Stephen King on 'The Shining' sequel and the novel he co-authored with his son

Summary

NPR's Book of the Day

Episode: Stephen King on 'The Shining' Sequel and the Novel He Co-Authored With His Son

Date: October 31, 2025
Host: Andrew Limbong
Featured Authors: Stephen King and Owen King
Guest Hosts/Interviewers: David Green, Mary Louise Kelly

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Episode Overview

This special Halloween episode dives into the master of horror, Stephen King. It features two insightful interviews:

• A 2013 NPR conversation with Stephen King about "Doctor Sleep," his sequel to "The Shining," exploring themes of alcoholism, generational trauma, and writing evolution.
• A joint interview with Stephen King and his son, Owen King, discussing their collaborative novel "Sleeping Beauties," the dynamics of their co-writing process, and the family legacy of storytelling.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Revisiting The Shining: Doctor Sleep and Generational Trauma

Segments: 01:58 – 09:38
Interview: David Green with Stephen King

• On Writing a Sequel to a Classic

  • Stephen King addresses the challenge of following up such an iconic work. He reflects on the enduring resonance of "The Shining," particularly with young readers discovering it at a formative age.
    • “Being scared is like sex. There's nothing like your first time.” — Stephen King (02:13)

• Danny Torrance Grown Up: Cycles of Trauma

  • The desire to revisit Danny as an adult is linked to curiosity about whether people can rise above familial mistakes and trauma.
    • “Can we rise above the mistakes that our parents made or the character flaws that our parents had?” — Stephen King (03:33)

• Addiction and AA in Doctor Sleep

  • King draws from personal experience, contrasting Danny’s journey with Jack Torrance’s. The nature-vs-nurture question is central, with special attention to whether one can escape familial predispositions to addiction.
    • “Jack Torrance never tries Alcoholics Anonymous...I wondered what it would be like to see Danny first as an alcoholic and then see him in AA.” — Stephen King (05:17)
  • King is reserved about specifics but affirms “a lot of personal research” shaped the depiction of recovery.
    • “I haven’t had a drink in about 25 years now, so you could draw certain conclusions from that. But I wouldn’t cop to it. Let me just say this, David. I’ve done a lot of personal research.” — Stephen King (06:31)

• King’s Evolution As a Writer

  • King feels he's become more sophisticated but is determined never to “phone it in.” He’s driven by a need to fully use his talent in the time he has.
    • “There are plenty of people who’ve got lots of talent. This world is lousy with talent. The idea is to work that talent and try to get to be the best person that you can, given the limits of the talent that God gave you or fate or genetics, whatever name you want to put on it.” — Stephen King (07:30)

• Spirituality and Mortality in Storytelling

  • On reluctance to proselytize, King wants themes to emerge naturally, letting his characters be the vehicle.
    • “My main job is to tell stories and to be a storyteller. And what I feel about spirituality...are things that should come through in the book. But I don’t put up any billboards.” — Stephen King (08:16)
  • He candidly addresses aging and thoughts about death:
    • “Death is the great mystery and it’s the final act in our lives. And it deserves, if anything ever does, it deserves the kind of treatment that a guy like me can give it: speculative and imaginative.” — Stephen King (09:13)

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2. King & Son: Collaborating on "Sleeping Beauties"

Segments: 10:15 – 17:15
Interview: Mary Louise Kelly with Stephen King and Owen King

• Origins of a Horror Family

  • Both Stephen and Owen recall childhood memories that influenced their paths as writers:
    • Stephen’s mother read him shocking stories like "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (10:49).
    • Owen describes their family “writing game,” a collaborative storytelling exercise (11:26).

• How "Sleeping Beauties" Was Conceived and Written

  • Owen pitched the idea: What if all women in the world fell asleep and didn’t wake up? Stephen instantly recognized it as the seed for a gripping story.
    • “Owen kind of tossed this thing off and all my lights came on...This is a situation that demands a story.” — Stephen King (11:54)
  • Their collaborative method involved alternating writing pages and encouraging each other to take ownership—and risks—with the narrative.
    • “I rewrote him and he rewrote me ... just make it as hard as possible for the poor old guy. And then he would do the same to me.” — Owen King (12:37)

• Blending Styles and Creating a "Third Voice"

  • The back-and-forth led to a merging of voices so complete neither could recall who wrote specific passages.
    • “When we were done, the stuff was so interwoven and so rewritten and plowed over, it’s almost like we created a third person, which could be a horror story in itself.” — Stephen King (13:38)

• Evie: The Supernatural Heart of "Sleeping Beauties"

  • The Kings read a lyrical passage establishing Evie’s uncanny omnipresence, highlighting their seamless collaboration.
    • “Evie was almost everywhere. She was a fly in the 767 ... as an aunt, she moved through the still warm blood of a dead teenage girl in the woods where Jared ran from his pursuers.” — Stephen & Owen King (14:13 – 15:16)
  • Neither author could remember who wrote which lines, underscoring their successful partnership.

• Reflections on Co-Writing as Father and Son

  • For Owen, the process was most valuable for the time spent together.
    • “I’m thrilled with the book. I’m very, very proud of it. But the thing that I liked the most about this was that I got to spend all this time with my dad.” — Owen King (16:03)
  • Stephen echoes the sentiment, comparing solo writing to sailing the Atlantic in a bathtub and cherishing the companionship.
    • “I had somebody with me on it, and that was great. And for it to be my son, that was a tremendous gift.” — Stephen King (16:34)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Being scared is like sex. There's nothing like your first time.” — Stephen King, [02:13]
• “My idea is to come up to you and grab you by the lapels and say, I have this story. I want to tell it to you.” — Stephen King, [04:25]
• “There are plenty of people who’ve got lots of talent... the idea is to work that talent and try to get to be the best person that you can, given the limits of the talent that God gave you or fate or genetics, whatever name you want to put on it.” — Stephen King, [07:30]
• “You could say, having read these two books and knowing that I was a very heavy drinker at the time that I wrote The Shining, and I haven't had a drink in about 25 years now, so you could draw certain conclusions from that. But I wouldn't cop to it. Let me just say this, David. I've done a lot of personal research.” — Stephen King, [06:30]
• “Evie was almost everywhere. She was a fly in the 767 … as an aunt, she moved through the still warm blood of a dead teenage girl...” — Stephen & Owen King, [14:13 – 15:16]
• “It’s almost like we created a third person, which could be a horror story in itself.” — Stephen King, [13:38]
• “To me, that was... I’m thrilled with the book... But the thing that I liked the most about this was that I got to spend all this time with my dad.” — Owen King, [16:03]
• “Writing a novel is like sailing across the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub...I had somebody with me on it, and that was great. And for it to be my son, that was a tremendous gift.” — Stephen King, [16:34]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Time | Segment Description | |-------------|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 01:58 | Start of 2013 Stephen King interview on "Doctor Sleep" | | 03:06 | Revisiting Danny Torrance and familial legacy | | 04:58 | Alcoholism, nature vs. nurture, AA in King’s works | | 06:52 | King’s evolution and philosophy about writing | | 08:09 | King on spirituality and storytelling | | 10:15 | Introduction to collaboration with Owen King | | 11:26 | Family storytelling traditions, “the writing game” | | 12:23 | Collaborative process of writing "Sleeping Beauties" | | 14:13 | Joint reading: Evie character description | | 16:03 | Reflections on what collaboration meant to father and son |

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Episode Flow and Tone

The episode maintains NPR's signature warmth and curiosity, balancing literary analysis with personal reflection. King’s frankness about addiction, writing anxieties, and mortality gives the episode depth, while the exchange between father and son infuses the second half with tenderness and humor.

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Takeaways

• Generational trauma and addiction are at the heart of "Doctor Sleep," drawn from King’s personal and familial reflections.
• Collaboration across generations, especially within a family of writers, brings both creative challenges and emotional rewards, as vividly illustrated in the making of "Sleeping Beauties."
• Stephen King’s ability to blend the horrifying with the human has evolved but remains energized by a commitment to mining every facet of his talent—and life experience.

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Listeners gain a window into both the psychological terrain of King’s fiction and the human connections that fuel his enduring relevance in horror and beyond.

Transcript

[Andrew Limbong]

Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. We're a books podcast doing a whole week on horror for Halloween. So of course we've gotta do something on Stephen King. I think that's somewhere in the bylaws of horror fiction. In a bit, we'll hear about the book he co wrote with his son. But first, I wanted to play you this conversation from 2013. It's with King and then NPR host David Green. And they're talking about King's book doctor Sleep, which is a sequel to the Shining. And, and in this interview, King talks about being a pretty heavy drinker back when he wrote the Shining. And he wrote doctor Sleep with more than two decades of sobriety under his belt. And in some ways, the book is a meditation on what alcoholism does to a person, to a family, to future generations. That's after the break.

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[NPR Host David Green]

Remember the first time you were really, really scared and you liked it? Maybe it was when you picked up a book by Stephen King like the Shining.

[Stephen King]

An awful lot of the people who read the shining were like 14 years old. They were at summer camp. They read it under the covers with a flashlight on. And you know, in a way, being scared is like sex. There's nothing like your first time.

[NPR Host David Green]

Okay, that's Stephen King describing the challenge that he has taken on writing a sequel to such a terrifying and memorable novel. The Shining, which later became a film starring Jack Nicholson, is the story of Jack Torrance, a man struggling with demons from alcoholism to writer's block. And to make matters worse, he takes the job of caretaker at an isolated old hotel in the Rocky Mountains. He snowed in with his wife, his son Danny, and a lot of ghosts. Danny, the little boy was blessed and cursed with the ability to read thoughts and see the future. And King picks up his story in the sequel. It's called doctor Sleep. Danny, as an adult, is using his gift to help ease the pain when someone dies.

[Stephen King]

I wanted to kind of revisit Danny and see what he was like as a grown up. I think that we all have this kind of desire to reconnect with friends from when we were younger. You know, that's the whole basis of high school and college reunions. So I was also wanting to re meet some of the people that I knew from the Shining. And I also wanted to investigate this whole idea about can we rise above our parents? Can we rise above the mistakes that our parents made or the character flaws that our parents had?

[NPR Host David Green]

When I went back to reread the Shining before talking to you and then reading doctor Sleep, I was left with this question at the end. When was Stephen King kind of setting us up for a sequel?

[Stephen King]

No, I had no idea. I got them through the hotel. The hotel burned down. There's a Stanley Kubrick film of the book that most people know. And in that particular version of the Shining, the hotel freezes solid, which kind of reflects Stanley Kubrick's temperament at that time. And in my version, the hotel burns, which reflects my temperament at the time.

[NPR Host David Green]

Why do you say that this exploding, burning building reflected your temperament?

[Stephen King]

Well, I was hot. And as a writer, I've always been confrontational. I've never been cool. I've never been calculating. My idea is to come up to you and grab you by the lapels and say, I have this story. I want to tell it to you. And when you hear it, you're not going to want to cook dinner, you're not going to want to clean the house, you're not going to want to go to your job. You're just going to want to read this story and care about what comes next.

[NPR Host David Green]

Well, let's get into the world of doctor Sleep, the new book, and alcoholism. A big part of it. Was that a conscious choice? I mean, did you really want to dig into alcoholism and sort of that vulnerability?

[Stephen King]

Well, I was interested in it for a lot of different reasons. There does seem to be a genetic predisposition to alcoholism. That's the nature part. The nurture part is that if you grow up in a household where there's a lot of drinking, you have A tendency to become a drinker yourself. So I wanted to see if it was possible to escape those things. But the other thing that sort of interested me was that Jack Torrance never tries Alcoholics Anonymous. That is never even mentioned in the Shining. He is what they call white knuckle sobriety. He's doing it all by himself. So I wondered what it would be like to see Danny first as an alcoholic and then see him in aa.

[NPR Host David Green]

The author's note in this book seems to make it pretty clear that you spent some time in aa, and I wonder if those experiences shape this in any sort of way.

[Stephen King]

That reminds me of something that the guy says in the British TV series House of Cards. You might think so, but I could not possibly comment. One of the traditions of AA is we try to maintain complete anonymity at the level of press, radio and the films. And as you know, we're on the radio right now.

[NPR Host David Green]

That is true.

[Stephen King]

You could, you could say, having read these two books and knowing that I was a very heavy drinker at the time that I wrote the Shining, and I haven't had a drink in about 25 years now, so you could draw certain conclusions from that. But I wouldn't cop to it. Let me just say this, David. I've done a lot of personal research.

[NPR Host David Green]

In these subjects, thinking about you as a writer. Look back to 1977, the Shining is first published, and now, you know, more than 30 years later, you do the sequel. How have you changed as a writer over this time?

[Stephen King]

Well, I think that I've gotten a little bit more sophisticated in my writing ability. I want to try to keep what I'm doing fresh. I don't want to phone it in, let's put it that way. And that in itself makes it possible to work to the top of your abilities. I mean, I don't want to get all spiritual about this or anything, but feel free. No, I don't think so. I don't feel free. But let's put it this way. There are plenty of people who've got lots of talent. This world is lousy with talent. The idea is to work that talent and try to get to be the best person that you can, given the limits of the talent that God gave you or fate or genetics, whatever name you want to put on it. So I think a lot of people have sort of suggested that, that the stuff that I do may be second class because there's so much of it. And my response to that is, I'm going to quit and be dead for a Long time. This is the time that I've got and I want to use it. I want to use it to the max. I really want to try and mine everything that I've got.

[NPR Host David Green]

Why do you say you don't feel free to get spiritual with me here? Because you certainly do in your books.

[Stephen King]

I do, and that's the property. And I let my characters speak for me. And the one thing that I don't want to do at all is to get up on a hobby horse because I don't respect that. My main job is to tell stories and to be a storyteller. And what I feel about spirituality, the afterlife, this life, are things that should come through in the book. But I don't put up any billboards.

[NPR Host David Green]

Because there's some really moving scenes in doctor Sleep about dying. And I did wonder if you sort of thought about dying in a possible afterlife as you get older.

[Stephen King]

Yeah, I think about it a lot. The older I get, the more I think about it because the closer it comes. I'm very interested in the actual act of dying, which is the last great human action that we have in our lives. And it's the one event in our lives that nobody can describe adequately because nobody comes back to talk about it. There are people who claim that they've done that and they've had near death experiences. And I'm kind of like, okay, if you say so. My feeling is death is the great mystery and it's the final act in our lives. And it deserves, if anything ever does, it deserves the kind of treatment that a guy like me can give it, which is speculative and imaginative.

[NPR Host David Green]

Stephen King, this has been a real pleasure. Thanks so much for taking the time.

[Stephen King]

Thanks for having me.

[NPR Host David Green]

His new novel, doctor Sleep, is out today.

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[Andrew Limbong]

All right, we're going to go from a book about generational trauma to a book written via generational trauma. I'm joking, but I just couldn't imagine doing a creative project with either of my parents. But in 2017, Stephen King and his son Owen wrote a horror novel together. It's called Sleeping Beauties. And they talked about their writing process with NPR's Mayor Louise Kelly. And it doesn't seem like they made it easy for each other. Here's the interview.

[NPR Host Mary Louise Kelly]

When Stephen King was a little boy, his mother read him bedtime stories, gruesome bedtime stories.

[Stephen King]

One of the things that she read when I was 8 or 9 was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. And what I remembered very clearly was that when Dr. Jekyll was Mr. Hyde, he knocked down a little girl and walked over her, and you could hear her bones cracking in her body.

And I thought, oh, my God.

[NPR Host Mary Louise Kelly]

Kind of makes you wonder if that might have been the moment that set Stephen King on his way to writing horror. He has now written more than 50 books. And here's a twist you might not know. Stephen King's youngest son, Owen, is also a writer, and he too has a childhood memory that helped shape his craft.

[Owen King]

When I was a kid, we used to play this thing called the writing game with our father. My brother and I would play it where the first person writes a sentence and the second person writes a sentence and the third person writes a sentence and so on until you get bored and have to go to bed.

[NPR Host Mary Louise Kelly]

Now, father and son have now collaborated on a new novel, trying to keep all of us up late into the night. It is called Sleeping Beauties. Eoin King pitched the creepy premise of the book to his dad. What if all the women in the world fell asleep and didn't wake up?

[Stephen King]

Owen kind of tossed this thing off and all my lights came on. You know, they all went from red to green at once. And I thought, this is a situation that demands a story. And if you start, the story will pretty much tell itself.

[NPR Host Mary Louise Kelly]

Okay, you've got an idea and you're both excited about it and you both think, huh, that's an interesting question. How does that then translate into co writing a 700 page novel?

[Owen King]

What we did was he'd write 25 pages and then I'd write 25 pages. And so we just pass it back and forth. But one of the things about collaborating with somebody is that you want them to take ownership of what you've written, and you want to be able to take ownership of what they've written. So I rewrote him and he rewrote me, and I would leave a message for him when it was my turn, and I'd say, okay, I want you to write a scene with this character, and I want this to happen, and here's how I think it will play out. And, you know, just make it as hard as Possible for the poor old guy. And then he would do the same to me.

[NPR Host Mary Louise Kelly]

That sounds like that could either be a really exciting way to write or totally leaving little booby traps for each other. Like, I can't figure out what's going to happen next. So let me leave a little hey, dad, have at it right here. Note for him.

[Stephen King]

Well, you know, the thing is, once the story starts to roll, everything becomes story driven and character driven. So that the major thing that we were doing by leaving those holes in the script was giving us a chance to blend our writing together. If I had a real problem with saying, well, I really don't know what to do here, he would tell me, sort of like, well, you could go this way or you could go that way, leaving the choice up to me. Then I did the same for him. And the result was, when we were done, the stuff was so interwoven and so rewritten and plowed over, it's almost like we created a third person, which could be a horror story in itself.

[NPR Host Mary Louise Kelly]

Samhain King.

[Stephen King]

Right, The Samhain.

[NPR Host Mary Louise Kelly]

I want to ask you to read me one passage. There's a woman at the center of this whole mystery. Sleeping sickness. Let me let you. Steven, tell me about her, and then I want both of you to read this for us.

[Stephen King]

Well, her name's Evie, and she's the one character in the book that we can assume is a supernatural being. She's very enigmatic and she's. Everybody knows that she's something special. So this is this segment about Evie early on in the book. And Evie was almost everywhere. She was a fly in the 767 crawling down to the bottom of a highball glass and dabbling her legs in the residue of whiskey and coke. Moments before the plane's nose connected with.

[Owen King]

The ocean surface, the moth that fluttered around the fluorescent bar on the ceiling of Nell Seeger and Celia Froad's prison cell was also Evie.

[Stephen King]

She was visiting the Coughlin courthouse behind the grid of the air duct in the corner of the conference room, where she peered through the shiny black eyes.

[Owen King]

Of a mouse on the White House lawn. As an aunt, she moved through the still warm blood of a dead teenage.

[Stephen King]

Girl in the woods where Jared ran from his pursuers. She was a worm beneath his shoes, nosing in the soil. Blind and many segmented, Evie got around.

[NPR Host Mary Louise Kelly]

Hmm. Now, I gotta ask. Can you two even remember which of you wrote that?

[Stephen King]

No, I cannot remember, to tell you the truth. And you know what, Owen? I think we both wrote that.

[Owen King]

I think we both wrote that our.

[Stephen King]

Fingerprints are on both of Amer and Louise.

[NPR Host Mary Louise Kelly]

So I'm trying to imagine what comes next for you two, aside from book tour, which I know is gonna take up the next few weeks. I'm trying to imagine breakfast in the King household, a whole family of writers. And it sounds like the basic conversation is y' all all sit around and try to figure out how to scare the living daylights out of each other.

[Owen King]

I just wanna say for me, the great thing about this experience is that it's very unusual to get to spend the kind of time that we got to spend together to work on this book. And to me, that was. I'm thrilled with the book. I'm very, very proud of it. But the thing that I liked the most about this was that I got to spend all this time with my dad.

[Stephen King]

Yeah, I thought it was a great gift to work with Owen to hear him say, yeah, I'd like to embark on this project with you. You know, in a lot of ways, writing a novel is like sailing across the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub. It's a lonely job and it's a long job, and I had somebody with me on it, and that was great. And for it to be my son, that was a tremendous gift.

[NPR Host Mary Louise Kelly]

You could have ended up wanting to kill each other at the end of trying to write 700 pages. And it sounds like it brought you closer.

[Owen King]

We'll see if we survive.

[NPR Host Mary Louise Kelly]

Book tour.

[Owen King]

Mary Louise.

[NPR Host Mary Louise Kelly]

We'Ll wish you luck on that. That is father and son Stephen King and Owen King talking about the novel they wrote together. It's called Sleeping Beauties, and it is out this week. Thanks to you both very much.

[Owen King]

Thank you very much, Mary Louise.

[Stephen King]

Thank you so much.

[Andrew Limbong]

That's it for this week on NPR's Book of the Day. Let us know what you think you can write to [e-mail] I'm Andrew Limbong. The podcast is produced by Chloe Weiner and edited by Megan Sullivan with help from Ivy Buck. Our founding editor is Petra Meyer. The show elements for this week were produced and edited by Neal Carruth, Samantha Balaban, Barry Hardiman, Melissa Gray, Ashley Lisenby, Justin Richmond, Jacob Conrad, and Phil Harrell. Yolanda Sanguini is our executive producer. Thanks for listening.

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