Colorado
Suggested by: Jacob
Traveled: October 21-27

I have an old, claw-foot bathtub in my house, with a white curtain that pulls all the way around. The edges get tipped with mildew every three months or so. It’s my job to scrub it clean, and I enjoy the cocoon it creates when I am ensconced for my daily showers or rare, luxurious baths. There is a massive shower upstairs, renovated by the previous owner with two waterfall heads and a solid wall of frosted glass, letting the morning sunlight pour onto the dazzling, naked form inside. But I prefer my claw-foot tub and its high, porcelain edges.

That is, until Mr. King finally walked into my life. Now, I approach the tub with a tiny knot at the base of my neck, throwing back the curtains with one eye closed.

This is, I have decided, a fair price to pay for the thrilling story he has given me, providentially during the week where ghosts and ghouls roam the streets. I saw Kubrick’s The Shining two years ago, and while I remember liking it, had very little stick with me. Fortunately so, as it left me as a relatively blank slate to experience King’s writing for the first time. I couldn’t put The Shining down, and pushed my lunch “hours” five-ten-fifteen minutes longer to creep ahead through the satisfying mix of supernatural and human depravity that King has put down. Not sure what to expect from a household-name author with over fifty books in a genre I rarely touch, I started The Shining skeptically. But I quickly warmed as the Colorado winter grew colder, and hardly noticed my pages-to-go dwindling to the thin back cover.

The setting in the Colorado mountains, with the elements blocking any passage of escape, was a haunting mirror of the will of the supernatural forces of the hotel. The snow and wind were just as impassable as the ghostly spirits and evil wills, becoming the source of much of the steady panic that built through the book. To be reminded that human beings are just an illusion away from control is scary. A snowstorm, a hurricane, a tiny solar flare away from disaster. And then King took it one step further, weaving a history for his antagonist Jack that suggests he may have, in fact, had some choice in the matter. And he chose evil. And that is even scarier.