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In the course of my time in Stephen King’s papers, which I write about in my new book, Monsters in the Archives, I compare drafts of the book that would become The Shining, looking to understand why the story has had such an impact on me over the years. When I consult the revised scene depicting young Danny Torrance’s precognitive visions in the second draft of the novel, now called “The Shining” (King changed the title from the first draft, which he had called “The Shine,” when he learned that shine was a racist term), I see that King has taken out all of the first draft’s references to the “Bad Stuff,” Daddy hurting Danny’s arm, and the smell of booze. At the same time, King swaps out the general sounds indicated by “Heavy. Booming” in the first draft for the pointed aural horrors of “splintering wood” and “a bellow of rage and satisfaction.”
The scene is becoming both more particular and less specific. You can imagine something solid being broken apart, or down, by an angry someone (something?) that feels pleasure at its success. But who or what is doing the splintering? When and where will it happen? The deleted REDRUMs that had been superimposed on the smashed bottles in the bedroom now appear solely in the bathroom mirror, signifying nothing. At least not yet. Who’s bleeding onto the bathroom floor? Their nails are carefully shaped (in the next draft it will just be one shaped nail on one gruesomely specific third finger dripping blood), so we can imagine who it might be.
But the Overlook has more than one dead woman in a bathtub.
In the last scene of this vision, as King first wrote it, Danny finally sees the monster that has been coming for him. He’s “crouched in a dark hallway . . . listening to the booming noises grow louder, and now a Shape turned the corner and began to come towards him, and the Shape had a [careted in: “short”] croquet mallet in one hand, swinging it (REDRUM) from side to side in vicious, sizzling arcs, slamming it into the walls, knocking ghostly bursts of plaster from them.” Danny comes out of his trance just as Jack arrives home with the news that he’s gotten the job at the Overlook, something Danny already knows because of his shining. He’s excited to see his father, and starts running toward him, but then freezes: “Beside his daddy, in the other front seat, was a croquet mallet, its head clotted with blood and hair.”
Over the next few weeks, one of the things I discover is that King has left a record in “The Shine” of how he imagined that brain-bashing mallet—The Shining’s most deadly prop. Eventually he changes it from a croquet to a roque mallet, which, as his careted-in “short” suggests, does not have as long a handle. (In the final draft, King adds that roque is a “British forebear of our croquet . . . Croquet is bastardized roque.”) King writes reminders to himself to make the change at a number of points in “The Shine” whenever he references croquet: margin notes like “roque, remember” and “Roque ←.” By the second draft, Jack wields this new weapon.
The change to a roque mallet gives King the opportunity to wordsmith particular literary effects that amp up the thematic and material horrors of his story. He’s able to play with the sound roque, for example, to produce some of his trademark aural assaults on his readers. In one scene, Danny is having a dream, much like his recurring vision, of being chased. He hears the whistle of the mallet cutting through the air; in his head, the terror of this sound is compounded by the echoing of “(roque . . . stroke . . . roque . . . stroke . . . REDRUM) before it crashed into the wall.”
In another case of using roque’s sound to enhance the horror of a scene, King revises one in which Danny gets lost in a psychic trance while brushing his teeth. In the first draft, Jack and Jenny (the wife and mother character Wendy’s name, in the first draft) have to break down the door to get to him: “ ‘Yurguh,’ Danny said. ‘Nuh-nuh. Cro-kay. Nuh.’ ” King pens parentheses around the word “Cro-kay” and puts a question mark above it—perhaps a note to himself that it’s hard to decipher the word croquet from this hyphenated construction. In the next draft, it’s clear what Danny’s saying: We can hear the precise, sharp sound of roque (and the deep voice of the person who eventually will turn the game into something deadly): “ ‘Roque!’ Danny said, his voice suddenly deep, almost man-like. ‘Roque. Stroke. The roque mallet . . . has two sides. Gaaaaaa— . . . Roque. Stroke. Redrum.’ ”
As Danny unconsciously expresses it here, the head of a roque mallet is different from a croquet mallet: It has two sides, one soft and one hard. This makes it a fitting symbol of the love/hate and human/monster divides that power the book’s psychological and emotional pathos. At a crucial inflection point in the story, this connection is made explicit: Jack is considering whether to heed Wendy’s pleas that they try to get off the mountain using the hotel snowmobile. Danny has been experiencing increasingly violent fits and physical injuries, and Jack has smashed the radio (although he blames it on Danny)—their only means of communication with the outside world. If they don’t get off the mountain and away from the hotel soon, it will be too late.
In an extended scene in the equipment shed, Jack ponders his options. The part of him that the evil spirits have been getting to wants to stay, but the other part of him knows that Wendy is right. He picks up a roque mallet and reflects: “He frowned a little, then smiled. Yes, it was a schizo sort of game at that. The mallet expressed that perfectly. A soft end and a hard end.” He almost gets the Ski-Doo in driving shape, putting in the spark plugs and finding its battery.
But by the end of the scene, the hard end has won: He flings the snowmobile’s battery into the deep snow and strands them all there together. When shall we three meet again?
From the book Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King by Caroline Bicks. Copyright © 2026 by Caroline Bicks. Published by Hogarth, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
