Dr Sleep - Sequel to Kings Shining and set to be film

I watched Doctor Sleep and the biggest, overriding impression it left on me was: Was Danny's father Jack really that bad of a guy? It seems like his son took up a lot of his father's bad habits, if not some worser ones, for most of his adult life until he finally hit rock bottom in 2011 and decided to move to New England, get an AA sponsor, clean up and get off booze and drugs and stay that way until sinister, supernatural outside forces made him confront many of the same demons his father faced working over the winter as a caretaker at the Overlook Hotel trying to write a novel before he gradually lost his mind, sanity, his family and then his life.

When Danny gets a medal celebrating 8 years of sobriety, he talks about his father in a very unexpected, positive light as a man who was an accomplished academic, intelligent, smart, tried to be a good husband and father but had a terrible weakness for alcohol that led him down a dark, evil road that even he couldn't imagined how it ended up.

Was Jack Torrance really a bad, evil person or just a frustrated academic, bothered by a lack of apparent success and social mobility, allowed his weaknesses for alcohol allow him to be ultimately corrupted by an unimaginable, malignant, ghostly presence in the one place he never should have stepped into, much less gotten a job there as a caretaker?

His problems, initially, if you read the Shining or watch the movie versions, weren't as extreme or out-of-control as his son Danny's were throughout first part of Doctor Sleep. I suppose Danny's Shining telepathic skills and his wanting to avoid them made his behavior sort of understandable.

In a way, Jack Torrance reminds me a little of Pop Terrell, one of King's other literary characters and featured prominently by Tim Robbins in Season 2 of Castle Rock on Hulu. Their complex, multi-faceted personalities who make their money or reputations in organized crime or in the grey area of business. Pop Terrell served in Somalia, as shown in flashbacks of Castle Rock Season 2, and he made a terribly tragic judgement call killing two Somali suspected militants and felt awful about it afterwards but tried to make it right in his own way by adopting a large group of Somali war-torn refugees into his Maine hometown and adopting the two children of the Somali militants he killed, raising them as his own. It's just whatever good they tried to achieve always got blown up in their faces by the particular circumstances they lived or worked around, like running a local organized crime outfit or in Jack Torrances case, having a weakness for alcohol.

But they weren't inherently evil, despicable psychopath King villains like Pennywise, Randall Flagg, or greedy, hypocritical butt crevasses like Warden Norton in Shawshank Redemption.