the shining

Gotta love the book tour Stephen King is currently on to promote Under the Dome. First he tells a crowd in Maryland that he has written a draft of the television screenplay for Cell, that HBO wants to do an Under the Dome miniseries, and that he is working on new Talisman and The Dark Tower novels. And now an even bigger bombshell comes: he's got a plan for a sequel to The Shining brewing in the back of his always-working mind.

But before getting to the news, I'd like to address the means by which it leaked out, which is equally interesting. While in Toronto, King followed up a 15-minute reading from Under the Dome with an hour long Q&A in a packed theater. The interviewer? David Cronenberg. Thinking about that taking place makes my heart hurt. My favorite director interviewing my favorite writer? What kind of cruel world hides such an event from me?

Fortunately the books portion of the Torontoist was there to cover the event and they've got all the details surrounding The Shining sequel Cronenberg and King talked about, tentatively titled Doctor Sleep. King explained that he had spent the last summer wondering what Danny Torrance would be like as a grown up and how the emotional scars carved into his psyche by the Overlook Hotel would have impacted the path of his otherwise happy life. The author charts the basic premise thusly:

In anticipation of this year's San Diego Comic Con, Horror Squad and SciFi Squad have launched the ultimate fan polls, asking you readers to vote not only for the best films of all time in their respective genre, but also on favorite characters, future scream queens, films from the past year and so on. We're going to ask you to make some tough choices here, but that's the point -- how else are we to determine the best of the best? So check out our Ultimate Horror Movie Fan Poll below and vote away! When you're done, head on over to SciFi Squad and do the same. We'll announce the winners just in time for this year's Comic Con.