DR. SLEEP Coming in January (UPDATE: Biblio Info Added)

A press release on Stephen King’s Web site announces that Dr. Sleep, the sequel to The Shining, is tentatively scheduled for publication on January 15 of next year. Update:  S&S/Scribner; 9781451698848; $30; 544 pgs; on-sale date as 1/15/13.

In a recent interview with Neil Gaiman, King talks about Dr. Sleep and also says he is working on another new title, Joyland, about an amusement park serial killer.

King’s The Wind Through the Keyhole debuted at #1 on the NYT Fiction Hardcover Best Seller list this week.

Below, King reads from the first chapter of Dr. Sleep at the Savannah Book Fair in February (via Daily Dead). Last fall, he read from another segment at George Mason University.

Publisher description after the jump:

Stephen King returns to the characters and territory of one of his most popular novels ever, The Shining, in this instantly riveting novel about the now middle-aged Dan Torrance (the boy protagonist of The Shining) and the very special twelve-year-old girl he must save from a tribe of murderous paranormals.

On highways across America, a tribe of people called The True Knot travel in search of sustenance. They look harmless—mostly old, lots of polyester, and married to their RVs. But as Dan Torrance knows, and tween Abra Stone learns, The True Knot are quasi-immortal, living off the “steam” that children with the “shining” produce when they are slowly tortured to death.

Haunted by the inhabitants of the Overlook Hotel where he spent one horrific childhood year, Dan has been drifting for decades, desperate to shed his father’s legacy of despair, alcoholism, and violence. Finally, he settles in a New Hampshire town, an AA community that sustains him, and a job at a nursing home where his remnant “shining” power provides the crucial final comfort to the dying. Aided by a prescient cat, he becomes “Doctor Sleep.”

Then Dan meets the evanescent Abra Stone, and it is her spectacular gift, the brightest shining ever seen, that reignites Dan’s own demons and summons him to a battle for Abra’s soul and survival. This is an epic war between good and evil, a gory, glorious story that will thrill the millions of hyper-devoted readers of The Shining and wildly satisfy anyone new to the territory of this icon in the King canon.

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