The TV Guide He only published a small excerpt of that five-act prologue that, attention, King had already brought to light back in 1982, specifically in the pages of the magazine Whispersspecialized in horror and fantasy. There are, however, those who doubt the word of the Maine genius and suspect that Before the Playthe secret prologue of The glow, was actually written after both the novel and the film merged into a single cultural supernovadespite the tremendously hostile critical reception that Stanley Kubrick initially garnered… Be that as it may, King was not lying when he claimed that his proposed overture to the nightmare shared by Jack, Wendy and Danny Torrance contained “a lot of pretty chilling things.” ”: in fact, we would dare to affirm that reading it constitutes a supplement to the main narrative so rich and stimulating that every fan of The glow I should know him. It is, in short, amazing: pure unadulterated seventies King.
Before the Play opens with an initial scene that, under the title of The third floor of a hotel that is going through difficult timesserves us on a plate something as incredibly valuable as the founding myth of the Overlook. Its origin story. Your Ground Zero. In it we meet Bob T. Watson, an unfortunate local magnate from the beginning of the 20th century who, after the apparently arbitrary death of his first-born son, throws himself into the construction of a resort vacation at the top of the Colorado mountains. Everything that could go wrong ends up going much worse than expected in a macabre vignette that concludes when a ruined and haggard Watson is forced to sell the damned hotel undersell, with the only condition that the new owner accept him and his only heir. I live as watchmen during the winter season… The first watchmen of the Overlook. From there we go to A room in the wee hours of the morninga cruel miniature set in the summer of 1929: gold-digger Lottie Kilgallon and her goofy (but filthy rich) new husband were going to spend their honeymoon in Rome before settling for the Overlook, where she suffers every night the worst nightmares of all. his life. It is about a collection of premonitory dreams (the plant sculptures in the garden come to life, the fire hoses try to kill it, the elevator descends far beyond the basement, the boiler threatens to burst at any moment) that will later take shape in the main narrative.
Are you obsessed with that scene in the movie where Wendy catches a man dressed as a bear getting intimate with an ancient gentleman (and gala dress)? Then you will be interested to know that On the night of the great masquerade ballthird scene of Before the Playtakes place in the mid-1940s and opens with a young man, Lewis Toner, frantically walking through the hotel hallways. He tries to escape from his boss and lover, the millionaire Horace Derwent, who has organized a masquerade/orgy in the ballroom to mark his recent acquisition of the property… Only Derwent still does not know to what extent this supposed curse that surrounds the Overlook has teeth and can bite you. Just before dying under strange circumstances, Toner is forced to dress up as a dog (not a bear, but almost) as part of a complicated game of humiliation that leads to tragedy. As a result, Derwent is forced to hand over control of the hotel to the Las Vegas mafia, which explains why The Overlook Hotel, third floor, 1958fifth and last scene of this kind of prequel to The glowthis written as if it were a story by James Ellroy. King finishes off the grand finale of the unpublished prologue, where the corpses of multiple gangsters are piled up in the hotel facilities, with a phrase that is certainly insurmountable: “The Overlook was at home with the dead”.
We would have to comment on the fourth scene of the prologue, the only one that does not take place on the (damned) grounds of the Overlook Hotel, but rather much further east. And now, news from New Hampshire takes us back to little Jacky Torrance’s sixth birthday, in the hot summer of 1953. We sit next to him while he waits for his father to return from work completely drunk, as usual, and the gods toss a coin in the air to know which way to go. Which side of the scale is her afternoon going to lean on… After receiving an almost fatal beating at the hands of the monster whom, despite everything, she loves with all her soul, Jacky’s mind formulates a strange message as she immerses herself in the unconsciousness: “What you see is what you will be”. In other words, Before the Play underlines the idea that the Overlook Hotel is just a gigantic echo chamber designed, by who knows what entities, to amplify the uniquely personal ghosts that each of its visitors brings with them. Stephen King was careful not to overexplain the central mystery of his novel in this discarded prologuebut it is evident that reading it provides some very valuable clues to navigate the labyrinth of corridors that leads to room 217 (according to the book) or 237 (according to the film).
