Rereading Stephen King, chapter 24: Misery

1987 was a big year for King. Four novels published in 10 months. That's ludicrous. Yes, he didn't write them all that quickly (although a quick glimpse at his release schedule for previous years suggests it's not as if he took any real holidays from the typewriter), but the act of editing them, prepping them for release, and promoting them: that would have been tiring.

And it was a strange year in terms of the books themselves, because only one of the titles – The Tommyknockers – resembles the sort of thing King's staunch fanbase already drooled over. (Even then, it's a piece of SF rather than straight-up horror.) Misery is the strangest of them all, however, because it barely relates to any of King's other books. Instead? It's one of the greatest thrillers ever written.

While I might have my hyperbole hat on, this book deserves it. It began life as what would have been the final Richard Bachman book before King killed him off. The books authored by that pseudonym, as I've harped on about before, were nastier in a way than King's traditional output; their bad guys were more human, and the books less supernatural. Misery has no supernatural elements, focusing instead on a story that is actually desperately sad, and, to my mind, hugely personal to King.

Paul Shelton is a much-loved author of a specific kind of genre fiction: the bodice-ripper. His main character, the wonderfully named Misery Chastain, is loved by his fans, but not so much by her author. So, he does what any sane writer who wants to write other stories would do: he kills her off, in a book that, at the novel's start, is still unpublished. And then he writes an utterly different novel, Fast Cars, packed full of violence, and swearing, and catharsis. Paul has a car crash – the irony – and is rescued from the wreck by Annie Wilkes, his "biggest fan". She lives in the middle of nowhere, and used to be a nurse, and she can, she tells him, nurse him back to health. Only, of course, she doesn't. As his biggest fan, she's driven almost entirely by a desire to see him write the books that she wants him to write. There's the hint that she might have set a trap to get him – it's a hell of a coincidence that he should end up crashing just where she could find him – but that's not the story. The majority of the book's plot is superbly simple: Paul is injured and trapped in Annie's house, and she is insane. He has to escape, and save his life, because there will come a point, it's clear, where she will push him too far.

It's unbelievably tense, and superbly written, probably – along with Bag of Bones, but we're not getting to that for a long time yet – King's finest prose. And this is a novel with no ghosts or psychics or aliens; it's a book about a woman who feels too passionately for a character that she has created in her head, a character who doesn't – and cannot – exist, and for the writer who created her. It's a book about being mentally ill, in many ways; and, true to this period of King's output, about dependency.

There's one overriding theme that runs through Misery and the two books that followed, The Tommyknockers and The Dark Half: all three deal, whether consciously or not, with King's addiction to drink and drugs at the height of its powers. They're about stages of addiction: The Tommyknockers is probably King's most drug-addled book, like seeing the world through a lens of cocaine and sleeplessness; Misery is about kicking addiction, being deprived of the thing you need the most; and The Dark Half is about burying the person that you were, that you hated, and trying to begin the next (clean) stage of your life. That these three books were published as King was cleaning himself up and kicking his addictions simply can't be a coincidence.

In Misery, themes of addiction and entrapment abound. Paul is trapped physically by Annie, kept on a bed and, in the novel's most horrifying moment, has his foot amputated to ensure that he cannot move. And he's trapped by the drugs that she gives him, the painkillers that she gets him addicted to during his initial healing process and which make him compliant. And he's trapped in his career, writing books for a fanbase he's sick of, people who want him to endlessly regurgitate the same thing again and again (and that's a whole other thematic crossover from the text to King's real-world life). The metaphors don't stop with Paul: Annie is trapped in the books and worlds that she loves; she is trapped by her past; she is trapped by mental problems. The old adage goes that writers should write what they know, and I think here King did: he wrote a novel with two characters who are at war over him. They're at war over freedom, and the chance to start again, free of the shackles that have been holding them back. When I read the book back it was all I could see: endless references to being trapped and addicted. At the novel's close, when Paul has escaped Annie's clutches, her impact remains. He hasn't kicked his sickness; he's just escaped it for a little while. It haunts him, and likely always will.

But then, through all that, the book is what matters. It's one of the best exercises in tension and restraint that I have ever encountered: as a template novel for the thriller, echoes of it can still be seen in today's huge publishing successes. It might just be King's finest novel: an example of the power that his words can have. Every character in the book feels it, and so do you as a reader. This is a book that every reader, King fan or not, should read.

Connections

Misery overtly references two of King's more conventional horror texts: Annie refers to The Shining's Overlook Hotel at one point (which also counts as a reference to King's forthcoming Doctor Sleep); and Paul Sheldon grew up near the Kaspbrak family, as featured in It. And it works the other way as well: in a few other King tales (Rose Madder, Desperation, The Library Policeman), characters talk of having read books in Sheldon's much-beloved Misery series…

Next: Late last night and the night before, it's The Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door.