Stephen Graham Jones

The Shining is great and amazing and permanent and iconic and all that good stuff, of course, but one thing it has going for it that very, very few other stories ever get is that it instantly activates our imagination—immediately upon hearing the premise, we put ourselves in that situation of being winter caretaker for a remote hotel, and then, before we ever read what King wrote, we’re writing our own stories in our heads: I’d sleep in a different bed every night, I’d make myself sit in place and watch an orange on the table until it started to decay, I’d, I don’t know, write a bloody ending for this story swirling through my head, play catch with myself against the wall of the Big Room, and on and on.