Misery
by Stephen King
Summary
Paul Sheldon has just killed the goose that laid his golden eggs: in the manuscript riding beside him through a Colorado snowstorm, he has finally finished off Misery Chastain, heroine of the bodice ripping series that made him rich and kept him, he believes, from serious work. Then the car leaves the road. He wakes with his legs shattered, in the spare bedroom of Annie Wilkes, a former nurse living alone in the hills, who introduces herself with the sentence that entered the language: she is his number one fan.
Annie has rules, moods, and a past that Paul reconstructs, in the book's coldest sequence, from a scrapbook of clippings that reveals what her nursing career actually consisted of. When she reads the new manuscript and learns what he did to Misery, the captivity finds its shape: Paul will burn the book and write a new one, Misery's Return, resurrecting her, chapter by chapter, for an audience of one, on a typewriter with missing keys. What she does to his foot with an axe when he displeases her made the novel notorious; what makes it great is the writing about writing, because the book Annie extorts turns out to be good, and Paul's discovery that the gotta, the storyteller's drive, works even at gunpoint is the most honest thing King ever wrote about his own gift.
Around three hundred pages, nearly all of them one room.
Best for readers who want King with no supernatural anywhere, just two people and craft, the tightest and scariest chamber piece in his shelf.
Historical Context & Significance
Misery shared the very first Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel, for 1987, with Robert McCammon's Swan Song, the Horror Writers Association opening its history with a tie between the genre's superpower and its rising challenger.
King later gave the book its confessional key: Annie was my drug problem, he said, and she was my number one fan. Written at the height of the addiction he had not yet named publicly, the novel doubles as an allegory of cocaine and of the fan expectations he felt imprisoned by, the horror writer forced to keep producing the thing that is killing him.
Rob Reiner's 1990 film made the story permanent culture: Kathy Bates won the Academy Award for Best Actress as Annie, the first Oscar ever won for a Stephen King adaptation, and the American Film Institute ranks her among cinema's greatest villains. The hobbling scene, softened for film and still infamous, keeps the novel's reputation as the one where King frightened even his own readers domestically.