to dispel it. After a perfunctory update on Danny, now eight, we meet our new bad guys. These are a clan of vampirelike beings known, regrettably, as the True Knot. Not regrettably, though awfully Carl Hiaasen–y, they roam the country in RVs, clad in stretch pants and grandma-wear.