While most of King’s dread vampires hunt and eat alone, 2013’s Doctor Sleep, the decades-later sequel to The Shining, introduces a whole cult of these creatures. Called the True Knot, this nomadic group is obsessed with identifying people who possess psychic abilities—people who “shine”—and ingesting the “steam” (psychic essence) they release when they die.
Similar to If It Bleeds, these deaths can sometimes happen without the True Knot’s intervention. We’re told that on September 11, 2001, the cult drove to New Jersey and passed around a pair of binoculars to watch the tragedy unfolding across the Hudson.
“There had been plenty for everybody that day, and in the days following,” the author explains. “There might only have been a couple of true steamheads among those who died when the Towers fell, but when the disaster was big enough, agony and violent death had an enriching quality.”
With its “limited precognitive skills,” the True Knot can sense major disasters on the horizon, but these are few and far between. Instead, the cult focuses its energy on tracking and murdering its prey. “[The True Knot] weren’t vampires from one of those old Hammer horror pictures,” we’re told, “but they still needed to eat.” And like Pennywise and El Cuco before them, this band of dread vampires prefers to eat kids.
Also, like Pennywise, the True Knot tends to play with its food. The cult tortures its victims extensively before murdering them because “agony and violent death had an enriching quality.”
This is exemplified in the novel’s most shocking scene, where members of the True Knot lure an 11-year-old boy named Bradley Trevor into their van, drive him to an abandoned power plant, and torture him to death.
They torture Bradley for so long that his vocal cords rupture from screaming—so horrifically that he eventually begs for death. And throughout it all, they feel no shred of remorse.
“It was regrettable,” the novel notes, “but pain purified steam, and the True had to eat. Lobsters also felt pain when they were dropped into pots of boiling water, but that didn’t stop the rubes from doing it. Food was food, and survival was survival.”
Is it, though? True Knot member Snakebite Andi certainly believes so, telling all-grown-up Dan Torrance that “we didn’t choose to be what we are any more than you did.” But this is a lie: we witnessed Andi herself choosing to join the True Knot and being transformed into a steam-eating monster.
The tribe’s members were human—they only began to “eat screams and drink pain” because it allowed them to “live long, stay young, and eat well.” Hannibal Lecter could just as convincingly argue that he had no choice but to do a little cannibalism because he was hungry.
There were other options on the table. The True Knot chose the unthinkable.