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Welcome to The Overlook Hotel.

Jack Torrance is a temperamental writer who is trying to rebuild his and his family's life after his alcoholism and volatile temper cause him to lose his teaching position at a prestigious New England preparatory school. Having given up drinking, he accepts a job as a winter caretaker at a large, isolated, Colorado hotel. He hopes that this will reestablish him as a responsible person, enable him to finish a promising play, and resume his career. He moves into the Overlook Hotel with his wife, Wendy, and young son, Danny, who is telepathic (the "shining" of the title) and sensitive to supernatural forces. The hotel is possessed by a life force or is itself sentient and especially uses people with psychic powers. Danny, who has had premonitions of the hotel's danger to his family, begins seeing ghosts and frightening visions from the hotel's past, but tolerates them in the hope that they are not dangerous in the present. He doesn't tell his parents because he senses how important the job of caretaker is to his father's and his family's future. Having difficulty possessing Danny, the hotel begins to possess Jack, frustrating his need and desire to work as he becomes increasingly unstable, and gradually turns him to its purposes.

The Overlook hotel does not seem to be inhabited by ghosts of the former inhabitants, but rather a collaboration of the immoral, and somewhat sinister personalities of the hotel's former occupants. None of the inhabitants seem outright "deranged", but instead are much more sinister and plotting than anything else. Common amongst the ghostly inhabitants are perverse sexual desires (there is a section about an affair between a closet homosexual and an openly gay man in a dog costume), which even transfers over to real life people who stay in the hotel. Early in the book, Danny reads the thoughts of an older woman who has sexual desires for a younger bellboy. Numerous stories of sexual perversion are dotted throughout the novel, seemingly under the hotel's influence.

Although the hotel has enough power to 'influence' people, it is still only a psychological and spiritual force, and cannot bring itself into "existence" other than in the minds of the hotel's real life occupants. The goal of the Overlook Hotel is to obtain someone with significant psychic power (Danny) who will be able to make the Overlook's more sinister side a physical force rather than just a psychological one.