You’ve Always Been the Caretaker: On Dorothea Lasky’s The Shining

by Heather Bowlan

So maybe it’s a mistake to review a book of poems based on one of my favorite books and my all-time favorite movie—especially if they’re in the horror genre.

Perhaps I’ve set the bar a little high, especially if I’ve spent a lot of time while actually high thinking about the shared themes across book + story: the insidious alienation of casual sexism and racism, the shame woven into capitalist notions of success and milestones, not to mention one of horror’s most compelling tropes, the haunted house as manifested family trauma. 

All of this is to say that I’m not sure what I expected from Dorothea Lasky’s latest collection, The Shining (Wave Books, 2023)—but surprise, it’s its own thing altogether. It’s not a refraction or a straight ahead retelling of the book (1977) or film (1980), and that’s probably better, especially for readers who are not so personally invested.

There’s plenty to dive into and enjoy for us superfans, with the main characters (including that sinister maze) appearing alongside various Easter eggs (a stuffed animal in Danny’s room, the hypnotic rug patterns, the man in the bear costume).

It’s very much a collection set in the numb quiet of the aftermath. There’s not the novel or film’s slow build of terror in anticipation of the rending and damage to come. The memory of violence lingers in the air, unsettling but not terrifying; to paraphrase the Overlook Hotel’s cook and summer season psychic Dick Hallorann, like the smell of burnt toast.

And the poems bring their own brand of dread—an endless waiting for meaning and acceptance, fueled by personalized, increasingly baroque systems of oppression and alienation, “perfectly absurd little rooms for all eternity.”

At times the poems are from some version of Lasky herself, however fictionalized, fighting to retain her name and the self framed inside of it. At other times she slips in and out of known or neglected roles, wandering the hotel, wandering her inner landscape: “That terrible terror of being / That’s me.”

I’m thinking about a line from JJ’s recent essay, that horror “makes room for us to be our own monsters, rather than filling the role of someone else’s boogeyman.” Thinking about how all three Shinings create that space and complicate it.

These poems build on how King and Kubrick both present the hotel’s accumulation of evil, as victims move into their new roles as supernatural witnesses and willing participants. The collection points to writing and poetry explicitly, their potential to document and perpetuate trauma, but also their potential for transformation:

The dead only speak through poetry
So make the poems be the things
That you give everything
They must carry on

And throughout the poems, as expected in Lasky’s writing, there are references to literature as self-portrait and funhouse mirror, the struggle to write, the disingenuous role of the gatekeeper. The White Dude Academic passing judgment naturally makes his appearance (a bit easy, but you know, accurate). “I take out my tiny book / And read you these words,” the narrator, a jilted woman, says in “The Gold Ballroom”:

I have come here from far away 
To see what time could do to me

Everywhere there is the woman
Slouched over her drink

The slow drain of connection, and the continued fight to rediscover it, make the poems echo across each other with a dull ache–the way the blank stare of Wendy watching the TV contrasts Jack’s vacant anger staring out the window. The poems capture the paralysis of memory and the way we shape it to fit the story we tell ourselves about ourselves and the people we hurt and who hurt us. The poems speak to our monstrosity, or our heroism, depending on the day. Or as she writes in “Blue Hallway”:

All the people I was running from
Are here now
I am in the place I have dreamt about

Of course the visual has an important place in The Shining, and the slant Lasky gives some of the story’s most memorable scenes presents a jarring disorientation that echoes the film, especially. In “Swimming Pool,” written in the voice of the Woman in Room 237, the woman boasts about her “Turquoise eye shadow / Glittery and clear coated / In the middle of winter.” Put this against the flash of sinister color as the cunning trap in “Red Airplane”—“I am so warm in this place / The red velvet interior / Making a home of me”—and we see that the sumptuous and feminine are (true to the source texts) not to be trusted.

In “Red Airplane” and elsewhere, Lasky seems to be on the same plane and in the same space as one of the characters, but she does not necessarily speak their part. The technique serves to evoke some of the film’s most memorable scenes as apparitions haunting the poems and carves out a fresh space for longing in the Overlook’s impossible architecture.

I realize I’ve painted Lasky’s book as a downer, but let’s be honest, no one likes the novel’s ending better than the movie. It’s corny as shit and even King knows it; Doctor Sleep (a sequel of sorts) negates the whole post-hotel brighter days vibes in The Shining’s last few pages. 

It’s possible to read Lasky’s recent poem “Blood” in the New Yorker as a kind of coda; it’s framed around the film’s famous, amazing, terrifying trailer with blood pouring out of an elevator: “I am pouring something out of me / With every step that I take // No one is surprised by any of this.” Anyone who hadn’t numbed out before learned how three years ago (if we were lucky enough to experience the height of the pandemic from inside our houses), and now the supposed comfort of a “return to normalcy” outweighs too much discussion of who and what that truly benefits.

A haunted house is a place where you can long for transformation, imagine it. The most you’ll get, though, is some kind of escape from the pain you can’t stop remembering, from the ghosts around us, humming underneath the book’s refrain: “There was always something there / Something there / That was waiting.”

P.S. If you want the happy version of The Shining, it’s out there.

Heather Bowlan is a writer, critic, and community organizer from Northwest Philadelphia and living in Germantown after time in London, Hilo, Long Beach, and Raleigh, among other places. Her collection of self-erasures and collaborative poems, Highlights & Blackouts, was released by _mixlit press as a chapbook and code poem experience in 2023. Heather’s work has appeared in the anthology Feminisms in Motion, the New Ohio Review, the Anarchist Review of Books, and elsewhere.