Misery, by Stephen King

This is one of the first books I read by Stephen King. It was the early ‘90s, and while I didn’t catch the full extent of the underlying themes at the time (drug addiction, his own love/hate relationship with fans, his pending “retirement”), but I could tell this book was written from a place filled with pain and uncertainty. Reading it again, more than 20 years later, those feelings are more apparent.

Misery is beautifully written, which makes the fact he wrote it while coked to the gourd even more astounding. When King develops characters, he makes them real to the reader. They aren’t merely vessels to move the plot along, but people whose situation we genuinely care about. When you put two characters in a room together and set the entirety of your novel there, you’re bound to get to know them on a deeper level.

That’s what happens in Misery. It’s a claustrophobic tale that’s told from the POV of Paul Sheldon, and we see no more than what Paul sees. After some time, the reader begins to feel it is they that are bed and wheelchair ridden. I want to believe that Sheldon was fun for King to write because he didn’t have to worry about secondary, tertiary and… --quadriary? fourthiary?—characters. He became Paul Sheldon. But, sadly, Paul Sheldon isn’t the topic if this class. It’s Psychos. So let’s meet Annie Wilkes.

Annie Wilkes, Paul Sheldon’s Number One Fan, rescues him after a snowy car accident and brings him back to her house to mend. An unhinged woman, “solid all the way through, with no soul,” is an ex-nurse with a shadowy past (she turns out to be one of those angels of death nurses and loves to kill people and make it look like an accident). She’s also pissed because Pauly killed off her favorite heroine, Misery Chastain, so that he could turn his focus from gothic romance to “serious” literature. When she sees what he’s been spending his time working on, she forces him to burn it and replace it with a new Misery Chastain book just for her.

A lopped off foot and thumb later, and Sheldon finishes the book under duress. And he loves it!

But we spend so much time in Paul’s head, that we don’t really learn too much about Annie except through his descriptions. What we do know is that she loses her temper quickly, often blanks out, and has a laughing place. She would be a caricature of psychosis if King hadn’t created a well-sketched background for her. Through all her little proclivities and idiosyncrasies, Annie becomes not just evil incarnate, but an evil that just sees herself as just a little wonky. She

knows she’s evil, she just thinks it’s a personality quirk. Of course, we see through her scrapbook of horror (the second time I’ve gotten to use that phrase in as many months!), she’s been a little quirky for a long time.

From her colloquialisms to the way King describes her responses to Paul’s behavior (she goes blank mid-sentence, only to begin pick up where she left off minutes later), Annie Wilkes is about as well-developed a serial killer in fiction can get. There’s no real trigger in her background (which is pieced together over the course of the book, with one big data dump in the form of her photo album labeled “Memory Lane”), leaving the reader to realize that sometimes psychos are just born that way.