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In the 2017 film The Dark Tower, Jake's psychic powers are referred to as "The Shine". This has a similar phrasing to "The Shining", which is a story about a boy with psychic powers. Given that both are novels written by Stephen King, and The Dark Tower has a multiple-worlds thing going on, is "The Shine" related to "The Shining"?

I am unfamiliar with Stephen King's works in general and have only seen these two films (and Maximum Overdrive), so I apologize if this is an obvious question.

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  • I'm not going to make this an answer because I'm not familiar with the film, but the Dark Tower novels are kind of infamous for linking huge swathes of King's literary universe; many characters from prior books are met and/or referenced, and versions of "The Man in Black" appear as antagonists in several otherwise-unrelated books. This connection is almost certainly deliberate
    – Jason Baker
    Nov 12, 2017 at 2:59
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    Jake's power is not called "The Shine" in the Dark Tower books: it is called "The Touch". Many readers speculated that they are the same thing, e.g. darktower.wikia.com/wiki/The_Touch . Probably they called it "The Shine" in the DT movie to make the connection more obvious to moviegoers.
    – Teem Porary
    Nov 12, 2017 at 15:00
  • scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/166799/…
    – Mithoron
    Jan 7, 2018 at 16:33

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Short Answer: Yes

The dark Tower is the work that connects all Stephen King works

I have written enough novels and short stories to fill a solar system of the imagination, but Roland's story is my Jupiter--a planet that dwarfs all the others . . . a place of strange atmosphere, crazy landscape, and savage gravitational pull. Dwarfs the others, did I say? I think there's more to it than that, actually. I am coming to understand that Roland's world (or worlds) actually contains all the others of my making...

Stephen King

Specifically about the relation between the shine and The Shinning: Jake Chambers (from the Dark Tower) has psychic powers, refered as the Shine, that are similar to those of Danny Torrance (the little fellow on the trycicle that found two charming sisters in a hotel hallway). Danny's powers are called in similar terms:

"You shine on boy, harder than anyone I ever met in my life. […]. You got a knack. […] Me I've always called it shining. That's what my grandmother called it, too. She had it. We used to sit in the kitchen when I was a boy and have long talks without even opening our mouths"

In other King’s novel The Stand, prophetic visions are said to be

“the shining lamp of God… sometimes just the shine.”

So it seems King is kind of using the shine as a common term for this psychic powers across his universe.

On anoteher note, Jake and Danny are possible twinners: different versions of the same person, living on different levels of the Tower.

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