The Overlook Manuscript makes reference to the manuscript of the fictional character Jack Torrance in Stephen King’s novel The Shining and its adaption as a movie by Stanley Kubrick. The book reproduces some of the pages seen in the movie when Torrance’s wife Wendy first encounters her husband’s manuscript pages. Discovering that he has been writing the same sentence over and over for hundreds of pages in different graphical constellations while pretending to be working on his novel, the manuscript functions as a testimony of his madness.

In contrast to Phil Buehler’s All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy, which purports to be a publication of Torrance’s lost manuscript itself, Jean Keller’s The Overlook Manuscript tells a frame story in an editorial note. According to this note, Keller worked in the same abandoned hotel in the Swiss Alps as Torrance did, also during winter, but in the year of 2010. There, Keller allegedly finds Torrance’s manuscript and, “[i]nspired by this discovery, [...] ditched his other artistic projects and began using Torrance’s typewritten pages as the basis for a new book” (Jean Keller, editorial note).

Apart from his editorial note, Jean Keller makes another addition when, on four pages of his book, he replaces “Jack” with “Jean” and the phrase “All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy” with “Un ‘Tiens’ vaut mieux que deux ‘Tu l’auras’” (A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush). This is the proverb Kubrick used in the French version of his film (the German, Italian, and Spanish versions of the film also show manuscripts in the corresponding languages). This echoes the cross-fading of both figures or authors staged here, and preserves Keller’s legend of being based in Paris—known to be a pseudonym, for which the author profile on Lulu only reads “Jean Keller is.”