My mom subscribed to TV Guide for most of my childhood. I must have read hundreds of them over the years. Yet I can only remember one single edition because it’s the only one I reread roughly a hundred times. In the spring of 1997 TV Guide released a big collectors edition for the upcoming ABC mini-series, Stephen King’s The Shining. I wasn’t a big horror fan yet, I had probably only ever seen highly-edited snippets of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film on Saturday afternoons, and I had yet to even read any King novel myself. But I loved that mini-series before it even aired because of TV Guide. Its special edition included the “lost” prologue to the novel, a series of mini-histories from the Overlook’s past called “Before the Play.”
At the time I found it absolutely captivating, like being let it on an amazing secret. Now, after years writing about pop culture, I realize that TV Guide is why I grew up obsessed with lore.
King wrote a prologue for The Shining that was first published separately in 1982, five years after the novel’s release. Few had ever read “Before the Play” before TV Guide included an abridged version of it in that collector’s edition in 1997. It also became the first thing by King I had ever read. I was a big book nerd as a youngster, but even in middle school Stephen King novels felt too adult for me. I assumed they would also certainly be too scary for someone who had not yet come to love horror.
And yet, something about that incredible cover pulled me in. “Why does he have a big croquet mallet and not an axe like in the movie?” I wondered. When I then began reading I couldn’t stop. I poured over the past of Overlook again and again. It all began with builder Bob T. Watson and the death of his son. Was that the cause of all those demons that would one day haunt little Danny?
The more I read and reread the more I couldn’t help but be drawn in to King’s horrifying world. At the time I definitely didn’t really appreciate exactly why. I had already become obsessed with Greek mythology and I loved history, but to me those were still stories as I’d always known them. Real or not, they were complete tales with a start and end. “Before the Play” was something else. They were mere pieces, fragments of something much bigger that let my imagination grow in ways a fully told story couldn’t. They also framed an entirely different story. Those long ago tales were history, the history of a fictional world that suddenly felt so much bigger than I ever thought possible.
I hadn’t known a fictional story could have its own fictional stories that existed both within and outside of the main story. Had all the books I had loved also had their own stories waiting for me to find them? How much further back did it all go? How much secret knowledge was out there to discover? I was hooked, right then, without knowing it. TV Guide and Stephen King hadn’t just introduced me to fictional lore, they had made me obsessed with it. That obsession never stopped. It’s why I’m, often to my own detriment, so obsessed with canon. I want to know what actually “counts” because I want need to know the official lore. I don’t want to miss something that “matters.” And I can never obsess in the same way over the things that don’t.
When the three-episode minis-series started airing on ABC a few days later I was glued to my TV. I watched every installment and I loved it. How much of that was because it was great unto itself and how much of that was because I felt like I was privy to information about the Overlook itself? I don’t know and I don’t care. I still love Stephen King’s The Shining and always will. And when I finally, way too many years later, read the actual novel it felt like I had already been there for years. I knew that place, those walls, those ghosts, and why it wanted Danny Torrance. It felt like I had always been there, and rereading “Before the Play” for this piece has me eager to return once more….
No, the irony is not lost on me. I realize that TV Guide did to me exactly what The Overlook did to Jack. When I watched the mini-series I saw him become obsessed with the hotel’s lore. He spent days and days in the basement reading old news clippings about its past horrors. He’d found them in a scrapbook it seemed the hotel itself had put together to lure him into it’s grasp. He had found the fictional version of “Before the Play” and had succumbed to its tragic tales of murder, grief, loss, and pain the same way TV Guide has made sure I tuned in.
Fortunately my lore obsession didn’t lead to me trying to murder my wife and son. Instead it led to me getting to write professionally about things like the history of Westeros, what happened before the bombs fells in Fallout, and the “worlds between worlds” of Star Wars. Those are always and forever my favorite pieces to write. Now you know the unlikely lore behind why I love lore.
As for Jack Torrance, I’m sorry for him and his family the whole professional writer thing never worked out. But he wasn’t wrong that an obsession with lore can open up new worlds of imagination. He also wasn’t wrong it can help you become a professional writer. He just should have become obsessed with that edition of TV Guide instead of a haunted scrapbook.
The post THE SHINING Mini-Series and TV Guide Made Me Lore Obsessed appeared first on Nerdist.
This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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