From: frantz@bvc.edu
Newsgroups: alt.horror,rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: Gerald's Game  ***MILD SPOILER***
Date: 29 Jul 92 09:34:05 CDT
Organization: Buena Vista College, Storm Lake, IA

In article <1992Jul23.160047.25954@grebyn.com>, fi@grebyn.com (Fiona Webster) writes:
> Kevin Roberts says he didn't much like _Gerald's_Game_.
> 
> Andrea has another opinion, writing:
>>	I really have to disagree with your assessment of Gerald's Game.  I 
>>thought it was as taut and horrifying as Misery.  The whole character of 
>>Jessie is both sympathetic and realistic.  She's complex and not 
>>necessarily all that easy to like at times, but I thought King's ability to 
>>get inside the woman's psyche was far superior to a lot of the recent stuff 
>>he's done.  I wonder if this book has more appeal to women than it does men 
>>because this is so much a woman's story.  What do some of the rest of you 
>>who've read Gerald's Game think?
> 
> I liked Jessie.  I liked her psychological development--so far as it
> went.  I didn't think he took the character *far* enough, though.  She
> doesn't seem to be changing as dramatically, as a result of her ordeal,
> as Paul Sheldon did through his, or Donna Trenton (_Cujo_) did through
> hers.  I thought her fervent pursuit of the real identity of the bones-
> -n-jewelry man, and her spitting on him in court, were extremely tangen-
> tial plot elements.  I cared about Jessie as a person, especially in
> her believability as an abuse survivor, but I couldn't care about the
> man in the corner--well, at least not as much as *she* did.  Stephen
> King misfires, somehow, in his development of that part of the plot:
> it's as if he stuck the ending from another book--one about the
> boogeyman--onto _Gerald's_Game_.
> 
> Also, _Gerald's_Game_ just isn't as *nervy* a book as _Misery_: it
> doesn't read as if Stephen King suffered through Jessie's torments with
> her.  My first reading of _Misery_ was almost painful, so much did I feel
> that Stephen King *himself* was sweating blood as he wrote that book.
> Can anyone doubt that King himself got the shudders over the scene
> with the ax?
> 
> I just didn't sense that King was as deeply emotionally invested in the
> writing of _Gerald's_Game_.  It doesn't seem like a book that he *had*
> to write--that weird necessity that drives his best work--like _The_
> _Shining_ and _Misery_--and even _Pet_Sematery_--and allows his
> prose to transcend its awkwardness through sheer force of emotion.
> 

> 						--Fiona Webster

This is a very apt assessment of Gerald's Game and I enjoyed reading it.  
But I have to disagree about the ending.  For me, the ending works simply 
because he doesn't really try to tie things up as neatly with the main 
character (Jessie) the way that he did with, say, Donna Trenton in Cujo or 
Carrie or others.  Jessie is not "magically healed" nor is she completely 
destroyed (as we see in the fates of many in Pet Semetary, the Stand, It).  
She's somewhere in between, though I get a sense at the end that she is in 
fact working to regain (and, to some extent, create for the first time) 
some semblence of control.  I liked the fact that nothing was spelled out 
completely where she's concerned.  

On the other hand I have to agree that the "boogey" in this book didn't 
need necessarily to be explained so completely.  I guess I would have just 
as well preferred never to know-for sure, anyway-- who that horrifying 
creature was.  At the same time, he is, of course, a metaphor for the other 
abusers in her life especially because of his odd sexual tendencies.  I 
suppose it's appropriate for King to explain in that it makes her defiance 
at the end all the more powerful.

I think you're right about King's personal investment in this story to be 
less than it was in Misery, but keep in mind that King himself said in 
interviews which followed the publication of Misery that that story was his 
own personal nightmare.  Gerald's Game couldn't possibly be, with the 
tangential exception being the sexual abuse theme which has popped up most 
recently in the Library Police story in Four Past Midnight.  I think this 
is a woman's story, plain and simple, which precludes it really being *his*
.  I think that's what makes me admire it so much.  It's a risk and I think 
he pulls it off admireably.

Andrea @ BVC