'Did I approach the book with trepidation?" asks Stephen King in the author's note to "Doctor Sleep." "You better believe it."

DOCTOR SLEEP, by Stephen King. Scribner, 2013, 544 pp., $30 (hardcover)

Me, too. It's a brave man who writes a sequel to "The Shining" — which, if not the perfect horror novel, was as good a candidate as any in the past 50 years. Please, please, please, the reader thinks as he opens the book: don't do a "Star Wars Episode I" on us.