Stephen King at work on sequel to The Shining

File this under: Exciting book news! Stephen King is writing a sequel to The Shining!

King, who crafted the novel that was adapted into the (terrifying) 1980 film starring Jack Nicholson [Ed. note: One of my favorite films of all time], read from excerpts of The Shining's sequel, entitled Dr. Sleep, at a recent appearance at George Mason University, Slashfilm reports.

The novel reintroduces The Shining's main character, Danny Torrance, as a grown-up. In the sequel, Torrance is now 40, and working in a hospice for the terminally ill in New York. Torrance has special powers though, and will visit the patients as they're about to "cross over" to help them move on without pain.

As King explained to the crowd gathered at GMU:

"I've always wondered what happened to the kid. People say to me sometimes, do you keep an idea notebook? And I don't. If you don't keep a notebook a kind of Darwinian process takes place, where the bad ones just go away. The good ones, the important ones, they stick around. I kept wondering, what's going on with Danny Torrance? Where did he go after this terrible experience? And little by little, this story began to form."

He added that it wasn't finished yet, but he was able to read a bit of the excerpt and gave a teensy bit of description.

"I knew that there were bad people in this story that were like vampires, only that what they sucked out was not blood but psychic energy from special people like Danny Torrance," King said. "And I came to realize these people were called The Tribe, and they move around a lot...They all have these kinda pirate names, because pirates is sort of what they are."

--> It'd be great if the haul in whatever's left of Shelley Duvall for the film version of Dr. Sleep! A fan boy can only dream...