misery loves company
and I love Misery
Last Halloween, I wrote about Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, one of my all-time favorite books that I re-read each spooky season. With three (3!) editions of Paraphrasing in October this year, I wanted to do more chaotic fun spooky Halloween book reports. Each issue this month will feature horror book reviews, all written by an internationally renowned author whose work I have never read: Stephen King.
This week I read Misery, originally published in 1987. This was not only the best of the three King books I read this month - it might be one of my favorite books ever. Definitely one of the most thrilling - I think I devoured 450 pages in less than three days.
Spoilers below.
first, the first paragraph
Released over a decade after Carrie, King has improved much as a writer - he’s more confident and creative as a storyteller.
umber whunnnn
yerrrnnn umber whunnnn
fayunnnn
These sounds: even in the haze.
But sometimes the sounds — like the pain — faded, and then there was only the haze. He remembered darkness: solid darkness had come before the haze. Did that mean he was making progress? Let there be light (even of the hazy variety), and the light was good, and so on and so on? Had those sounds existed in the darkness? He didn’t know the answers to any of these questions. Did it make sense to ask them? He didn’t know the answer to that one, either.
I love books that make readers work to figure out what is going on, to try and solve a mystery along with the characters (for a more contemporary version of this, I highly recommend The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton).
Unlike Carrie and Salem’s Lot, King chooses to skip any exposition and deposit readers directly into the action. We immediately know there is confusion, pain, haze, darkness; existentialism is an ongoing theme throughout the book.
then, the plot
Writer Paul Sheldon awakens in a drug-filled fog, motionless in a strange bed, his legs broken and wracked with pain. The house he finds himself in belongs to retired nurse Annie Wilkes, who happened to come upon Paul’s wrecked car during a Colorado snowstorm and has taken care of him these last few weeks.
Annie is Paul’s “number one fan” (umber whunnn fayunnn), especially loving his more “commercial” saccharine chronicles of Victorian era heroine Misery Chastain; but she won’t take him to a hospital, manipulates Paul using pain meds (which he is now addicted to), and has strange outbursts and bouts of catatonia. When she finds out Paul (oops!) happily killed off Misery in his latest book, she brings him a typewriter and asks him to bring her back, to write a new Misery book.
The horrific power struggle and torture that enfolds kept me on the edge of my seat.
a fun, omnipresent villain
There is no ensemble of townsfolk or high school students in Misery: there is Paul, and there is Annie. As a reader, we are limited to Paul’s interior monologue and thought process - we only know what he knows, and we remain trapped in the house and his declining psyche for the entirety of the tale.
There was a feeling about her of clots and roadblocks rather than welcoming orifices or even open spaces, areas of hiatus. Most of all she gave him a disturbing sense of solidity, as if she might not have any blood vessels or even internal organs; as if she might be only solid Annie Wilkes from side to side and top to bottom.
And yet, the dynamic between these two characters - the constant unpredictability of Annie’s brand of crazy, the cresting and fading of Paul’s hope for escape, even how Annie’s strange vocabulary begins to creep into Paul’s thoughts and words - makes this my favorite King work to date. I even walked away with a bit of empathy for Annie, the mark of a well-executed villain. I am tempted to subject myself to the film just to see the incomparable Kathy Bates take on Annie:
“I’m not going to kill you, Paul. ” She paused. “ At least, not if I have just a little luck. I should kill you — I know that — but I’m crazy, right? And crazy people often don’t look after their best interests, do they?”
smell and taste the horror
King is a master at horrific visuals, but the way this book engaged other senses left me literally covering my mouth and gagging. I want to share these selected passages as excellent examples of engaging readers’ smell and taste (an intimidating, difficult feat!), but read below at your own peril -
“Breathe, goddam you!” the unseen voice shrieked, and he thought I will, anything, please just don’t do that anymore, don’t infect me anymore, and he tried, but before he could really get started her lips were clamped over his again, lips as dry and dead as strips of salted leather, and she raped him full of her air again.
Paul screamed as fire splashed over the raw and bleeding stump. Smoke drifted up. It smelled sweet. He and his first wife had honeymooned on Maui. There had been a luau. This smell reminded him of the smell of the pig when they brought it out of the pit where it had cooked all day. The pig had been on a stick, sagging, black, falling apart. The pain was screaming. He was screaming.
final thoughts - maybe writing was the misery business all along
In this book, the Kinder egg chocolate is Paul Sheldon’s kidnapping and torture, and the toy inside is…writing. At its core, Misery is about the torture and escapism of writing stories and feeling trapped in a particular genre (oh and also cocaine addiction). Paul’s stream of consciousness references both the divine highs and low lows of dreaming up fiction that any writer can relate to: having an idea vs. needing to have an idea, dealing with roadblocks, and the desire to be taken “seriously” as an artist.
Perhaps through Paul, King can allow himself to reveal truths about his raison d’etre. I love the concept of the writer playing Scheherazade to themselves:
“Paul Sheldon turned out to be a good deal more resourceful than I initially thought, and his efforts to play Scheherazade 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.”
To everyone who has followed along all month with these chaotic book reviews - thank you. Reading these books and writing about them in a way that makes sense for my brain has been a bright spot in a dark month. If nothing else, I hope you come away with inspiration to step outside your reading comfort zone and try something new.
Happy Halloween!
good things on the internet
This rayne fisher-quann essay against narrativizing that I can’t stop thinking about 📝
Lambrini Girls Live on KEXP, I aspire to be as cool as them 🤘
Practical Magic has a 25% on Rotten Tomatoes, criminal 🍅
currently reading
A Paradise of Small Houses: The Evolution, Devolution, and Potential Rebirth of Urban Housing by Max Podemski: I love books by urban planners! This history of iconic missing middle housing throughout the US provides a potential path out of our current housing crisis.
The Beauty and Audacity of Black Detroit, two poems by Brittany Rogers (Electric Lit)
A Rupture in Time by Sarah Aziza (The Baffler): “Genocide, so wild and ruthless it mutilates even the clock. In the midst of death, an hour might be the measure of a human’s capacity for pain. How much does one minute weigh to the mother of a hemorrhaging child? To the amputee, at what speed does an hour pass on the first day without your limb? Who can ever know the size of Hind Rejab’s final night?”
this week’s jam
photo of my cats
Definitely adding this to my list!