In one memorable scene they appear to come to life and chase Danny Torrance back inside the hotel.

In the novel, these same topiary hedge animals lurk in the Overlook Hotel's playground. It's a poorly executed thing, the greens of the animals too violent, and the artist has for some reason plinked a dab of red in the lions' eyes to give them a devilish aspect.'Īnyone who's read The Shining will recognise this immediately. Or maybe it's supposed to be a rhinoceros. 'There's a dog on the left, a couple of rabbits on the right, two lions in the middle, and what might be a bull behind the lions. 'It appears to show a bunch of hedges that have been clipped into animal shapes,' reads the description. It's situated just across the valley from where the Overlook used to stand. Later, Billy uses a summer house not far from Bucky's cabin to work on the book he's writing. 'Then I blinked my eyes - the wind was so strong they were tearing up - and when I looked again, it was gone.' 'This is crazy, but I thought I saw that hotel you talked about,' Alice says. Sure enough, when Alice returns from her walk she's seen a ghost.

''Used to be a resort hotel there, but it burned flat many a moon ago.'' Bucky tells Alice, when he's describing the view across the ravine she'll be treated to if she walks a little way from his cabin. This is the fictional town that features in The Shining, and it isn't long before the Overlook Hotel itself gets a mention. The first mention comes when the title character Billy Summers and his companion Alice arrive at the home of Billy's associate Bucky, who just so happens to live in Colorado's Rocky Mountains near a place called - you guessed it - Sidewinder. But the references do crop up on a fair few pages, and they're detailed enough to make them worth breaking down a little. They feature in passing, something the main characters stumble across mid-way through their journey. The first thing worth mentioning is that the events of The Shining don't play a key role in the plot of Billy Summers. Unlike many of King's books it's a fairly straight thriller without any overt supernatural elements - but hidden among the disguises and the shootouts is a hat-tip to King's horror roots, and it comes in the form of an Easter egg anyone familiar with The Shining will recognise straight away. Stephen King's latest novel, Billy Summers, is a story about an assassin on one final job. The evil building that facilitated Jack Torrance's infamous axe wielding burned down at the conclusion of Stephen King's 1977 novel The Shining, only to get another mention (this time as an absence rather than a presence) in the 2013 sequel Doctor Sleep.Īnd now, eight years later, it's back again.

The Overlook Hotel may be gone, but its monstrous legacy lives on. Warning: Contains mild spoilers for Stephen King's novel, Billy Summers.

Shining by Stephen King