Even though the film version of this one from Stanley Kubrick is generally considered a horror classic, Stephen King has never been shy about making his dislike of it known. He hates it so much that he was heavily involved in making a more faithful adaptation of it as TV mini-series in 1997. (This inferior version invited comparisons of Stephen Weber from Wings to one of Jack Nicholson's most iconic performances. So that worked well....) 
 Considering Uncle Stevie's longstanding grudge about it, I was more than a little shocked when he recently made a public plea for fans of Under the Dome to accept the changes that the new TV show was making. I can't quite wrap my head around why a genius director creating something new and brilliant based on his story is bad, but anything that a fairly shitty TV show does with the source material is A-OK with King? 
 Whatever.... 
 On to the book. As most everyone knows, this is about a family spending the winter in a haunted hotel in the Rocky Mountains called the Overlook. Jack Torrance was a teacher and promising writer, but his alcoholism and short temper wrecked his career and very nearly ended his marriage. Jack has been sober over a year, and he and Wendy have started down the path of reconciliation. However, she can never entirely forgive him for breaking the arm of their son Danny in an incident that was equal parts rage and accident. Five year old Danny has psychic mojo that includes reading thoughts and precognition courtesy of visions shown to him by his imaginary friend, Tony. 
 Nearly broke, Jack takes on the job of being the winter caretaker for the Overlook. This means that the family will spend months alone in the hotel once the snow flies, and the last caretaker went axe-happy and killed his family. Unfortunately, the Overlook is like an emotional sponge that has soaked in every ugly act that ever took place within its rooms, and the presence of a high-powered psychic like Danny kicks the place into overdrive. As Jack is being driven into madness, Wendy and Danny become increasingly terrified of what he might do. 
 I once read something in which King talked about denial of his own substance abuse problems in which he noted that he somehow wrote The Shining without ever once realizing he was describing his own alcoholism. That element of the Jack Torrence character is what makes this one of his better books. The idea of being trapped in a hotel with a bunch of ghosts is scary in a horror story kind of way. The idea of being trapped in a hotel with an ill-tempered drunk with a history of violence as he is cracking up is downright terrifying. 
 Adding even more weight to that idea is that Jack Torrance isn't a monster. He's a troubled man who does love his wife and son, and he's self-aware enough to realize that he's on the brink. He'll either turn his life around and earn his wife's trust back, or he'll give in to his own worst impulses. This would be hard enough under any circumstances, but under the influence of the evil spirits of the Overlook, Jack becomes a tragedy. 
 Another element jumped out at me while re-reading this time. King talked in his non-fiction Danse Macabre (Which I remember as being entertaining, but probably very dated by now. I would be very interested if Uncle Stevie wanted to take another look at what's become of the horror genre since he wrote that one.) about the economic factor of The Amityville Horror and how a part of why the movie worked was that the family was essentially trapped by their finances. 
 He uses that idea to good effect here. Most people would run screaming from the Overloook in less than a week, but we're frequently reminded that the Torrance family was swirling the drain financially. If the perception is that Jack botched this job, his last chance to get back to a more stable lifestyle is probably shot and that goes a long way towards allowing him to convince himself and Wendy that they're overreacting to the weird occurrences during the early stages, and by the time they've become snowed in, the Overlook has its hooks deep into Jack. 
 It's those more mundane things like a family struggling with money and that an evil entity turns one of them against the others by playing on his inherent weaknesses that make this one of my favorite King novels.