Wild ectoplasmic partly decayed vampire horses would not tear from me the story of what happens next, but let me assure you King is a pro: by the end of this book your fingers will be mere stubs of their former selves, and you will be looking askance at the people in the supermarket line, because if they turn around they might have metallic eyes. King’s inventiveness and skill show no signs of slacking: “Doctor Sleep” has all the virtues of his best work.

What are those virtues? First, King is a well-trusted guide to the underworld. His readers will follow him through any door marked “Danger: Keep Out” (or, in more literary terms, “Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here”), because they know that not only will he give them a thorough tour of the inferno — no gore left unspilled, no shriek left unshrieked — he will also get them out alive. As the Sibyl of Cumae puts it to Aeneas, it’s easy to go to hell, but returning from it is the hard part. She can say that because she’s been there; and, in a manner of speaking — our intuition tells us — so has King.

Second, King is right at the center of an American literary taproot that goes all the way down: to the Puritans and their belief in witches, to Hawthorne, to Poe, to Melville, to the Henry James of “The Turn of the Screw,” and then to later exemplars like Ray Bradbury. In the future, I predict, theses will be written on such subjects as “American Puritan Neo-Surrealism in ‘The Scarlet Letter’ and ‘The Shining,’ ” and “Melville’s Pequod and King’s Overlook Hotel as Structures That Encapsulate American History.”

Some may look skeptically at “horror” as a subliterary genre, but in fact horror is one of the most literary of all forms. Its practitioners read widely and well — King being a pre-eminent example — since horror stories are made from other horror stories: you can’t find a real-life example of the Overlook Hotel. People do “see” some of the things King’s characters see (for a companion volume, try Oliver Sacks’s “Hallucinations”), but it is one of the functions of “horror” writing to question the reality of unreality and the unreality of reality: what exactly do we mean by “see”?

But dig down below the horror trappings, and “Doctor Sleep” is about families. The biological families of Dan and Abra, the “good” family of A.A., to which “Doctor Sleep” is a kind of love song, and the “bad” family of the True Knot. High on the list of King sins are the maltreatment of children by male relatives, and the brutalizing of women, mothers in particular. Righteous anger and destructive anger both have their focus in the family. As Doctor Sleep himself says to young Abra, “There’s nothing but family history”: often the narrative glue that sticks a King novel together. The family dimension, too, is quintessentially American-horror, all the way from “Young Goodman Brown” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” on up.

What will King do next? Perhaps Abra will grow up, and become a writer, and use her “shining” talent to divine the minds and souls of others. For that, of course, is yet another interpretation of King’s eerie, luminescent metaphor.