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I’ve re-read this quite a few times but apparently never talked about it here. So here are my thoughts on Misery.
A lot of King novels are great but have very striking flaws. Misery isn’t one of them. It’s a practically perfect novel, an extremely well-plotted and thematically coherent exercise in sustained tension, long enough to be meaty but without flab, featuring multiple great set pieces, a hugely satisfying climax followed by just enough “what happened afterward,” a pair of compelling characters who easily carry the novel all by themselves, excellent black humor, and a great exploration of the power of story – for better and for worse. I could do without a couple of the gross-outs, but for one thing I’m not sure those are actual flaws rather than just elements I dislike, and for another they are short and easy to skip.
It’s a technical marvel that’s well worth studying but is also just plain fun to read. I’m sure some readers find it too brutal/intense to be fun, but to me Paul’s basic predicament – write a new romance novel resurrecting the heroine he gleefully killed off, or his psychotic number one fan will feed him to the pig she named after that same heroine – provides a low-level but constant current of dark hilarity. I often find myself griping about books that don’t follow through on their premise. Misery 100% follows through on its premise.
King has said that in retrospect, he sees Misery as a metaphor for addiction (beyond the fact that Paul is literally addicted to painkillers) and that Annie Wilkes represents the drug/the power of addiction. I can see that interpretation, but it neither particularly resonates nor spoils anything for me. It’s one lens through which to see the book, but to me Misery is deeper when you look at what’s right there on the surface.
I see Annie Wilkes as a reader, Paul as a writer, and Misery as a story about storytelling. It’s a gender-flipped update of the frame story of the Arabian Nights, with Paul as Scheherazade trapped in the castle, desperately spinning out his story to stay alive one more night, and Annie as the murderous sultan who has killed many times before, and will kill again if the story doesn’t satisfy her.
If Annie was just the writer’s nightmare of a stalker fan, she wouldn’t be half as interesting. But she’s also a good reader. When Paul initially tries to placate her by half-assing Misery’s return, Annie rightly points out that it’s an unsatisfying cheat and makes him rewrite it. She doesn’t just want Misery back; she wants Misery back in a way that’s artistically satisfying and believable. And that demand, in addition to Paul desperately needing an escape, leads him to do something he never managed to do on his own: write a Misery book that’s not only heartfelt, but actually good on its own overheated terms.
Before Paul crashed his car (while celebrating Misery’s death) and got trapped by Annie, he felt trapped by his own career. He was contemptuous of his books, his fans, and himself, but went on writing stories he didn’t value and didn’t enjoy writing. Then he took a break to write a great literary novel… which seems like it was also bad, just in a different way. The Misery books were written out of greed and to satisfy readers whom Paul held in contempt, and the literary novel was written out of ego and to impress critics. Neither were written because they needed to be written – because the story demanded to be told.
But Misery’s Return was. Paul had to satisfy Annie to save himself, which put him in the odd position of writing for someone he feared and hated. But fear and hate are powerful emotions, more likely to produce vital work than contempt or greed. And Paul ended up writing the book much more for himself than for Annie. In writing it, he rediscovered the purity of writing a story simply to tell a story– writing as escape and joy. It’s a sort of addiction, but a positive one: it kills pain as well as Novril, but revitalizes rather than numbs. At the end of the day, rather than fewer pills, there’s more pages.
The climax is a wonderfully well-constructed machine of irony and fitting punishment: Annie never gets to find out what happens at the end of the book – the worst possible punishment for the worst/best fan – is forced to watch the destruction of the book she helped create in the same way she forced Paul to burn his literary novel, and is literally brought down by a typewriter and manuscript pages. But Paul has safely hidden away the real manuscript, which he couldn’t bear to sacrifice.
In the very end, he’s taking another stab at a literary novel, not another Misery novel. The hero is a young New Yorker named Eddie Desmond – some relation of a young New Yorker named Eddie Dean? It seems like a positive resonance, anyway, especially since he’s encountering an odd furry creature. It’s too soon to tell if the book will be any good. But he’s fallen through the hole in the page, writing to tell the story, and that’s the important thing.
The “hole in the page” is a lovely expression of writing at its best, when it flows and you’re writing to find out for yourself what happens next. I tend to re-read the book when I’m at a really low point in my life, and I find it very inspirational. Especially because King really did end up writing as a refuge from the pain of injuries very similar to Paul’s, after he wrote Misery. So it was fiction, but it was fiction that was also the nearly-literal truth.
It’s also comforting in a “at least it’s not me” way. No matter how much my life sucks, at least I’m not being held hostage by a murderous fan with an axe and forced to write on smudgy paper on a typewriter whose keys kept falling off. But also, it points out that no matter how much my life sucks, I can still go in search of that hole in the page. It won’t fix my life, but if the choice is between staring blankly into space while my life is falling apart, or writing while my life is falling apart, I know which I’d rather do.
A lot of King novels are great but have very striking flaws. Misery isn’t one of them. It’s a practically perfect novel, an extremely well-plotted and thematically coherent exercise in sustained tension, long enough to be meaty but without flab, featuring multiple great set pieces, a hugely satisfying climax followed by just enough “what happened afterward,” a pair of compelling characters who easily carry the novel all by themselves, excellent black humor, and a great exploration of the power of story – for better and for worse. I could do without a couple of the gross-outs, but for one thing I’m not sure those are actual flaws rather than just elements I dislike, and for another they are short and easy to skip.
It’s a technical marvel that’s well worth studying but is also just plain fun to read. I’m sure some readers find it too brutal/intense to be fun, but to me Paul’s basic predicament – write a new romance novel resurrecting the heroine he gleefully killed off, or his psychotic number one fan will feed him to the pig she named after that same heroine – provides a low-level but constant current of dark hilarity. I often find myself griping about books that don’t follow through on their premise. Misery 100% follows through on its premise.
King has said that in retrospect, he sees Misery as a metaphor for addiction (beyond the fact that Paul is literally addicted to painkillers) and that Annie Wilkes represents the drug/the power of addiction. I can see that interpretation, but it neither particularly resonates nor spoils anything for me. It’s one lens through which to see the book, but to me Misery is deeper when you look at what’s right there on the surface.
I see Annie Wilkes as a reader, Paul as a writer, and Misery as a story about storytelling. It’s a gender-flipped update of the frame story of the Arabian Nights, with Paul as Scheherazade trapped in the castle, desperately spinning out his story to stay alive one more night, and Annie as the murderous sultan who has killed many times before, and will kill again if the story doesn’t satisfy her.
If Annie was just the writer’s nightmare of a stalker fan, she wouldn’t be half as interesting. But she’s also a good reader. When Paul initially tries to placate her by half-assing Misery’s return, Annie rightly points out that it’s an unsatisfying cheat and makes him rewrite it. She doesn’t just want Misery back; she wants Misery back in a way that’s artistically satisfying and believable. And that demand, in addition to Paul desperately needing an escape, leads him to do something he never managed to do on his own: write a Misery book that’s not only heartfelt, but actually good on its own overheated terms.
Before Paul crashed his car (while celebrating Misery’s death) and got trapped by Annie, he felt trapped by his own career. He was contemptuous of his books, his fans, and himself, but went on writing stories he didn’t value and didn’t enjoy writing. Then he took a break to write a great literary novel… which seems like it was also bad, just in a different way. The Misery books were written out of greed and to satisfy readers whom Paul held in contempt, and the literary novel was written out of ego and to impress critics. Neither were written because they needed to be written – because the story demanded to be told.
But Misery’s Return was. Paul had to satisfy Annie to save himself, which put him in the odd position of writing for someone he feared and hated. But fear and hate are powerful emotions, more likely to produce vital work than contempt or greed. And Paul ended up writing the book much more for himself than for Annie. In writing it, he rediscovered the purity of writing a story simply to tell a story– writing as escape and joy. It’s a sort of addiction, but a positive one: it kills pain as well as Novril, but revitalizes rather than numbs. At the end of the day, rather than fewer pills, there’s more pages.
The climax is a wonderfully well-constructed machine of irony and fitting punishment: Annie never gets to find out what happens at the end of the book – the worst possible punishment for the worst/best fan – is forced to watch the destruction of the book she helped create in the same way she forced Paul to burn his literary novel, and is literally brought down by a typewriter and manuscript pages. But Paul has safely hidden away the real manuscript, which he couldn’t bear to sacrifice.
In the very end, he’s taking another stab at a literary novel, not another Misery novel. The hero is a young New Yorker named Eddie Desmond – some relation of a young New Yorker named Eddie Dean? It seems like a positive resonance, anyway, especially since he’s encountering an odd furry creature. It’s too soon to tell if the book will be any good. But he’s fallen through the hole in the page, writing to tell the story, and that’s the important thing.
The “hole in the page” is a lovely expression of writing at its best, when it flows and you’re writing to find out for yourself what happens next. I tend to re-read the book when I’m at a really low point in my life, and I find it very inspirational. Especially because King really did end up writing as a refuge from the pain of injuries very similar to Paul’s, after he wrote Misery. So it was fiction, but it was fiction that was also the nearly-literal truth.
It’s also comforting in a “at least it’s not me” way. No matter how much my life sucks, at least I’m not being held hostage by a murderous fan with an axe and forced to write on smudgy paper on a typewriter whose keys kept falling off. But also, it points out that no matter how much my life sucks, I can still go in search of that hole in the page. It won’t fix my life, but if the choice is between staring blankly into space while my life is falling apart, or writing while my life is falling apart, I know which I’d rather do.
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fear and hate are powerful emotions, more likely to produce vital work than contempt or greed. --Yes.
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Of course, there's an entire subtype of literature based around stupid tricks like writing a novel without the letter e, e.g. this one that I've heard of, Gadsby. NOT TO SAY THAT I WOULD WANT TO BE FORCED TO DO IT.
(I've never read it, but I heard of it in connection with IF and Oulipo and ludic fiction and...stuff??)
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Have you seen the film? It's also excellent.
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Such perfect, nail-biting suspense, and one of the greatest evocations of the feel of writing--the frustrations (is there anyone who reads this who loses a key off their keyboard and doesn't immediately think of poor Paul?) but, despite its darkness, mostly the joys. I started my wife out on this as her first King novel and she got really hooked.
Also, Misery Chastain is a legitimately great old school romance heroine name.
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One of my favorite things is that the Misery books are totally convincing as a specific type of old school romance, despite that being one of the few genres King has never written. The doting housekeeper! The lavish hair and eye descriptions! The careful thought given to the name of the baby!
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IIRC Misery was supposed to be a Bachman book, right? It’s always felt more like King except possibly for being a shorter, more streamlined book than some of the others he put out around that time (have just checked and it came out in the same year as Eyes of the Dragon, Drawing Of the Three and Tommyknockers, which, well, three out of four hits is pretty impressive!). I love Annie’s reaction to his first Misery resurrection, and how the second attempt works much better and the story takes him over.
I liked the film but have never felt the urge to rewatch it. Wiki informs me there are two theatrical adaptations and a musical...
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That is mind-boggling if he wrote all those books at around the same time! Misery and Drawing of the Three are two of my all-time favorites of his... and The Tommyknockers put me off him for something like ten years. (I haven't yet read Eyes of the Dragon.
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I have also just found out he has a new book - The Outsider out tomorrow.
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I have never read Dreamcatchers and never intend to. Tommyknockers reads like it was written on a bender. I remember it as starting out fairly well, then dissolving into total incoherence. There's a flying Coke machine that attacks people... hmm... talk about a message from your subconscious!
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https://web.archive.org/web/20170201102343/https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5653/stephen-king-the-art-of-fiction-no-189-stephen-king
Once in a while, something will declare itself so obviously that it’s inescapable. 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.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/stephen-king-the-rolling-stone-interview-20141031
But the books start to show it after a while. Misery is a book about cocaine. Annie Wilkes is cocaine. She was my number-one fan.
He's emphasizing both sides of it: the lure (Annie does get Paul to write, she spurs him on) and the downside (she's literally going to kill him, like drugs were probably literally going to kill King before he quit). It's not exactly metaphorical. I know people who think of Annie as Paul's muse! which she kind of is. But she'll destroy him.
I'm a little *headtilt* at how easily you dismiss the connection to addiction here, but then again I think Misery isn't "just" a book about addiction, or quitting, or writer's block, or writing, or bipolar depression, which Annie Wilkes clearly has. It's all of those things, in one package, which is what makes it so interesting and well-done. I don't think it's quite as bootstrappy, though. This review talks about how literally painful it was for King to write after his accident, and how his wife basically fixed up a space for him and parked him there and left him to it. There are lots of people who actually can't write for whatever reason while their lives are falling apart, and I don't think the book is about choice quite the way you make it sound. Nobody would have faulted King if he had just produced nothing on some of the days he sat there in that space, and in fact he wasn't able to just choose to do it. It took time and perseverance and determination, and also his wife making the space and looking after him, and him having the space and time and security to recover and the people in his life not making any other demands on him. His wife knew he had to sit there, he had to write, or he'd just be miserable. So she helped make it happen.
For me Misery isn't about the hole in the page so much as the gotta. I gotta know will she live. I gotta know will he catch the shitheel who killed his father. I gotta know if she finds out her best friend’s screwing her husband. The gotta. Nasty as a hand-job in a sleazy bar, fine as a fuck from the world’s most talented call-girl. Oh boy it was bad and oh boy it was good and oh boy in the end it didn’t matter how rude it was or how crude it was because in the end it was just like the Jacksons said on that record — don’t stop til you get enough. The gotta is the compulsion of writing, and reading, and addiction, and Misery is the place where they all intersect.
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