Misery (novel)

First edition cover

**Misery** is the 25th book published by Stephen King; it was his 21st novel, and the 16th novel written under his own name. The book was released by Viking on June 8, 1987.

## Plot

Famed novelist Paul Sheldon is the author of a highly successful series of historical romance novels involving a character called Misery Chastain. His latest novel, *Misery's Child*, ended with the death of Misery in childbirth. Paul wants to branch out to other genres, hence his "killing off" of Misery, and has just finished the manuscript of a new unrelated drama novel called ***Fast Cars***. His agent believes that it was a bad idea to kill off Misery, but Sheldon argues that it was an important career move, as he does not want to be typecast as a romance writer.

In February 1987, while in seclusion at a private cabin near Sidewinder, Colorado, Paul finishes Fast Cars. After drinking a fair amount of champagne to celebrate the novel's completion, decides to head west to California for some rest and relaxation, but is caught in a blizzard and his car skids off the road and crashes, leaving him seriously injured and helpless. He is rescued by a former nurse, Annie Wilkes, and brought to her nearby home. By the time Paul regains consciousness, he is already in the guest room of Annie's secluded farmhouse. Both of Paul's legs are broken in several places, so he is bedridden and incapacitated and and hooked on Novril, an addictive, morphine-based drug that Annie has a large supply of. Annie claims she is his 'number one fan' and talks a lot about him and his novels. She is happy when Paul lets her read his new novel, but later admits she disliked the excessive swearing, despite the fact that the book is written from the point of view of a street kid who grew up impoverished in a big city. While feeding him, the discussion of the profanity angers her and she spills soup on his bed and, in an unexpected fury, throws the bowl at the wall where it shatters. Annie apologizes and then spends an entire hour slowly and methodically cleaning up the mess she claims Paul caused. By the time she finishes, Paul, who was supposed to have his next dose of Novril after eating, is in agony. She brings him his Novril capsules and forces him to wash them down with the water in the bucket she'd used to rinse the wall with.

She buys a copy of Paul's latest book, ***Misery's Child***, but after learning that he has "murdered" Misery, Annie flies into a rage, almost smashing a table on Paul's head. She reveals that nobody knows where he is (contradicting what she had earlier told him about the roads to town being impassable because of the blizzard). Annie leaves and Paul considers escaping from his room, but she has locked the door and the thought of the pain he'd endure if he tried to get out of bed stops him -- Paul would have to drop to the floor, risking incredible pain and further injury. Trapped in bed, Paul is left starving, wracked with pain and dehydrated, forcing him to drink his own urine. When Annie returns 51 hours later, she genially apologizes for mistreating him but tells him she can't give him food or his medication until he performs a single task.

Annie forces Sheldon to burn the *Fast Cars* manuscript. Paul holds out for several more hours but finally cracks, needing his medication to end his agony. Unfortunately, Sheldon had never made copies of the manuscript, believing that making copies is a jinx, so Fast Cars is lost forever. Paul vows to kill her.

Annie comes up with a new plan: she wants him to write a sequel to *Misery's Child*, where Misery is brought back to life. She supplies him with a used Royal typewriter, which is missing the "N" key (by buying it off of Nancy Dartmonger). Paul turns over a first chapter to Annie, who, while writing in the missing N's, immediately rejects it, saying that the manner with which Paul had resurrected Misery was cheating. She likens his method to Saturday serial matinees where her hero, Rocket Man, had repeatedly escaped death. One installment left Annie herself very upset because the story contained a small flaw: the car that the hero was trapped in exploded *after* falling from a cliff, *before* her hero could escape. The resolution the following week had shown the hero escaping the car before it had gone over the cliff, leaving Annie obsessively upset. Annie tells Paul he'll have to go back to the drawing board and do better.

Upon presenting Paul with the typewriter, Paul suggests that Annie supply him with different paper. The brand she'd chosen, Corrasable Bond, though one of the most expensive papers available, allows ink to smudge too easily. Stating that he'll need to shift the pages around during his writing, in a few years Annie will have nothing of the manuscript but smeared or blank pages. He asks her to get him less expensive long-grain mimeo. She agrees to get him the paper but in a fury, she pounds his shattered left knee with her fist, causing Paul tremendous pain. She stomps out. Paul, desperately needing Novril, picks the lock on his bedroom door with a bobby pin that had fallen from Annie's hair. After a tense few minutes where he fears the wheelchair will not fit through the door, Paul is able to escape the room. In the bathroom next to his room, he finds Annie's medication stash and takes several cards of Novril. He also checks the phone in Annie's living room but the line is dead, perhaps Annie's own doing to maintain her privacy and isolation. Hearing Annie's car approaching, he quickly returns to his room. Annie doesn't discover his escape from the room. She is again very genial and motherly, bringing Paul his medication right away. Paul is able to stash his own thieved Novril under his mattress.

Paul struggles with the concept of resurrecting a dead character until he has an epiphany; he is able to introduce a new trait into Misery herself, one that Annie had inspired: Misery had been allergic to bee stings and had gone into anaphylactic shock and could be saved from her grave. Annie happily approves and becomes very excited.

Sheldon plays his part for several more months, partially inspired by writing the novel and also because the heavy typewriter (which also loses it's "T" and "E" keys) makes for an exercise tool -- Paul is able to build his upper body strength will lifting the hated machine. Paul also notes that he hasn't had any alcohol or eaten any less than healthy food in that time and that it has increased his state of mind and creativity.

He escapes from his room one day to inspect Annie's house and stumbles upon her "scrapbook", where he discovers, while leafing through numerous newspaper clippings, Annie had been murdering infants and elderly patients in mercy killings while still a nurse, but was never convicted due to lack of evidence. Paul realizes the gravity of his situation has changed drastically and he steals a kitchen knife and plans to kill Annie with it. Annie discovers he was out, finds the knife, and cuts off one of his feet with an axe, cauterizing the wound with a blowtorch. The next week, when Annie hears Paul complains about the missing T key, she grabs a syringe and electric knife, pulls his hand down and cuts off his thumb.

Weeks later, a local cop named Duane Kushner comes by, looking for Paul but presumably to also question Annie. Sheldon uses this opportunity to get his attention with an ashtray thrown through the window. Annie uses a wooden cross to stab the cop repeatedly, incapacitating him. She disappears from the scene briefly and Paul, much to his horror, sees that the cop is still alive. As he struggles to reach his cruiser, Annie runs over his head with a riding lawnmower. Paul expects Annie to punish him more harshly than ever but she locks him in her basement with some food, pills and a syringe of Scopalamine while she drives the cop and his crusier to her private cabin higher in the mountains. When she returns, she fails to notice that Paul has stolen a small can of lighter fluid from near her grill.

Paul finishes the book and tells Annie. Prior to his announcement, Paul had made a few small requests: he asked Annie to pick up a bottle of Dom Perignon champagne to celebrate with him and for a single cigarette to smoke and match to light it with -- part of his own tradition when finishing a book. After Annie brings him the items he'd asked for, he sends her out of the room a final time. Annie falls for the ruse -- Paul had only wanted the single match she gave him. He quickly douses the manuscript with the starter fluid he'd stolen and, while Annie watches horrified, Paul sets the stack of paper ablaze. Predicting correctly that Annie would bend over him to grab the stack of paper and run to douse it in water, Paul lifts the typewriter and brings it down on Annie's head, a blow that fails to kill her outright. A short battle ensues with Paul able to stand on his broken left leg. When Paul is finally able to pin Annie to the floor, Paul temporarily loses control and grabs the burnt paper and begins to shove it in Annie's mouth, forcing it into her throat. Annie is able to throw Paul off and approaches him, tripping on the typewriter and hitting her head against the bedframe, knocking herself unconscious.

Paul is able to leave the room and is found by two cops who'd shown up at Annie's with strong evidence that Paul was there. They take him to a hospital after gawking briefly at his slightly emaciated body and nearly-hysterical state of mind. He warns them that Annie is still in the bedroom and very dangerous; however when they inspect the room, she's gone. She's found a short time later in her barn, dead of a fracture in her skull and gripping her chainsaw.

We find out later that Paul's burning of the stack of paper was a ruse: he'd hidden the actual manuscript under the bed where he was able to retrieve it later. He returns to New York sporting a prosthetic foot. Sheldon has released Misery's Return, and it is a hit. His agent wants him to write a non-fiction book on his experiences, but Sheldon refuses, as he is obviously suffering psychological trauma and writer's block from his experiences, and often suffers nightmares and hallucinations of Annie coming to get him for revenge. He believes that if he tries to write a true account, it would end up more fiction than fact. Paul drinks heavily to deal with his PTSD and the absence of the Novril his doctors weaned him from following the ordeal. One day, while returning from a short shopping trip, he has an odd encounter with a child, a skunk, and a shopping cart, and begins furiously to write about it, having rediscovered his muse.

## Characters

* Paul Sheldon
* Annie Wilkes
* Duane Kushner
* Nancy Dartmonger
* Charlie Merrill
* Misery
* Andrew Pomeroy (flashback)
* Ralph Dugan (flashback)
* Carl Wilkes (flashback)
* Paul Emery Wilkes (flashback)
* Crysilda Berryman (flashback)
* Roger Sheldon (flashback)
* Andrea Saint James (flashback)
* Peter Gunn (flashback)

## Background

One of Stephen King's inspirations for *Misery* was the reaction his fans had to his 1984 novel *The Eyes of the Dragon*. 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. Paul Sheldon feeling chained to the *Misery* books by his fans was a metaphor for King's feeling chained to horror fiction. Another source was King's addiction to drugs and alcohol, and his struggle to get sober. 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."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."

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.'"

King and his wife, Tabitha King, stayed in London's Brown's Hotel, where he wrote "sixteen pages of a steno notebook", on a desk the concierge offered him that was the same desk Rudyard Kipling owned, and had died of a ischemic stroke at while writing. The working title of the book, which King thought would only be around 30,000 words (it ended up being almost four times that at 370 pages), was *The Annie Wilkes Edition*.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, which 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 ..."
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## Adaptations

The story was adapted into a film in 1990 starring James Caan as Paul Sheldon and Kathy Bates as Annie Wilkes. The novel was also turned into a play by Simon Moore and premiered in 1992.

### Audiobook

The audiobook version of Misery is read by Lindsay Crouse.

## Trivia

* *Misery* was originally intended to be published as a Richard Bachman book, but while King was writing it the public discovered Bachman's true identity, and so *Misery* was instead published under his real name.