(no subject)

[darchildre]

So, I'm rereading The Shining for the first time in...a while. It's not my favorite Stephen King but it's good and solidly enjoyable. (And not, for me personally, scary enough that I can't read it before bed, which is a plus.)

But.

Y'all, I read enough of a certain type of fantasy literature as a child that I to this day immediately and automatically read any word that looks weird and made up backwards just in case*. And I get that the characters often literally can't do that but I can only engage with the book as written media. And given Stephen King's habit of picking a significant word and having it recur and recur and recur throughout whatever he's writing**, by about halfway through, the fact that we are still acting like the meaning of "redrum" is a big scary mystery is just annoying as all hell.





*Every once in a while, I run into a Harry Potter fan who still has not done this with the Mirror of Erised. It is always a fun time.

**Which usually I'm pretty into.

Comments

[littlestclouds]

The "redrum" bit scared the crap out of me as a kid (who was too young to be reading The Shining, probably) but thinking about it today...

[florescent_luminescence]

Oh same!! It got to the point when I was a kid where I would do that with pretty much every word (a couple w=names where it meant something backwards had slipped by me and I was like "never again shall a backwards word get by me") and I can still do it now as an adult. Saying people's names and such backwards is my party trick now.

[out_there]

You know, I just realised erised was desire backwards. Heh.