5 best (and 5 worst) dads from sci-fi and fantasy

Second Worst Dad: Jack Torrance from The Shining

We probably don’t need to say much about this one, right? Good fathers don’t chase their children through an icy hedge maze trying to kill them. They teach you that on day 1.

What’s unsettling about Jack Torrance, the main character of Stephen King’s The Shining, is that he didn’t have to be this bad of a dad. At the beginning of the book, he’s not an awful parent, although there are hints that he struggles with alcohol and that he and his wife Wendy have had their fair share of squabbles. It’s also possible he hurt his son Danny in the past, but he’s trying to move past it and do what’s best for his family, taking a job maintaining the Overlook Hotel for the winter so they’ll have a roof over their heads while he gets his writing career off the ground.

He couldn’t have chosen a worse location. The Overlook is a haunted place with an evil history, and it starts to eat away at Jack over the course of the story. By the final stretch, his family is running for their lives as he chases through the hotel’s twisty halls with an axe, determined to end their lives.

Is Jack under the malevolent influence of dark spirits? Has he just gone crazy? Or did he always have resentful feelings towards his wife and son, and whatever inhabited the Overlook just brought them to the surface? That, I think, is the scariest option. Jack Torrance has become a pop culture icon because he represents the idea that any father, no matter how well meaning, is capable of hurting the ones he loves.