Review: Doctor Sleep joins IT as one of the best Stephen King adaptations yet

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  A grown-up Danny Torrance (Ewan McGregor) is still haunted by what happened in his childhood. [credit: YouTube/Warner Bros. ]

Horror master Stephen King continues to have a banner year in Hollywood. We've had the release of a (disappointing) Pet Sematary remake earlier this year, IT: Chapter 2 in September, the Netflix adaptation of In the Tall Grass last month, and a new season of Castle Rock currently airing on Hulu. Closing out this annus mirabilis is Doctor Sleep, adapted from King's novel of the same name, a sequel to The Shining. Along with 2017's spectacular IT, Doctor Sleep is one of the best film adaptations of a King novel yet.

(Major spoilers for The Shining—film and book—below; mild spoilers for Doctor Sleep.)

King published The Shining in 1977. It became his first hardback bestseller and was adapted into a film by Stanley Kubrick in 1980, starring Jack Nicholson as struggling alcoholic and aspiring writer Jack Torrance. Initial reviews weren't particularly favorable—King himself was not a fan of the film, going so far as to produce his own adaptation in a 1997 miniseries—but it's now considered a horror classic.

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