Doctor Sleep

I missed this book when it first came out a few years ago but came across it during the recent promotional campaign for the movie.  This book fits in with so many other of Stephen King's books for me: I like the story and the characters but they are just too long. 
This book is a sequel to The Shining in the sense that it picks up Danny Torrence's life as an adult.  He continues to shine and he has come to deal with both that and the problems that plagued his father.
We learn that he has been able to deal with some parts of what happened at the Overlook, and others he has had to lock away from himself in his own mind.
This book encapsulates something else about King's books that has become more apparent to me as I have gotten older.  King is interested in family legacy and the things that we seem to have thrust upon us.  Danny is an alcoholic like his father, and this has long been a theme in King's work.  But there is more.  Danny, now "Dan" as an adult, also has to deal with his own anger and find a way to reconnect with people.  He talks a lot about his mother and he thinks about Dick Halorann a lot.  The book is as much about his need to get out from under what happened to him when he was young as it is about anything.  He does this through the main action of the book, which is something that is unrelated to The Shining and not something I really want to get into here. 
Doctor Sleep is about dispelling the notion that there are things that are inevitable.  Dan sees signs of his own death at one point in the novel, but he is able to dodge his demise.  The novel deals more directly with alcoholism than some of King's other work, giving the reader some AA aphorisms and narrating meetings that Dan attends, as well as defining his relationship with his sponsor.  The elements of AA that seep in walk a line between individual choice and inevitability.  As it is presented in the text, AA is about staving off the inevitable, and accepting that for paradox that it is. 
I don't think that there is really a good comparison with The Shining in this novel.  The books are too different and are trying to do different things.  The Shining is a tighter novel, but it is also a less skillfully executed novel.  It requires a different sort of imagination than Doctor Sleep does because King seems more likely to fill in the gaps in his later work than when he was a younger writer.  His early novels left spaces for the reader to fill with their own fears.  More recent work seems to define the unknown a bit more.  This is not a judgement either way, just an observation. 
I have not yet seen the movie adaptation of Doctor Sleep, but am curious to see how it translates to the screen.  Adaptations of King's novels are always a mixed bag, but the quality of them has improved over time.  The last big question for me, though, is how an adaptation of this novel will stack up against Stanley Kubrik's adaptation of The Shining.