RAG Demo

Tag: Horror

  • The Shining

    Jack Torrance, a former teacher and aspiring playwright, is a recovering alcoholic with a violent temper that has already cost him his job. He accepts a post as winter caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, a grand old resort high in the Colorado Rockies that is cut off by snow for months. His wife Wendy and five-year-old son Danny come with him.

    Danny has a psychic gift the hotel's cook, Dick Hallorann, calls the shining, which lets him sense thoughts and glimpse the future. Before leaving for the season, Hallorann warns Danny that the Overlook has a dark history. As the snow closes in, Danny sees things in certain rooms and in the topiary garden, and Jack becomes increasingly absorbed in the hotel's past.

    King uses the haunted-house tradition to explore addiction, domestic violence and a family under pressure, drawing on his own struggles with alcohol. The isolation and slow psychological unravelling make it one of the most frightening novels in popular fiction. Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film, which King famously disliked, became a horror landmark in its own right.

    Book details

    AuthorStephen King
    First published1977
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreHorror
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)447
    SettingThe Overlook Hotel in the Colorado Rockies, during winter

    Themes

    • Addiction
    • Isolation
    • Domestic violence
    • Madness
    • Family

    Who should read it

    Horror fans and anyone curious about the novel behind one of cinema's scariest films.

  • Dracula

    Jonathan Harker, a young English solicitor, travels to the Carpathian Mountains to help Count Dracula complete the purchase of an estate near London. His host is courteous but strange, and Harker gradually realises he is a prisoner in a castle where the Count crawls down walls and three spectral women haunt the rooms.

    The story then moves to England, where Harker's fiancee Mina and her friend Lucy Westenra become entangled in a series of disturbing events after a ship runs aground at Whitby with its crew dead. Lucy's suitors, the asylum doctor John Seward, the American Quincey Morris and Arthur Holmwood, call in the Dutch professor Abraham Van Helsing, whose knowledge of folklore and science may be their only defence.

    Told through diaries, letters, newspaper cuttings and phonograph records, the novel creates suspense from fragments that the characters must piece together. It drew on Eastern European vampire legend and Victorian anxieties about sexuality, disease, immigration and modern technology, and its count became the template for the vampire in popular culture.

    Book details

    AuthorBram Stoker
    First published1897
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreHorror
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)418
    SettingTransylvania, Whitby and London, 1890s

    Themes

    • Good and evil
    • Sexuality
    • Fear of the foreign
    • Science versus superstition
    • Modernity

    Who should read it

    Horror fans who want the original vampire novel and readers who enjoy stories pieced together from documents.