Misery
1978
- dope
- pills
- american novelists
- captives
- fans (persons)
- fiction
- novelists
- prisoners
- suspense fiction
- writers
The story
Novelist Paul Sheldon has plans to make the difficult transition from writing historical romances featuring heroine Misery Chastain to publishing literary fiction. Annie Wilkes, Sheldon's number one fan, rescues the author from the scene of a car accident. The former nurse takes care of him in her remote house, but becomes irate when she discovers that the author has killed Misery off in his latest book. Annie keeps Sheldon prisoner while forcing him to write a book that brings Misery back to life. [Source][1] [1]: https://stephenking.com/library/novel/misery.html
What it’s like
Misery reads like a snowbound winter afternoon in a sealed room: the prose is plain, clipped and grounded in physical discomfort, with the cold, the pain in a shattered leg, the smell of a sickroom and the hum of a rural Colorado farmhouse carefully rendered. King's voice is conversational and wry, so long stretches of interior monologue feel close and claustrophobic rather than lurid. The pacing is relentless in a slow-burning way; chapters drift through ordinary routines of meals, pills and typewriter clatter before a single flicker of wrongness tips the scales. Its vibe is tense, cabin-fever dread with dark humour threaded through it, the kind of book that suits a stormy night alone or a long train journey where you want to be pulled in. Intensity is high: there is brutal physical violence, including a notorious mutilation scene, along with sustained psychological cruelty, captivity, and drug-induced coercion, and it lands hard rather than gratuitously. This is not gentle reading. It is for people who want a suspenseful psychological thriller about a writer and his obsessive reader, and who can tolerate graphic, uncomfortable brutality.
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