Stephen King’s third novel, The Shining (1977), takes place in five Parts. Part 1, “Prefatory Matters,” begins with Jack Torrance interviewing for the job of winter caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, an isolated resort in the Rocky Mountains. While providing some of the more grandiose aspects of the hotel’s history, its manager Mr. Ullman bluntly relays that he wouldn’t hire Jack for the job due to the fact that Jack’s wife Wendy and five-year-old son Danny will be staying there with him; Ullman mentions that a previous Overlook caretaker named Grady ended up murdering his family and then killing himself. Ullman has to hire Jack, however, because he was ordered to by a board member, Al Shockley, an acquaintance of Jack’s from his job teaching at Stovington Academy in Vermont, which Ullman references Jack’s being fired from. Jack is shown around by the handyman Watson, whose grandfather founded the hotel, and who tells Jack the stories of a few of the people who have died at the hotel, including an older woman who overdosed on pills in her room’s bathtub after the young man she’d brought with her left. 

Back at the Torrance apartment in Boulder, Danny is waiting for his father’s return, knowing that his mother is worried his father has gone off drinking somewhere and also knowing that his father has not actually done this. He asks his mother why Jack lost his job at Stovington Academy, and Wendy tells him the truth: Jack assaulted a student he caught slashing his tires after Jack had cut this student, George Hatfield, from the debate team. Danny is aware his mother considered divorcing his father after his father broke Danny’s arm a couple of years earlier. Jack recalls this incident as he’s being shown around the hotel, and how he didn’t actually stop drinking until a couple of months after he broke Danny’s arm, when he and Al Shockley drunkenly hit a bike in the road and thought they might have killed a kid, though they never found any evidence of a body (the George Hatfield incident happened after that, when he was sober). 

At home, Danny’s invisible friend Tony shows him a vision of a building with a skull and crossbones over it, telling him it’s poison and that “redrum” will happen there, and when Jack arrives home, Danny sees a vision of a bloody mallet in the car’s front seat, and has another vision/nightmare of “redrum” that night.    

In Part II, “Closing Day,” the Torrance family arrives at the Overlook as it’s closing for the season, and Dick Halloran, the cook, shows them around the massive kitchen. When Halloran leaves, he asks Danny to help with his bags and tells him he “shines harder” than anyone he’s ever met, explaining how “shining” means you can sometimes read other people’s thoughts or see things happening other places or that might happen in the future. He tells Danny he’s seen some strange things around the hotel because of his shining, but that these things shouldn’t be able to actually hurt Danny, but that if they get into trouble, Danny should use his shining to call him. 

In Part III, “The Wasps’ Nest,” Jack finds a wasps’ nest while fixing shingles on the hotel’s roof and considers it an apt metaphor for his life at Stovington while drinking, thinking about his confrontation with George Hatfield in which George accused him of setting the timer ahead when it was his turn to speak, which Jack claims not to have done, though later thinks that if he did—though he didn’t—it would have been for George’s own good because George stuttered. He also thinks about the play he’s working on, The Little School, about a crotchety headmaster and an adversarial student, and how his writer’s block has improved since being at the hotel. He uses a bug bomb on the wasps’ nest and then gives it to Danny, since he enjoyed having one his father gave him as a kid, but that night, after Danny has a weird trance in the bathroom when Tony visits him, a bunch of live wasps come out of it and sting him. The next day they take Danny to a local doctor, who surmises that Danny’s trances and premonitions are simply the product of observation and intuition. Jack discovers a scrapbook in the Overlook’s basement collecting newspapers about its history, including its takeover at one point by mobsters and some violent deaths (including murder) that took place there. He calls Stuart Ullman to confront him with this information, threatening to write a book about it, and causing Al Shockley to call him and say he can’t write about it if he wants to keep his job. Despite reservations, after discussing it, Wendy and Danny opt not to try to leave the hotel before the snow closes them in. Working on the playground, Jack thinks he sees the hedge animals move but refuses to believe it. Overcome by curiosity, Danny finally enters the room Halloran told him not to, 217, and sees a corpse-like woman in the bathtub. He tries to convince himself she’s not really there when she gets out and comes after him, but then her hands close around his throat. 

In Part IV, “Snowbound,” Jack leafs through the historical documents about the Overlook in the basement, recalling his own alcoholic father and the night that his father randomly and viciously beat his mother with his walking cane. He dreams his father is telling him to kill Wendy and Danny through the radio, and destroys the radio in response in real life. Danny appears at the top of the stairs, catatonic and with bruises on his neck, and Wendy, assuming Jack has done it, locks herself in their quarters with Danny. Jack, increasingly angry about how Wendy is still holding his breaking Danny’s arm and his drinking days against him, wanders into the Colorado Room, where he imagines he is served twenty martinis by the bartender Lloyd.

Wendy confronts Jack about getting Danny off the mountain, and Danny comes out of his catatonic state and tells them everything about his “shining” and how the dead woman grabbed him in 217 and he passed out. Jack goes to check out 217, seeing nothing at first but then hearing the shower curtain being pulled as he’s leaving; he refuses to look though he thinks he can hear someone inside after he shuts and locks the door. He tells Wendy and Danny there’s nothing there. Working on his play a bit later, he realizes it’s terrible. He promises Wendy he’ll get Danny down the mountain via snowmobile, but processing what it will mean to give up the job that night, starts to think he should kill Wendy. He wakes up in 217 and sees George Hatfield floating in the bathtub with a knife in his chest. The next day in the equipment shed, Jack tosses the battery for the one functioning snowmobile far away out into the snow. A few days later when Danny goes to play on the playground, the hedge animals chase him back to the porch, and Jack tries to convince him it was a hallucination. That night the elevator starts running by itself, and is filled with streamers, confetti, and masks. Danny winds a clock in the ballroom with a key, tries to call Halloran with his shining, and sees some of the recurring visions Tony has shown him, this time with the word REDRUM reflected in a mirror so he realizes it spells “MURDER.” 

In Part V, “Matters of Life and Death,” Dick Hallorann hears Danny’s cries in his head in Florida and heads for Colorado as a massive snowstorm hits. In the Overlook’s basement, Jack considers letting the boiler blow after giving Wendy and Danny enough time to get out, but then doesn’t. Danny runs into a man in a dog costume in the hall who threatens to eat him and blocks his way to Jack. Jack drinks in the Colorado Room again, enjoying a party with a bunch of other people, including former Overlook owner Horace Derwent, who teases a man in a dog costume. Jack talks to the former caretaker Grady, who encourages him to “correct” his wife and son if they keep him from doing his job looking after the hotel. Hallorann endures a turbulent flight to Denver, then has to drive in horribly dangerous conditions until he manages to rent a snowmobile. Wendy finds Jack passed out behind the Colorado Room bar, and when he wakes and tries to strangle her, she knocks him out with a bottle on the bar right after Danny comes in. They drag him to the pantry and lock him in just as he wakes up. As Jack sits in the pantry, he starts to sympathize with why his father would have been a drunk and beaten his mother. Grady lets him out after he promises to kill Wendy to bring the “manager” Danny, and there’s a roque mallet and a bottle of gin sitting on the kitchen counter for him. Wendy hears voices and goes down to check that Jack is still locked up; the clock strikes midnight thought it’s only 8:00, and Jack attacks her. He hits her with the mallet a couple of times, but she manages to stab him in the back with a knife. He pursues her upstairs, where she discovers that Danny is gone from their quarters. She locks herself in the bathroom and just as Jack is about to break the door down, they hear the motor of Hallorann’s approaching snowmobile, causing Jack to leave. Hallorann is attacked by a hedge lion as he comes in but manages to burn it using the snowmobile’s spare gasoline, and manages to get past the other hedge animals to get inside, where Jack immediately knocks him out with the mallet. He goes to find Danny, whom Tony has guided to the third floor. Danny encounters some of the Overlook’s ghosts but makes them disappear by yelling at them that they’re “false faces.” He says the same to Jack when Jack finally finds him, adding that the Overlook is just using Jack and won’t keep any of its promises, which induces Jack (or the Overlook in Jack’s body) to start smashing himself in the face with the mallet. Then Danny reminds Jack/the Overlook that it forgot to dump the boiler, which is about to explode, and Jack/the Overlook runs to the basement while Danny rejoins his mother and Hallorann and says they need to get out; Hallorann picks them up and runs out the doors with them just in the nick of time as the boiler explodes, which helps deter the hedge animals out front waiting to attack them. The hotel burns and Hallorann puts Danny and Wendy on the snowmobile and goes to the equipment shed to get blankets so they won’t freeze, where he’s almost seduced into murdering them by the Overlook, but resists and gets them out safely. 

In the final chapter, Danny and Wendy say goodbye to Hallorann at the Maine camp where Hallorann’s been working as a chef, since Al Shockley has gotten Wendy a job in Maryland.

The End.