Last night at Toronto’s packed Canon Theatre, fans of Stephen King were treated to a 15-minute reading from the author’s new novel, Under the Dome, and nearly an hour’s worth of typically funny anecdotes and keen observations during an on-stage interview with director David Cronenberg. Then King dropped a fan bombshell on the crowd by casually describing a novel idea he began working on last summer. Seems King was wondering whatever happened to Danny Torrance of The Shining, who when readers last saw him was recovering from his ordeal at the Overlook Hotel at a resort in Maine with fellow survivors Wendy Torrance and chef Dick Halloran (who dies in the Kubrick film version). King remarked that though he ended his 1977 novel on a positive note, the Overlook was bound to have left young Danny with a lifetime’s worth of emotional scars. What Danny made of those traumatic experiences, and with the psychic powers that saved him from his father at the Overlook, is a question that King believes might make a damn fine sequel.
So what would a sequel to one of King’s most beloved novels look like? In King’s still tentative plan for the novel, Danny is now 40 years old and living in upstate New York, where he works as the equivalent of an orderly at a hospice for the terminally ill. Danny’s real job is to visit with patients who are just about to pass on to the other side, and to help them make that journey with the aid of his mysterious powers. Danny also has a sideline in betting on the horses, a trick he learned from his buddy Dick Hallorann.
The title for King’s proposed sequel? Doctor Sleep.
Perhaps sensing that he’d let the cat out of the plot bag a little early, King then told Cronenberg and the audience that he wasn’t completely committed to the new novel, going so far as to say, “Maybe if I keep talking about it I won’t have to write it.”
Let’s hope King doesn’t have too many interviews booked in the next six months.
I wonder if there’s any way he can work it into the Dark Tower/Flagg mythos.
Oh, who am I kidding – of course he can!
More interesting to real Stephen King fans is that he’s looking at revisiting the Dark Tower series for an eighth volume — tentatively titled Wind Through The Keyhole. He has already started formulating the story, and plans on starting it in about 8 months. Don’t believe me? Check his website. Guaranteed we see this book before The Shining 2. Also, he told the same anecdote on The Hour — so it was hardly an accidental slip up.
Hi
Can somebody go a bit more into detail how it was at the event ?
What did he and Cronenberg talk about ? What were those anegdotes.
Please reply.
Thank you.
It was interesting to hear Stephen and David banter back and forth but what should have been an interview quickly became an “I love me Festival” for David Cronenburg. He should stick to directing movies and leave the interviewing to the pro’s. Long winded questions lead to short (although funny) answers from Stephen King. I will say, that as a long time fan of his books, I consider myself very lucky to have been there and hear him speaking, a chance I may never get again!!!
If you want to know what was said, pretty much just watch his appearance on CBC’s The Hour, which was taped just hours before. He pretty much tells the exact same stories in both interviews, including this so-called sequel.
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