Jack grew up in
Berlin, New Hampshire, where his father, Mark Torrance, worked in the Regional Community Hospital. The youngest of four children, he had three older siblings: Brett, Becky, and Mike. He is a writer, former teacher, and
debate team coach. His
alcoholism and volatile temper costs him his teaching position at Stovington Preparatory School after he assaults George Hatfield, a student and former member of the debate team, whom he catches vandalizing his car. Later, Jack's drinking nearly ends his marriage to his wife,
Wendy, after he breaks his son
Danny's arm in a blind rage. He finally decides to quit drinking after a
drunk driving crash in which he and a friend run over an abandoned bicycle in the road and realize they could have killed a child. Jack accepts a position maintaining the isolated Overlook Hotel in
Colorado for the winter, hoping this will salvage his family, re-establish his career, and give him the time and privacy to finish a promising play. He moves to the hotel with Wendy and Danny, who is
telepathic and sensitive to
supernatural forces. Danny receives guidance from an imaginary friend he calls "Tony." Danny is also comforted by meeting the hotel's kindly cook,
Dick Hallorann, who shares Danny's telepathic abilities. It is later revealed that Jack's father, also an alcoholic, was abusive towards his family. A flashback scene in the novel shows his drunk father brutally bashing Jack's mother with a cane. The Hotel is haunted by the ghosts of those who died violently within it and is itself host to a being of unknown origin, who wishes to coerce Jack into killing Danny. Apparently, the Hotel believes if it can harness the boy's "shining", then it can gather enough power to "break free" of the building in which it has somehow become trapped. Jack has encounters with ghosts of previous staff of the hotel, who insist he has always been working there and he must kill his family. Jack eventually succumbs to these supernatural forces, starts drinking again, and grows to hate his own wife and child. Jack cuts off all radio communications and sabotages the hotel snowmobile, their only means of transportation. He then tries to kill Wendy, who knocks him out and locks him in a food storage room. Jack is later helped out of the storage room by the ghost of the previous caretaker, who murdered his own family before committing suicide. Jack then brutally attacks Wendy with a
roque mallet he found, although she escapes. He is interrupted by the arrival of Hallorann, whom he almost beats to death. Jack finds and confronts Danny, and is about to kill him when his son reaches through the hotel's power and brings out his father's true self. Jack tells Danny to run and remember how much he loves him, before the hotel's power takes over again and forces Jack to bash in his own face with the mallet. Jack had forgotten to dump the boiler, which grows too hot and causes the hotel to explode. Jack is killed, but Danny, Wendy and Hallorann get out just in time. In the sequel novel
Doctor Sleep (2013), Danny (now going by Dan) learns that Jack is also the biological father of Lucy Stone, a woman whose daughter Abra has manifested “shining” abilities even stronger than Dan's. Shortly before he was fired from his teaching position, and unbeknownst to Wendy, Jack had a brief sexual encounter with a student teacher Sandy Reynolds at a party that led to Lucy's conception. Dan is thus Lucy's half-brother and Abra's half-uncle. This book gives Jack's middle name as Edward rather than Daniel. In the climax of the novel, Jack's ghost intervenes to help Dan's friend Billy Freeman, and Lucy and Abra Stone defeat the main antagonists, Rose the Hat and the True Knot, at the site where the Overlook once stood. After the battle, Jack and Dan make peace with each other before he, Billy, and Abra leave the location. ==In other media==