Misery (novel)

Paul Sheldon, the author of the best-selling series of Victorian-era romance novels featuring the character Misery Chastain, has finished the series' final installment, Misery's Child, in which Misery is killed off. After completing the manuscript for his new crime novel, Fast Cars, with which he hopes to launch his post-Misery career, Paul acts on an alcohol-induced impulse to drive to Los Angeles instead of flying back home to New York City. As a result, he is caught in a snowstorm in a remote section of Colorado, causing him to crash into a snowbank. He awakens to find that he has been rescued by Annie Wilkes, a local former nurse who is a devoted fan of the Misery series. She refuses to take Paul to the hospital despite his having two severely broken legs, and nurses Paul herself using her stockpiled food and an illicit stash of codeine-based painkillers, to which Paul quickly becomes addicted; Annie withholds pills in order to threaten and manipulate Paul. Annie coerces permission to read the manuscript of Fast Cars but disapproves of the subject matter, redacting all the profanity as she reads. Paul soon assesses that Annie is mentally unstable; she is prone to trailing off into catatonic episodes and has bouts of unreasonable rage. When Annie learns of Misery's death, she leaves Paul alone in her house for over two days, depriving him of food, water, and painkillers.

Upon Annie's return, she forces a weakened Paul to burn the manuscript for Fast Cars. Annie sets up an office for Paul – consisting of an antique Royal typewriter with a non-functional N-key, writing paper and a wheelchair – for the purpose of writing a new Misery novel that will bring the character back from the dead. Biding his time, Paul begins a new book, Misery's Return, and allows Annie to read it and fill in the missing Ns as he writes. He manages to escape his room using his wheelchair on several different occasions, searching for more painkillers and exploring the house. He discovers a scrapbook full of newspaper clippings that reveal Annie to be a serial killer; her victims included a neighboring family, her own father, her college roommate, a hitchhiker with whom she had a brief fling, several elderly or critically injured patients and eleven infants, the last resulting in her standing trial but being acquitted in Denver. When Annie discovers that Paul had been leaving his room, she punishes him by cutting off his foot with an axe and cauterizing his ankle with a blowtorch. Later, after Paul complains that the typewriter's T and E keys have broken and refuses to tell Annie how the novel ends before he has written it, she cuts off his thumb with an electric knife.

Colorado state trooper Duane Kushner eventually arrives at Annie's house in search of Paul. When Paul attempts to alert him, Annie murders Kushner by running him over with her riding lawnmower, and decides that she will shoot both Paul and herself after the novel is finished so that Misery may live forever. While she disposes of the body, Paul manages to steal a can of lighter fluid, which he uses to light a decoy copy of the manuscript on fire. As Annie attempts to save it, Paul beats her with the typewriter, and they engage in a violent struggle with Paul stuffing cinders from the manuscript into Annie's mouth. After Annie is rendered unconscious, Paul is finally able to alert the police, who have arrived in search of the dead officer Kushner. Annie is eventually found dead from her injuries in the barn, apparently on her way to murder Paul with a chainsaw. Returning home to New York, Paul submits Misery's Return to his publisher, which is set to become an international bestseller. Paul suffers frequent nightmares about Annie and continues to have withdrawal from painkillers. He has also become an alcoholic with writer's block. Eventually, after a random encounter on the street, Paul gains inspiration to write a new story, weeping both for his shattered life and in the joy that he is finally able to write again.

One of Stephen King's inspirations for Misery was the reaction his fans had to his 1984 novel The Eyes of the Dragon.[4] Many fans rejected The Eyes of the Dragon because it was an epic fantasy book, with virtually none of the horror that initially made his reputation.[4] Paul Sheldon feeling chained to the Misery books by his fans was a metaphor for King's feeling chained to horror fiction.[4] Another source was King's addiction to drugs and alcohol, and his struggle to give them up. He stated: "Take the psychotic nurse in Misery, which I wrote when I was having such a tough time with dope. I knew what I was writing about. There was never any question. Annie was my drug problem, and she was my number-one fan. God, she never wanted to leave."[5] When further addressing the idea of whether the character of Paul Sheldon was based on himself, King stated that in certain ways, he was, but in the ways where every character is a part of the author in some way: "It would be fair enough to ask, I suppose, if Paul Sheldon in Misery is me. Certain parts of him are ... but I think you will find that, if you continue to write fiction, every character you create is partly you."[6]

King has also attributed a dream he had while on a trans-Atlantic flight to London with the situation and characters that became fleshed out in Misery. He noted that he wrote the idea on an American Airlines cocktail napkin when he woke up so he could make sure to remember it, writing: "She speaks earnestly but never quite makes eye contact. A big woman and solid all through; she is an absence of hiatus. 'I wasn't trying to be funny in a mean way when I named my pig Misery, no sir. Please don't think that. No, I named her in the spirit of fan love, which is the purest love there is. You should be flattered.'"[7]

King and his wife, Tabitha King, stayed in London's Brown's Hotel, and wrote "sixteen pages of a steno notebook", on a desk the concierge offered him that was the same desk Rudyard Kipling owned, and died of a stroke at while writing.[7] The working title of the book, which King thought would only be around thirty thousand words (it ended up being almost four times that at 370 pages),[8] was The Annie Wilkes Edition.[7] While discussing the pros and cons (mostly cons) of pre-plotting novels, King mentioned that he had originally planned for Annie to force her prisoner to write a book, that she would then bind in Paul's skin. When commenting on why he chose not to go that route, King said:

... it would have made a pretty good story (not such a good novel, however; no one likes to root for a guy over the course of three hundred pages only to discover that between chapters sixteen and seventeen the pig ate him), but that wasn't the way things eventually went. Paul Sheldon turned out to be a good deal more resourceful than I initially thought, and his efforts to play Sheherezade and save his life gave me a chance to say some things about the redemptive power of writing that I had long felt but never articulated. Annie also turned out to be more complex than I'd first imagined her, and she was great fun to write about ..."[7]

• Misery on IMDb
• Official Website for the play
• Misery at Worlds Without End.