by Stephen King (Compact Disc King)
Misery was best-selling author Stephen King’s 20th book (approximately), originally released in 1987. King, to that point, was known primarily as a horror writer who often featured supernatural elements in his stories — ‘Salem’s Lot, Carrie, The Shining, Cujo, Christine, The Stand, Firestarter, Pet Sematary — he wrote Misery in part as a reaction to being pigeonholed by his fans as a particular type of writer. His ardent fans did not gracefully appreciate his classical fantasy novel, Eyes of the Dragon, and insisted he return to what he was best known for. Also, and King has been clear about this in his own non-fiction writings, he had been dealing with drug addictions and abuse, and Misery was a chance to anthropomorphize those addictions as a destructive human character.
In Misery, Paul Sheldon is the author of a
best-selling series of Victorian romantic suspense novels featuring plucky
heroine Misery Chastain — a series he has grown to despise. Sheldon
has just finished a personal writing retreat at a lodge in the Rocky Mountains,
having completed what he believes to be his first “serious novel”, and after too
much to drink, he drives off a mountain road, overturning his car and doing
himself grave bodily harm. When he next awakens, he finds himself in the remote
mountain home of ex-nurse Annie Wilkes, who identifies herself as “his #1 fan”
and tells Paul she pulled him from the wreckage of his car and has been
treating his two broken legs. Unfortunately, Annie has more than a few screws
loose, and has a hair-trigger temper. When she discovers in the latest Misery
Chastain novel that Sheldon has killed off her beloved literary hero, Annie
goes off the deep end. Reliant on Annie for illicit pain meds and help
surviving his injuries, and aware that no-one knows where he is, Paul Sheldon
has no recourse but to agree, when Annie buys him a second-hand typewriter and
demands that he write a new Misery novel, resurrecting the doomed
character. What follows is a terrifying game of cat-and-mouse and psychological
terror. But Paul has yet to realize just how demented Annie Wilkes truly is…and
how many people may have died at her hands already.
As the tagline for the novel Misery says, “Paul Sheldon used to write
for a living. Now he’s writing to save his own life!”
(The novel Misery is much like many of King’s early works
from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, though in this case there is no
supernatural element, only an all-too-human psychopath. Considering that there's only two primary characters, and one of those is left by himself a lot of the time -- there's a LOT of internal monologues, frequently peppered with "adult language". It was intended to be
released under King’s pseudonym Richard Bachman, but King was "outed" as Bachman
before that could happen, so it came out under his own name. I do recommend
seeing the Misery film, directed by Rob Reiner. You’ll never look at a
sledgehammer the same way again, much like you’ll never look at an axe the same
way after reading or listening to the novel.)
( official Misery
page on the official Stephen King web site )
Recommended
by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service
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