Misery

Misery
Stephen King

It seems to me that Stephen King’s best novels are the ones (a) that he wrote in the 1980s; and (b) that are centripetal or focused inward, sculling streams of consciousness to a rhythm set by the subjective awareness of time.

With those two criteria set, I think Misery is one of his two or three best books. It’s a much darker story than the Rob Reiner film version, as King’s Annie Wilkes is a cruel ogre out of the world of fairy-tales as much as she’s a psychological case. She would eat Kathy Bates for breakfast.

Then there is the subtext, with Paul Sheldon as King’s alter ego: a successful genre writer whose dreams of literary cred go up in smoke on a portable barbecue. A little lower layer, however, is darker still, with Paul recognizing that he is playing Scheherazade to himself, that junk fiction is his junk, the opium not only to the masses but for his own bitter soul. He’s weeping as he writes, though at least the pay is good for misery.