We heard many years ago that King was considering a sequel to The Shining, but fans of King all had the same question: Where could you possibly go from the end of The Shining? King has the answer, and it sounds like a doozy.

King released a statement on his website today that he plans to publish Dr. Sleep, the sequel to The Shining which will essentially focus on a grown up Danny Torrance who works helping terminally ill patients accept their death.

Also, there will be a band of psychic vampire-ish characters that suck psychic energy from people instead of blood. From King’s website-

This is an idea that I’ve had for some time. I wrote a novel in the ’70s called The shining… I always wondered what happened to that kid, Danny Torrance, when he grew up… and this story started to form. The book isn’t finished yet, it’s called Dr. Sleep. This kinda goes back to: what’s the worst thing you can think of? I knew that there were bad people in this story that were like vampires, only that what they sucked out was not blood, but psychic energy from special people like Danny Torrance. And I came to realize that these people were called The Tribe and that they move around a lot. Their leader is a woman called Rose [unintelligible] they all have these kinda pirate names, because pirates is sort of what they are.

Also, thanks to SlashFilm we have video of King discussing the novel and reading a passage!

So what do you think? Was it necessary for this story to be a sequel to The Shining? Are you excited to see what happened to Danny Torrance?