Misery was published in 1987, and won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel. The book is dedicated, “This is for Stephanie and Jim Leonard, who know why. Boy, do they.” Stephanie Leonard is King’s sister-in-law, she was King’s assistant at the time and also ran the Castle Rock Newsletter (a fan-club rag), while her husband Jim was the caretaker and property manager for King’s properties, so they both knew the intensity of the King fandom at this time. Moving from It directly into Misery was a fascinating experience as a reader. It is a dense, heavy, crowded, and sprawling piece of work, while Misery is tight, stripped almost bare (at least by King standards). This book is really just two people in a house, and mostly in a room. It’s also a sparse 310 pages, with a very linear plot that moves along at a clip with jet engines of suspense. Let’s dig in.

“Writing does not cause misery, it is born of misery.” -Montaigne

Paul Sheldon is a writer, and he writes two kinds of books, the popular and lucrative Misery Chastain romance novels, and what he thinks of as his real and serious work, literary novels that do not sell very well. He is at a turning point in his career as he has published his last Misery Chastain book, killing off his heroine. He has traveled to Colorado to write a new manuscript for one of his serious novels, Fast Cars, which he completes in a hotel. He is so jazzed that he drinks a bottle of champers and heads out to the airport, snowstorm be damned. Living in a remote house in the mountains of Colorado we have Annie Wilkes. Annie is Paul Sheldon’s number one fan, or more specifically, Misery Chastain’s number one fan. She lives alone, with only a cow named Bessie and a pig named…Misery. She was a RN once, and a wife, but all that is behind her now.

The book starts with Paul waking up in a bed, in a room, and Annie is there. She is giving Paul mouth-to-mouth. Paul is in pain, he is confused, he doesn’t know where he is, or even really who he is. He cycles in and out of waking, in and out of pain, like the tides. There is a beautiful piece of imagery used here, Paul remembers some old wooden pilings jutting from the sand at a beach his parents brought him to when he was just a little boy. The tide would move out revealing the jagged, barnacle covered wood, and then back in covering the wood. This is how he frames the pain, hidden by the administration of a drug called Novril (a fictional codeine based drug King created for the book), but then revealed again as the tide of the drug goes out. And Annie is the moon, pushing the pills into his mouth. It’s very effective. Eventually Paul surfaces enough to remember. He remembers finishing his book, and deciding to leave for the airport, and driving in a snow storm, and reaching for his cigarettes, and the car skidding, and flipping. Then nothing. Now he is here. Wherever here is.

“He discovered three things almost simultaneously, about ten days after having emerged from the dark cloud. The first was that Annie Wilkes had a great deal of Novril (she had, in fact, a great many drugs of all kinds.) The second was that he was hooked on Novril. The third was that Annie Wilkes was dangerously crazy.” – pg 8

Annie Wilkes just happened to drive by right after Paul crashed his car, and she almost kept on going. It was a blizzard, and even with her chains and four by four, conditions were bad. But something, let’s call it fate, made her stop. Paul’s legs were badly injured, pulverized he says later when he finally sees his mangled lower body for the first time weeks after being in Annie’s guest-room bed, and she drags him from the wreckage (which is hidden by feet of snow that falls that night) and brings him back to her home. Annie is a large woman of extreme strength and resilience. Solid like granite. She reminds Paul of a stone idol, solid through and through, dense, and he begins to think of her as the goddess. She tells him, while spoon feeding him soup, that she is reading his new Misery Chastain novel. You know, the one where Misery dies at the end. Uh-oh.

The death of Misery Chastain lands like a bomb on Annie Wilkes deeply volatile psyche. She is enraged, and leaves Paul alone (after terrorizing him in his bed, and forcing him to drink dirty mop water) for days without food, water, or pain pills. When she returns she presents him with an evil typewriter, missing the letter ‘n’, and forces him to burn the one existing copy of his Fast Cars manuscript. He will be writing a new book, she tells him, bringing Misery back. A line that had me laughing out loud here, as both a reader and a writer, “After all a man who could drink from a floor-bucket should be capable of a little directed writing.” That one hit, Steve.

And so Paul begins to write, at first grudgingly, but soon enough with real passion. The book is an escape, from the pain, from the reality of his situation, from Annie, from himself. There is a lot here that exposes King’s own feelings about writing, about art, about his process, and about his relationship to his own work. Like Paul’s complicated feelings about the Misery romance books, King had complicated feelings about being chained to horror novels. King wanted to write more literary fiction (and his short stories are often in that genre) and fantasy (like his Dark Tower series and Eyes of the Dragon.) Seeing Paul grapple with his Misery Chastain books, hating them, but also secretly loving them, is pretty revelatory for where King was at with his own work. Paul says, “Writer was the most important definition of himself.” And later, when Annie strokes his hair and thanks him for writing this new book for her, he thinks, “It was never for you Annie, or all the other people out there who sign their letters “your number one fan.” The minute you start to write all those people are at the other end of the galaxy. It was never for my ex-wives, or my mother, or for my father. The reason authors almost always put a dedication on a book, Annie, is because their selfishness even horrifies themselves in the end.” All of the dedications in Steve’s books flashed before my eyes then.

Paul has escaped his room in his wheelchair a few times to look for pain pills, food, and a way out (and on one of these forays he finds her scrapbook, full of newspaper obituaries that reveal Annie’s past kills. She has been murdering people since she was a child.) Annie knows this, all of it, and she punishes him by hobbling him. This is a harrowing scene. She cuts his foot off with an ax and then cauterizes the wound with a blow torch. Later she cuts off his thumb with an electric knife. Then she kills a local cop, a young guy who stops at her place with a picture of the missing writer Paul Sheldon. Annie runs him down with a lawn mower and hides his car and body. But the jig is up. Paul and Annie know more police will be coming, looking for the missing writer, but more pressingly the missing police officer. Annie plans to kill any more cops that show up, and then kill Paul and herself. But first she wants (and Paul is surprised to discover he wants) to finish the new book, Misery’s Return. Paul has realized along the way that Annie doesn’t love him, or care about him at all in fact. Paul is Annie’s golden goose. She wants the new Misery book, needs it in fact. So when he finishes the book he has one piece of leverage over her, finally. And he uses it to kill her.

In 1990 the Rob Reiner film adaptation of Misery was released, starring James Caan and Kathy Bates. I absolutely love this movie, and think it is one of the best King films, and Kathy Bates’ best performance (she won an Oscar). There have been at least three stage plays of Misery (one in 2015 staring Bruce Willis and Laurie Metcalf), and Annie Wilkes appears in season two of Castle Rock, the television series. This is yet another King book that is such a great idea. Paul Sheldon talks a lot about ideas in Misery, where they come from, how to find them, etc. King has some kind of magic when it comes to ideas for books. Golden eggs indeed. I had only read this book once before, loved it at the time, and loved it again this read through. A real scorcher!

Up next we have the complicated The Tommyknockers. Complicated for me, in that I love this book, and have read it three times before, despite it often being cited as one of King’s worst books. Stephen King himself has said it is an “awful” book and reflected his state of mind when he wrote it (he was bottoming out in his many addictions at the time). Not sure what it says about me that I love it so deeply and have revisited it so often, but I am chomping at the bit to dive in again, so let’s do it! You can find all of my reread project blogs here: Kind Reread Project.