Misery

Paul Sheldon crashes his car in rural Colorado after finishing the manuscript of a novel he hopes will move him beyond the romance series that made him rich. He is pulled from the wreck by Annie Wilkes, a former nurse living alone.

She sets his shattered legs herself, tells nobody he is there, and reacts badly when she reads the final book in the series and discovers he has killed the heroine.

Rescued by a nurse who has read everything he has written, in a house nobody knows he is in.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

Almost the entire novel takes place in one room, with Paul immobilised and dependent on Annie for food, water, painkillers and information about the outside world.

The restriction is total and is the source of the book's pressure. Every small change — a doorframe scuffed, a paperclip acquired — becomes an event, and the reader tracks resources as carefully as the protagonist does.

She is unpredictable, devoutly religious, sentimental about her own kindness, and capable of sudden extreme violence delivered without any change in register.

King's decision to give her a private vocabulary — cockadoodie, dirty birdie — is what makes her frightening rather than merely brutal. Her euphemisms signal that she is operating by rules nobody else can see.

Paul survives by writing: Annie demands a novel resurrecting the character he killed, and the book he produces under duress turns out to be the best work of the series.

The novel is genuinely interested in what compulsion does to craft, and in the uncomfortable proposition that a writer might work better with a captor than without one.

Paul's dependence on the painkillers Annie controls is described with clinical attention, and King has been open that the book was written during his own period of substance dependence.

The parallel between the drug and the audience — both something he needs and resents — is not stated and is unmistakable.

Extracts from the book Paul is writing appear throughout, including the physical appearance of the typescript with its missing letter n typed in by hand.

The device is effective and does real work: the reader watches him become absorbed in the work, which is both his escape and his collaboration with his captor.

The book contains two or three set pieces of extreme physical violence that are among the most frequently cited in King's work, and they arrive with very little warning.

The restraint elsewhere is what makes them land. Long stretches pass with nothing worse than fear, which means the reader is never braced.

Annie's sense of ownership over a character she did not create is the book's most durable idea, and it has become considerably more legible since publication.

King wrote it before the internet made the relationship between writers and their readerships continuously visible, and the novel anticipates a great deal.

It is short, linear and tightly controlled, with no subplot and almost no scenes away from the house.

The single exception — a brief external investigation — is the weakest material and King keeps it to a minimum, which is the correct judgement. King has said he wrote it quickly and the compression shows in the best way: there is nothing in the book that does not bear on the situation in the room.

First person, close, and written in a register that shifts as Paul's physical and mental state deteriorates.

The drug-affected passages are handled well, with the prose becoming loose and then sharpening as the medication wears off, which conveys the dependency more effectively than description would.

Rob Reiner's 1990 adaptation is faithful in outline and substantially softens the violence, replacing the novel's most notorious sequence with something less extreme.

Kathy Bates's performance has largely defined the character publicly. The novel's Annie is physically larger, stranger and considerably less readable. The novel also spends far more time inside the writing itself, and the extracts from Paul's manuscript have no real equivalent on screen.

Readers who want claustrophobic suspense with a genuine idea underneath, and who can tolerate a small number of very difficult scenes.

It is among King's tightest books and one of the few that works entirely without the supernatural. Readers put off by his length elsewhere will find this one disciplined.