[NOTE: I am not talking about the movie. Don't get me wrong, the movie is pretty great as well, in it's own right, BUT I am talking about the book, which, while it holds the same concept, differs quite a bit. Just something to keep in mind. Even though Kathy Bates is quite an impressive actress.]
I just finished my first re-reading of the book "Misery" by Stephen King.
I loved it the first time and I think I love it even more now.
I am aware that certain people would prefer to argue that books and movies such as this are little more than gruesome horror, that it's just pointless and stupid and sadistic and gross. But what you must understand, what I must make you understand, is that this book in particular is so much MORE than that.
Look; if you are in the midst of reading the book or would like to, stop reading here. I don't want to spoil what is an incredible experience for newcomers. But if you don't want to read the book or already have, then please, join me, spoilers and all.
Now here's the thing; there ARE gruesome bits in it. Yes, I will grant you that. Fine. But this book is not, for instance, The Shining. After reading The Shining I could not walk into my bathroom without checking the bathtub for stray dead people for a couple months. This book is not that. At least, not in the same way.
If this book keeps you up at night, it is not because you're imagining things crawling out from under your bed. It's because this book makes you ask questions. Simple questions, like "How?" as in "How did he survive?" and "Why?" as in "Why was she like that, why did she do that?" In short, this book is fantastic because it is utterly and extraordinarily fascinating.
If you do not know the premise of the book, let me clear that up:
A popular writer (Paul Sheldon), mostly known for his melodramatic, house-wife-pleasing romance novels, a series about a character called Misery Chastain, heads off to Vegas with a new, action-packed manuscript about a car thief. He gets in a car crash, shatters most of his lower body. I mean, his pelvis was broken, both of his legs are just shattered, the whole thing. He is found by a woman called Annie Wilkes who recognizes him as her favourite writer, and rescues him from his car. But instead of taking him to the hospital like a normal person, she takes him home and has him heal in her guest bedroom. ("I'm your number one fan!") Because she's an ex-nurse, she has a lot of medical supplies apparently just kind of lying around her house, such as a painkillers, anesthesia, and needles. It doesn't take long for Paul to realize that he isn't a guest here; he's a prisoner. She's never going to let him leave.
So why is this book so incredible?
Well, there's a few things.
First of all, just consider this; there are two characters in the entire book. I mean, okay, three cops show up near the end, but they're not really characters, just plot devices with about a line of dialogue each. So think of that - most of the book only contains two characters interacting with each other.
Now consider this: only about maybe sixty percent of the book has them interacting. The meat of the book takes place in Paul Sheldon's head. Which makes it sound boring, but oh my god is it ever not. I've never gotten so immersed in a book as I have in Misery. I've never stayed up half the night trying to finish the final quarter of a book like I have with Misery (which is ironic because now I'm sad it's over). Misery is one of those books I read non-stop for hours before I finally realized I may want to actually do some homework.
Misery is the definition of a psychological thriller.
Just imagine it like this: he's trapped in a house with a woman who is clearly insane, someone who has done horrible, awful things to him, the worst of which being cutting off his foot with an axe. He loathes her, despises her, had in fact planned to stick a knife in her throat right before she found it and performed the footectomy.
BUT
He also relies so heavily on her. He relies on her for food, water, for his painkillers, for everything. In the book he often refers to her as the goddess, because she controls whether he lives or dies, whether he suffers or not, everything. He hates her, but there are so many instances in the book that has him crying and pleading with her.
The thing is, Misery is not gruesome horror. There are gruesome parts to it, but that isn't the book. The book is a slow and captivating study of the breaking of Paul Sheldon's mind.
For instance, the book starts with him often attempting to reason with her. He knows she's crazy, but he tries nonetheless. And then she goes and does something so awful and horrible that no matter how many times I read the scene I just can't stand it.
After she discovers he killed off the character Misery Chastain, she makes him burn his book.
Not a paperback copy. No. She forces him to choose between possibly slipping into a coma or burning his one and only manuscript of his unpublished book about the car thief. He burned it. I don't think anyone but writers can understand the sheer, undying agony that is for the soul.
There was the punching him in his shattered knee for complaining about typewriter paper. Then, because he made her angry at some point - I don't recall the exact reason - after making him suffer without giving him his painkillers, she made him drink from a floor bucket full of disgusting water and soap and everything (which sounds not that bad, but it's one of the things that continuously returns in the book - because not only did she cause him intense emotional and physical pain, this is the first instance in the book that really humiliates and dehumanizes him. If Paul Sheldon's mind was made of glass, this would be the first crack). And then, of course, cutting off his foot after she discovered he could leave his room on his own. Cutting off his thumb after he wouldn't tell her how his book ended. These last two were the most important cracks of Paul's mind, which brings me to one of the most fascinating parts of the whole book.
The book isn't in first person, it's in third person, but it's in limited ominscience. Which means we know what Paul's thinking, but no one else. Not Annie, no one. For ninety nine percent of the book we're reading Paul's thoughts and Paul's thoughts only, and by the end of the book they're horribly confused and scared and hopeless and scared and desperate and scared and angry and scared, but they're COHERENT - we are able to understand what he says, what he means, and why he does what he does. But for the one percent that we're not reading Paul's thoughts, for the one scene in which we see it from an outsider's perspective, the cops arrive and find him broken and trembling on the floor of Annie's parlour, and he's turned into an incomprehensible, babbling lunatic. If that scene doesn't get your stomach twisted in knots then I don't know what will. He is so tortured. He is tottering on the edge of insanity and he is clearly losing his balance. That both horrifies me and fills me with an incredible fascination.
There's another scene - right after Annie kills a cop - that really stuck in my head. What she does is she gets Paul and carries him down into her dark, rat-infested cellar. She starts talking about how ungrateful he is. You know, 'All I ever did was rescue you, splint your poor broken legs, feed you, give you medicine, talk you out of a bad book you wrote and convince you to write the best one you EVER wrote.' Paul replies, (in a moment of recklessness - he would usually never talk back to Annie at this point) "You also cut off my f*cking foot!" And she smacks him across the face and starts berating him for using the F word. And it's tiny in comparison, and it's never brought up again, so I was wondering why this scene in particular stuck out to me - after mutilating him and torturing him, why is slapping him something that sticks so strongly to me? - and I think I know why.
The thing about being smacked in the face is that it's just small enough to be petty to bitch about, but just big enough to completely and utterly humiliate you. In a weird roundabout way, being slapped is more dehumanizing than having your foot cut off. Going to all the trouble to amputate his foot the way she did shows that he's worth that. He's worth all that trouble. Obviously it's exercising a wrong sort of control over him - she's playing God, or goddess as he would put it, by, and I quote, "exercising editorial authority over his body" - and it's one of the main things that puts Paul over the edge, has him living in utter fear for the foreseeable future - BUT, and this is a weird and possibly cold-hearted point if you manage to misunderstand me, BUT: This act doesn't send the message that he's not worth anything. It sends the message that she feels the need to diminish how much he IS worth, because she needs to have complete control of her pet writer.
Slapping someone, on the other hand, tells someone that they're just not worth anything. They never had worth, that they're nothing, and they're not even worth any form of effort. And to slap him after him talking about the footectomy shows that she really just doesn't care about him or his pain whatsoever. And then, of course, leaving him helpless in the dark, rat-infested cellar overnight while she hid the body of the cop, was probably the final crack that broke the glass of Paul Sheldon's mind. Again, the pain has him living in tremendous fear, but it's the smaller but more dehumanizing things that really break his mind. I don't think I can tell you how many times the phrase "Now I must rinse" is in the book (a reference to the drinking out of the floor-bucket scene).
Call me sadistic, but that is extremely fascinating.
One other thing I loved about this book, that's possibly less relatable; it describes what it's like to be a writer with incredible accuracy. That makes perfect sense, because obviously the book was written by one, but it's still something where you don't really think about the process until you see it written down somewhere and you go "OH MY GOD THIS IS MY BRAIN". It's clearly a writer's book. It talks about the difference between "getting an idea" and "trying to get an idea", something that I think every writer can relate to. It talks about that sudden stroke of inspiration - he refers to it as the "sweatshop" (the back part of your mind that works really hard to come up with ideas) sending up flares. He talks about that trance that happens when you're writing, where you're somewhere else completely - Paul often uses it to escape Annie's house - he calls it falling through the hole in the paper, and that's accurate too. It's also accurate when the hole sometimes shrinks to the size of a pinhole and you can't tell what's going on within the pages at all - writer's block, basically. And then he talks about how being a writer means remembering every scar you've ever gotten - because, of course, that's where the stories come from - and I thought about it and went "Wow...... it's true." Everything is so true. Not to mention Paul thinking about how, in becoming a writer, he doomed himself to a life of dissection when it comes to books.
Speaking of dissection, there is one thing I love about Stephen King books - he knows how to capture the stream of consciousness. When Paul is panicking in his head, Mr. King writes it with such honesty, and it's just a huge run-on sentence but that makes perfect sense because it's his thoughts, and he's panicking, so it's not polished, or, at some points, even really coherent without some decoding involved. Which is so honest, because who actually has a comprehensible train of thought, especially when thrown into a state of panic?
I would love to talk about symbolism now, but the fact is, I haven't figured it all out yet, and besides it's pretty redundant to what I've already said. If you're willing to have a book club talk with me about Misery, then please do. I would love that.
And if you haven't read it then please, please, do yourself a favour and read Misery. But before you do, try to be open-minded about it. Understand that it's not the freaking Saw movies, it's not meant to be particularly gory or just, y'know... torture-porn. It's not. It's nightmarish for completely different reasons. It is primarily about the terror of being totally at the mercy of someone who exercises none, and it is the story of how an ultra-controlling and psychotic woman drove a once-happy-and-healthy writer to the brink of insanity. There's only one word for it: fascinating. Not to mention that it's brilliantly written. It is so worth the read. I cannot express my adoration. Just arrarararargh. I have no words. Just read it. Absolutely brilliant.
P.S I'd just like to mention, in spite of the note at the beginning of the post, that the book is so so so much better than the movie. Not that the movie wasn't great, because it was, but it didn't capture a lot of what the book was fundamentally about. First of all, Paul Sheldon never loses his nerve in the movie, he never stops trying. He flips Annie off after she "hobbled" him. I suppose it's admirable to have a character with guts, but it misses a lot of the whole point. After Annie "hobbles" Paul, he's scared to even look at her wrong, let alone signal a nice clear "Eff you."
Secondly, the parallels between Paul and the book he's writing, along with all the rest of the psychological defenses that Paul put up, went completely out the window in the movie. It was the stuff like that that made the book so captivating to begin with, and it's kinda disappointing that the movie missed what was such a huge part of the book.
Despite the fact that the screenplay adaptation was less than perfect, and James Caan as Paul Sheldon seemed (to me) less than fabulous, I will happily give them this; Kathy Bates is downright amazing as Annie Wilkes. Fantastic performance on her part. Definitely deserved the Oscar she got for it. And for that reason I would recommend this movie, AFTER having read the book. Seriously though. Read it. You won't regret it.
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