Stephen King has officially confirmed his long-rumored plan to craft a sequel to The Shining, his seminal novel about the horrors of hotels, ESP, alcoholism, and naked dead women in bathtubs. King has been discussing the possible follow-up since at least 2009, when he revealed plans to check in on the now-40-year-old Danny Torrance with Dr. Sleep, a story that would find Danny working as a hospice orderly and using his powers to ease them into the afterlife, perhaps by telling them all about the time he was a little kid trapped in a snowbound, haunted inn with his psychotic, homicidal father and the spirits of dozens of murdered guests, and thus what they’re going through isn’t all that scary, now is it, relatively speaking?
On the side, King said, Danny also exploits his gifts to bet on horse races, and oh yeah, then there’s the roving band of sort-of vampires called The Tribe who feed on psychic energy from people like him, and who “all have these kinda pirate names, because pirates is sort of what they are.” King laid all of these various convolutions out over the weekend during his appearance at George Mason University, video of which is below—including King reading an excerpt from the book. No word on a prospective publishing date yet, but given King’s machine-like proficiency—and the fact that he’s obviously been thinking about this for some time—you can probably expect Dr. Sleep to be optioned for a movie any day now. [via /Film]