Misery - Stephen King

Stephen King as you would expect him. Gory… Vivid… and masterful at creating frightening scenarios. As you read the book you get more and more convinced that King deep dived into himself for playing out the thoughts of the protagonist, Paul Sheldon.

The book does have a close resemblance to one of his other works, Gerald’s Game. Of course this had more content to write around, as an author. After all, there were two people in this book: Paul and his captor, Annie Wilkes. And Paul had a specific task at hand, other than escaping. On the other hand, Gerald’s Game is about one woman who is trapped in a secluded house, hand-cuffed to a bed and the whole book primarily about her getting back to the world again. Surprisingly, in terms of volume, Gerald’s Game manages to beat Misery. Misery, in fact, is one of the shorter works of Stephen King!!

The plot veers more towards gore than horror. There is no paranormal activity here. Its just two humans, one, Paul Sheldon the writer, rendered a wreck by an accident and another, Annie Wilks, a psychotic fan of the writer who brings him home and provides care and medical help to the writer. As it turns out, Annie is not all that noble, and not very tender when you “beg to disagree” with her. The movie actually had to play down the nastiness of Annie Wilks in the novel, just so that the audiences didn’t leave the theater in a stagnant pool of puke that might have erupted had they actually seen what Annie does in the book. The story then goes through the trials of Paul as he is given a task, to write a novel, just for Annie.

The book offers plenty of scope to describe Paul’s state of mind, which would be as turbulent as twister, and more violent than the battle between King Kong and T-Rex. Wodehousian similes aside, the mind is King’s element. And he lets it flow as he goes through the hells that Paul Sheldon is subjected to. The book could have very well been written in first person since none of the scenes ever describe anything that does not have Paul Sheldon himself. Annie Wilkes too, is a very well constructed character, with her tantrums, though random, totally befitting a mentally unstable person. The balance between stupidity and sharpness, cruel and caring, obdurateness and yielding… all are well brought out in Annie’s persona. The ending is, as Annie would have put it, “fair” and believable. Stephen King offers a complete, entertaining package with this book.

As a book, Misery is a lot pacier than some of the other King books. So if a person has to begin reading Stephen King, Misery would be a great first book. If one has an appetite for this genre, it would be easy to get hooked on to Stephen King with Misery…