The Shining

Stephen King

Illustrated by Edward Kinsella

A Folio Society collector’s edition of Stephen King’s genre-changing tale of unquiet ghosts and simmering violence, illustrated by award-winning artist Edward Kinsella.

£60.00
£60.00
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‘Obviously a masterpiece, probably the best supernatural novel in a hundred years.’
  1. Peter Straub


Jack Torrance is the new winter caretaker of the Overlook, a grand hotel nestled in the isolated Colorado mountains and cut off from civilisation during the harsh cold months. Here, with his wife Wendy and their son Danny, Jack attempts to escape the mistakes of his past and rebuild a life with his family. But the hotel has other ideas. Using Danny's strange precognitive gift – his ’shining’ – the evil that lurks inside the Overlook begins to stir, and take hold.

Bound in blocked cloth

Set in Miller with Kingthings Typewriter display

536 pages

Black & white illustrated title-page spread and 11 colour illustrations

Printed endpapers

Plain slipcase

10˝ x 6¾˝

This inhuman place makes human monsters

In his introduction, King calls The Shining his ‘crossroads novel’. His first two books – Carrie and Salem’s Lot – fall more easily into the category of pure horror, but with this iconic work he decided to reach further. Rather than a two-dimensional villain compelled to madness by supernatural forces, Jack Torrance emerges as a more complex character, one driven to evil by the ghosts of his past. Trapped in the toxic atmosphere of the Overlook, Jack is haunted by the memory of his violent, alcoholic father, and the edges of the past and the present blur. Seething underneath the thrills and terror of one of the greatest horror novels ever written is an even more chilling conceit: ‘Aren’t memories the true ghosts of our lives? Do they not drive all of us to words and acts that we regret from time to time?’

Made into a critically acclaimed film by Stanley Kubrick in 1980, King famously felt the movie, at its heart, told a different story to his novel. Award-winning artist Edward Kinsella has provided 11 colour illustrations that capture the book’s vision of the inhuman nature of the Overlook, as well as Jack Torrance’s descent into madness. The binding is emblazoned with a vividly monstrous wasp – a creature which appears as a harbinger of doom in the book – and the endpapers feature the ominous Edgar Allan Poe quote, ‘And the Red Death held sway over all’, repeated over and over in a distinctive typewriter font – a nod to the film version.

‘As a storyteller, he is up there in the Dickens class.’
  1. The Times

About Stephen King

Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine, in 1947. He graduated with a BA in English from the University of Maine at Orono in 1970, and taught high-school English in Hampden, Maine, before becoming a full-time writer in 1974, following the publication of his first book, Carrie. He is the author of more than 50 novels, all of them worldwide best-sellers, including Salem’s Lot (1975), Pet Sematary (1983, Folio 2023) and Misery (1987, Folio 2021). He has also written six works of non-fiction and nearly 200 short stories. Many of his books and novellas have been turned into celebrated films, and have earned him Bram Stoker Awards, World Fantasy Awards and British Fantasy Society Awards. In 2003 the National Book Foundation awarded King the Medal for Distinguished Contributions to American Letters, and in 2015 he received a National Medal of Arts from the United States National Endowment for the Arts for his contribution to literature.

About Edward Kinsella

Edward Kinsella was born in St Louis, Missouri. He graduated with honours from Ringling School of Art and Design in 2006, and his work has since been commissioned by a variety of prestigious magazines and publishers. He has also shown his fine art and illustration in a number of gallery exhibitions. His accolades include gold and silver medals from the Society of Illustrators, and a Gold Award from Spectrum. Kinsella has previously illustrated the Folio editions of The Shining (2016), East of Eden (2017), Misery (2021) and Pet Sematary (2023). 

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