Trying to get a spatial sense of The Shining’s (1977) Overlook Hotel is a complicated process. King provides detailed descriptions of the hotel, its blueprints, and the Torrances’ navigation of this fraught space throughout the novel, but people’s experiences of the Overlook Hotel are also fundamentally intertwined with visual representations of the Overlook in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining and the actual, physical spaces of the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, which served as King’s inspiration for the Overlook. 

The most comprehensive mapping of the Overlook Hotel comes early in King’s novel, when Stuart Ullman goes over the floor plans of the hotel with Jack Torrance during his interview for the winter caretaker position. These blueprints chart the location of the suites and guest rooms, as well as linen closets and storerooms on the upper floors of the hotel, but the most important, in terms of Ullmann’s proprietary perspective of the hotel and the Torrances’ lives within it, is the lobby level. As Ullmann explains, laying the lobby floor plan out before Jack, “Here in the center is the registration desk. Behind it are the offices. The lobby runs for eighty feet in either direction from the desk. Over here in the west wing is the Overlook Dining Room and the Colorado Lounge. The banquet and ballroom facility is in the east wing” (6). Other than their personal apartment, the lobby level is where the Torrances spend most of their time in the Overlook, both in sharing family meals in Dick Hallorann’s clean and welcoming kitchen and in the unraveling nightmare of their relationships as Jack converses with the spirits in the Colorado Lounge and Danny witnesses the prescient horrors of the clock on the ballroom mantlepiece. 

Jack also becomes consumed by the Overlook’s basement, increasingly seduced by and absorbed in the dark history he finds there, but as far as Ullmann is concerned, the basement doesn’t really warrant any “official” consideration, telling Jack “Watson will show you all that. The basement floor plan is on the boiler room wall” (6), as though that is outside his purview of supervision and not worthy of his notice. 

Another layer of spatial awareness and experience comes through the Torrances’ frightening and familiar paths through the Overlook, like Danny noting that the door to Room 217 is at a right angle to the main hallway on the the second floor (250) and in the repetition of the path that Wendy walks from the family’s apartment to the kitchen and back again. 

In charting these spaces, it is interesting to look at the layout of the Stanley Hotel, which served as King’s inspirational catalyst for The Shining (though even that has changed notably in the years since the novel’s publication, a rabbit hole of place and legacy all its own). The 1997 ABC miniseries version of The Shining was filmed at the Stanley Hotel, which adds another layer of spatial engagement and recognition for many readers, viewers, and fans. 

There is also the popular culture shadow of Kubrick’s The Shining to contend with and while some of Kubrick’s adaptation choices are complex and contentious, his vision of the Overlook Hotel is the one that immediately comes to mind for many fans, with a range of artists offering their own maps and blueprints of the Overlook. (The Coded Chronicles game Escape from the Overlook Hotel and the board game adaptation of Kubrick’s The Shining—which we’ll tackle in the coming weeks—overtly highlight the central navigation of space and spatial awareness in Kubrick’s version of the Overlook, which is particularly pronounced through the iconic design of the carpet and the hedge maze that supplants the topiaries of King’s novel). 

While those elements definitely influence many readers’ vision and experience of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, as I considered spatial significance and mapping during this re-read, I drew exclusively from King’s descriptions of the hotel itself, including the blueprints Ullmann rolls out for Jack during his interview and the walkthrough of the hotel the Torrances’ get when they show up on closing day. I focused my attention pretty exclusively on the lobby level, since (as previously mentioned) that’s where a lot of the action happens, though I also found myself exploring rabbit holes of the layout and mapping of other distinct spaces, like the Torrances’ apartment, Room 217, and Dick Hallorann’s kitchen.

King’s descriptions of the lobby level make this part of the Overlook Hotel pretty easily navigable, at least in terms of concrete, fixed space (though the liminality that blurs—and even at times obliterates—the boundaries between the past and the present complicate this significantly). The check in desk is front and center when visitors come through the main doors and as Ullmann notes, the lobby runs for 80 feet in either direction, creating a long and expansive room. The offices and kitchen are on the other side of the wall behind the check in desk. The dining room and lounge are in the west wing and the ballroom is in the east wing. (Some friendly nuns sit on couches around a fireplace toward that end of the hotel as they wait to check out and given the comfort of the fireplace on that warm fall day and the converse terror Danny experiences looking at the clock on the ballroom’s fireplace mantle later in the winter, I’ve marked the location of that fireplace). 

The wide porch and front steps of the Overlook Hotel look out onto the sloping front lawn—including its paths to the pool and the roque court, its hedge animals, and its playground—and the driveway that runs down the mountains to Sidewinder. 

Much like mapping Donna Trenton’s route in Cujo (1981), mapping the lobby floor of the Overlook Hotel was a bit anticlimactic. While it was interesting, it wasn’t terribly challenging to identify where the different components of this main floor go (or at least where I think they go based on my close reading and textual interpretation), the heart of the story, the Torrances’ experience of this place, and the overlapping of the past and present are impossible to definitively chart or spatially isolate. Knowing where the Colorado Lounge is, for example, doesn’t help buffer us—or Jack—against the insidious influence of the Overlook’s power or the temptation to drink. Knowing the twists and turns that lead from the Torrances’ apartment to the kitchen doesn’t ensure safe passage or illuminate the dark corners between here and there, as Wendy goes to get food for herself and Danny. Charting these spaces doesn’t give us any control over them and the story they tell will always be just a miniscule fragment of the darker reality and scope of the hotel. 

[Page numbers are from the 2001 Pocket Books paperback edition of The Shining]