The first time I read Misery it seemed to come in flashes, these lightning shards that stuck with me for decades afterward: jagged black pilings on a beach, signifying unspeakable pain; gray scum sliding across the dirty water in a floor bucket, tipped up to force someone in a bed to drink; a phantom rising from behind a couch, misery risen from the grave. A photo album filled with obituaries, called Memory Lane.
I thought it was good, this novel about a jaded writer of bodice-rippers who gets kidnapped by his Number-One Fan. I could sense its acrid humor, starting with the romance heroine’s name, Misery Chastain (her given name is never explained btw). I remembered that it had perfect timing, hitting you with a shock or an awful hint just when you needed it. But I didn’t revisit it.
I watched the movie and that was terrifying too—Kathy Bates suddenly there in the doorway with the knife!—but film inevitably strips out some of the inner life or psychology you can get in a novel. Then I read this review from Rachel Manija Brown, and I knew I’d have to go back to Misery someday.
Brown says,
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.
...In writing it, he rediscovered the purity of writing a story simply to tell a story– writing as escape and joy.
Paul compares his situation to Scheherezade’s; in the comments, Brown name-drops A Little Princess. I get very cynical about our contemporary obsession with The Power Of Storytelling. I lick my chops whenever we get a story about the way stories can twist us. We tell stories in order to dehumanize one another. We tell stories in order to lie to ourselves. The imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth, etc etc.
But we also tell stories to survive, and nobody can make me feel the power and poignancy of that the way Stephen King does. Brown writes, “I tend to re-read the book when I’m at a really low point in my life, and I find it very inspirational.” Which has its own very dry humor—hey, I used to treat The Descent as a comfort-watch, I got no room to talk—but you can feel it in her memoir, too, that she knows what it’s like to write your way through to the other side of Hell.
Misery is for my money a much better guide to writing than On Writing. On Writing is an interesting memoir but the advice on crafting prose is mostly bad. Misery is about how a made-up story reveals its truths. King talks explicitly about what it means for a story to be “fair,” to respect the reader, even when it’s also wild and cartoony. Then he demonstrates, letting us read an unfair and disrespectful scrap of Misery’s Return and then a fair, shockingly powerful rewrite. He doesn’t talk explicitly about the ways fiction holds truths we can only face sidelong, but he shows us, as Paul’s existential fear and battle against despair emerge in the humid pages of his romance novel.
King writes better than anybody about what it’s like to “fall through the hole in the page,” as a writer or a reader: the compulsiveness, the indefensible pull of what happens next, the abjection and relief and liberation and joy. The mind as an animal escaping a trap; the mind as an animal running through the night.
King has said that Annie Wilkes is cocaine, and yeah, I feel that—the thing you’re desperate to escape, but you don’t know if you can write without her mutilating pressure, I remember. I believed that I couldn’t write without drinking. In order to get sober I had to reach a point where I was willing to quit drinking even if it meant I never wrote again. Instead, in my first year of sobriety I wrote my first book and my first novel, because your imagination lies to you, because we tell ourselves stories that keep us trapped and gnawing on what isn’t food.
Misery is a master class in suspense, and in writing the seemingly-unspeakable experience of pain, and in character. Annie isn’t totally a coherent character. She’s a force, she’s also based on kind of dated ideas about psychiatric conditions, she’s a “goddess” with Michael Myers hints of supernatural omnipresence. She’s “fibrous,” dang, what a frightening way of describing a person’s psyche. She’s childlike. There are moments when Paul glimpses what Annie might have been if she were only as deranged as the rest of us.
Paul is obnoxx, in his way, and the novel is about him getting taught a lesson good and hard, but don’t fall for the Tumblr style discourse where Annie Wilkes is practically the hero, “I support women’s wrongs” and all that. The scenes where Paul discovers his helplessness, and what helplessness does to the psyche, are awful to read, and if you come away thinking he’s “petulant and whiny throughout,” I sort of think maybe you also need to be trapped in a snowbound house with a psychotic representation of your ego.
There’s a moment toward the very end where it seems as though Paul and Annie might somehow be able to join hands and walk together into their crazy future. That was a thrilling moment, a glimpse of everything roiling below the blood-surf of Paul and Annie’s mutual need/hatred. But I’m glad this book isn’t that one. Misery is too grounded to skid into that kind of bonkers, gleeful apocalypse. There are authors who’d want to write about that kind of nuclear romance (Angela Carter could do it, I bet). But Stephen King wants to write about pain, and the writing that somehow gets you through it.
Iranian saddle axe at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, bequest of George C. Stone, 1935. Found via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license.