Jack Torrance, an aspiring writer,[1] is hired as the winter caretaker at the Overlook Hotel, an isolated resort hotel in the Colorado Rockies. Jack is a recovering alcoholic with anger issues which, prior to the story, had caused him to accidentally break his son Danny's arm and lose a teaching job after assaulting a student. Jack hopes that the hotel's seclusion will help him reconnect with Danny and his wife, Wendy, and give him the motivation needed to work on a play.
Unknown to his parents, Danny possesses psychic abilities referred to as "shining", which include reading minds, premonitions and clairvoyance. While moving into the hotel on closing day, the Torrances meet the chef, Dick Hallorann, who possesses similar abilities to Danny's and forms a connection with him.[2]
As the Torrances settle in alone at the Overlook, Danny sees ghosts and frightening visions. Danny does not tell either of his parents about his visions because he senses that the care-taking job is important to his father and dissuades Wendy from leaving Jack at the Overlook by himself. However, Danny soon realizes that his presence in the hotel makes the supernatural activity more powerful, turning echoes of past tragedies from the hotel's history into dangerous threats. Apparitions take solid form and the garden's topiary animals come to life. The winter snowfall leaves the Torrances cut off from the outside world.
The Overlook has difficulty possessing Danny, so it turns its attention to Jack by frustrating his desire to work and by enticing him with the dark history of the hotel through a scrapbook in the basement. Jack starts to develop cabin fever and becomes increasingly unstable, destroying a two-way radio and sabotaging a snowmobile, the family's only means of escape. After a fight with Wendy, Jack sees the hotel's bar fully stocked with liquor despite being previously empty and finds himself attending a party of ghosts. As he gets drunk, the hotel uses the ghost of Delbert Grady, a previous caretaker who murdered his family, to urge Jack to do the same to Danny and Wendy. He initially resists, but ultimately succumbs to his dark side and the hotel.[3][4]
Wendy and Danny get the better of Jack after he attacks Wendy, locking him inside the pantry, but Grady's ghost releases him after he makes Jack promise to bring him Danny and to kill Wendy. Jack attacks Wendy with one of the hotel's roque mallets, seriously injuring her, but she escapes to the caretaker's suite and locks herself in the bathroom. Jack attempts to break the door with the mallet, but Wendy slashes his hand with a razor blade to deter him. Meanwhile, Hallorann, having received a psychic distress call from Danny while working at a winter resort in Florida, rushes back to the Overlook, only to be attacked by the topiary animals and severely injured by Jack.
As Jack pursues Danny through the hotel and corners him on the top floor, he briefly gains control of himself and implores Danny to flee. The hotel quickly retakes control of Jack, making him violently batter his own face and skull into ruin with the mallet, leaving his body under the hotel's control. Remembering that Jack has neglected to relieve the pressure on the hotel's unstable boiler, Danny informs the hotel that it is about to explode. As Danny, Wendy, and Hallorann flee, the hotel-creature rushes to the basement in an attempt to vent the pressure, but it is too late. The boiler explodes, killing Jack and destroying the Overlook. Fighting off a last attempt by the hotel to possess him, Hallorann guides Danny and Wendy to safety.
The book's epilogue is set during the next summer. Hallorann, who has taken a chef's job at a resort in Maine, comforts Danny over the loss of his father as Wendy recuperates from the injuries Jack inflicted on her.
