When she was a girl in Bakersfield, Annie Wilkes went to the pictures every Saturday with her older brother for the next instalment of a serial. One week the hero’s car, brakes cut and doors welded shut, flew off a cliff and burst into flames. The following Saturday the episode began again, and this time the door banged open and he tumbled out onto the road before the car went over. Every child in the cinema cheered. Annie stood up and shouted that this was not what happened last week, bit her brother’s hand when he tried to quiet her, and was nearly thrown out. Decades later she tells the story to the bedridden novelist she is holding in her spare room, because his first new chapter has done exactly the same thing. Misery by Stephen King is famous for what Annie does with an axe. It is just as good on what she does with a manuscript.
Stephen King Puts a Critic in Charge
The set-up is simple and well known. Paul Sheldon, author of a long-running series of Victorian romances, has killed off his heroine and celebrated with champagne and a drive west. A blizzard rolls his car off a mountain road, and Annie, a retired nurse who lives alone outside the town of Sidewinder, pulls him out with both legs ruined. She tells nobody. When she finally reads the last Misery novel and learns its heroine has died in childbirth, she wants her back.
What lifts the book is that Annie is not wrong about fiction. She cannot say deus ex machina, but she knows one when she sees it, and her rule is precise: a story need not be realistic, only fair. Paul recognises it as the rule of a game he played at summer day camp, where children took turns rescuing a hero from lions within ten seconds and the circle voted on whether the rescue counted. He also recognises, to his own shame, that she is right. He has spent years treating his readers as people to be managed, and his captor has more respect for storytelling than he does.
She had already passed judgement on the other book. Paul’s new literary novel, the one he expected to win prizes, was in his bag when she found him, and she read it without asking. Too hard to follow, she reports, too much jumping about in time, and far too much bad language. Paul, flat on his back, tries a writing-workshop answer about form following subject, and the scene is very funny until she throws a bowl of soup at the wall. Misery by Stephen King keeps this double register throughout: the reader laughs at the literary man’s vanity and then watches what that vanity costs him.
The second attempt is the real thing, and King describes the moment of absorption beautifully: “When it was very good, he could see through the paper.” Misery by Stephen King may be the most convincing account any popular novelist has given of what writing feels like from the inside, the stalls, the bargaining, the sudden ideas arriving from somewhere below, and the embedded Victorian novel improves as its author does. Life in the spare room settles into a routine that is almost domestic: pages in the morning, a nap, a Somerset Maugham novel from Annie’s shelves in the afternoon, sitcoms on the black-and-white set in the evening. The calm is the most unnerving thing in the book, because both of them know it cannot last.
A Monster With a Vocabulary
None of this would matter if Annie were less alive on the page. She is a woman of rigid manners and sudden storms. She will not swear, so she says cockadoodie and calls people who cross her dirty birds. And she keeps her barn spotless because the neighbours might gossip, quotes her late mother’s sayings, and sometimes goes blank in mid-sentence, staring at a wall for minutes before warming back up like an appliance. A visit from a town official about overdue property taxes turns into a small comic masterpiece, with Annie kicking the bumper of his departing car and screaming insults that a child might use.
Then the comedy drains away. Her moods follow the weather, and when the barometer falls she falls with it, and the reader begins to understand why she was once tried in Denver. There is a scrapbook in her parlour that a first-time reader of Misery by Stephen King should be allowed to open without warning, and the pages that follow it are as frightening as anything in the author’s long career. King never explains her and never needs to.
The one real weakness of Misery by Stephen King is pace in the third quarter. Immediately after the novel’s most notorious act of violence, King lets Paul drift through long meditations on memory, compulsive readers and a fan he once met, and the pressure slackens just when it should tighten. The Victorian pastiche also carries a guide character written in a minstrel dialect that has aged very badly. Readers should know too that this is a severe book: captivity, addiction, mutilation, the deaths of children and animals, self-harm and despair are all part of its fabric, and two scenes are among the most explicit King has published.
The Fan Stephen King Was Afraid Of
King was born in Portland, Maine, in 1947, and wrote Misery by Stephen King between 1984 and 1986; the last page carries the dates and the two Maine towns, Lovell and Bangor, where it was begun and finished. Part of the spur was reader mail. When he published The Eyes of the Dragon, a fantasy for his daughter, many of his horror fans let him know they wanted the old kind of book, and Paul’s resentment of his Misery readers grew from that. Part of it was darker. King has since said that Annie stood for his own addiction to drink and drugs in those years, a reading the novel supports at every turn.
The working title was The Annie Wilkes Edition. Viking published it in June 1987, and it shared the horror writers’ first annual prize for the best novel of the year. When Rob Reiner filmed it in 1990, the screenwriter William Goldman fought to keep the book’s worst injury intact; Reiner softened it, and Goldman later conceded he was right. Kathy Bates won an Oscar, and in 2015 a stage version reached Broadway with Laurie Metcalf as Annie and Bruce Willis as Paul. The scholar Caroline Bicks describes a year spent reading King’s papers in Maine in Monsters in the Archives.
Where It Leaves You
What stays after Misery by Stephen King is less the gore than the argument: that readers are owed a fair story, and that a writer who forgets it deserves to be reminded, though perhaps not like this. Readers who want the modern publishing world held up to the same harsh light should try Yellowface by R.F. Kuang, whose narrator steals a manuscript and lives in fear of exposure, or The Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz, about a writer’s widow whose own book attracts a reader who knows too much. For the claustrophobia without the books, Emma Donoghue’s Room tells a captivity story from inside a single locked space.
Annie wanted the old serial to play fair. Terrible as she is, she would have no complaint about this one.