Misery

Misery

Author: Stephen King

Have you ever felt as if there’s a lot of pressure on you when you’re writing something? You probably have. I’m feeling that pressure right now as I hope not to write a load of rubbish here. With that said, I am at least doing this of my own free will, and there hopefully won’t be any severe consequences should I disappoint. Paul Sheldon, the protagonist of Misery, does not have that luxury.

Paul Sheldon is the author of the highly successful Misery Chastain books, which have developed a huge and obsessive fandom, though he thinks little of the quality of the books. As such, the latest book ended with Misery’s death, and Paul intends on using the funds to write some more ambitious novels. The new novel is finally ready to be published, but a combination of drunk driving and dangerous weather leads Paul to crash his car, destroying his legs. He is recovered from the wreck by Annie Wilkes, who identifies herself as Paul’s Number One Fan, but she has still yet to read the last Misery book. She does this while nursing Paul back to health, and needless to say, she isn’t happy at all when she finishes it, and demands Paul write a new Misery book bringing her back to life – or else.

For most of the book, there are only two characters, Paul and Annie, and the majority of the action takes place in Annie’s guest bedroom, where Paul is being kept prisoner. This makes the novel feel very claustrophobic, giving the reader a sense of what Paul is going through as his world has shrunk following the accident, and there’s little opportunity for the reader to get some reprieve. The solitude causes Paul to start gradually losing his mind, which is reflected in the repetition of several statements or words that Paul remembers vividly and starts to think about more often as his captivity goes on. This could be seen as either his attempt at clutching onto some semblance of familiarity in a surreal situation, or as a breakdown in his coherent thought depending on the situation or the reader’s interpretation of their use.

A big part of the reason why Paul’s situation is so tense is his jailer Annie. She is very temperamental, prone to severe mood swings and seems to suffer from every mental condition in the book, as well as a fair few that have yet to be discovered for good measure. Her unpredictability is her greatest asset, as she will be calm and sickeningly sweet to the point of inducing diabetes in the reader, yet switch to screaming in rage over the most mundane things at the drop of a hat. She acts very childish in some ways, such as losing her temper when her favourite tv show cheats by contradicting the cliffhanger at the end of the previous episode, and using words like cockadoodie as substitutes for swear words, which makes it easy for her to be underestimated when she does things that are more cunning than would be expected of her.

Annie’s behaviour tortures Paul mentally as well as physically. This also has an effect on the reader, as it’s hard to tell before it happens how she’ll respond to Paul’s acts of defiance. There’s no way of knowing whether she’ll laugh it off, not notice, punish Paul immediately or give him enough rope to hang himself with, which helps to crank up the tension further. It gets worse later once Paul discovers the skeletons in Annie’s closet and just how much danger he’s in. At this point, the reader is hooked, desperate to know what’ll happen next. Fittingly enough, the appeal behind cliffhangers and the idea of “How are they going to get out of this one?” is one of the recurring ideas of the book.

Despite having been written in 1987, the concept behind the book, that of the loony fan, is still relevant today. While there were cases at the time of obsessive fans, such as Mark David Chapman’s obsession with The Catcher in the Rye leading him to kill John Lennon, such things still happen today via internet fandoms, though they are generally less serious than these extreme cases. It seems as if some online fandoms are becoming more fanatical, becoming obsessed with the work they’re fans of and working themselves up into a state of mass hysteria and appearing off-putting to others outside their fandoms, with examples including My Little Pony, Five Nights at Freddy’s, Steven Universe, and the current flavour of the month, Undertale. This may be because people want to be noticed and become internet famous, which is harder to do now because everyone and their grandmother’s on the internet. For example, five or six years ago, 100,000 views on Youtube was huge. Today, it’s nothing, and even a million views is small potatoes, which means that being noticed requires drawing attention to oneself, and the more extreme you act, the more attention is drawn to you. There’s also the disconnect that something about the internet means people don’t stop to think about other people’s feelings or how they come across to others, making it easy to be an asshole online. Combine this with fandoms and “Notice Me Senpai” Syndrome, and you get ugliness like the Steven Universe fandom harassing a teenage girl to attempt suicide because she drew one of the show’s fat characters as being thin, which happened a few months ago. Then again, I could be completely wrong about all of this and it’s just me being old and not grasping how these things work because I’m too busy yelling at the youngins to get off my lawn. Anyway, I digress.

Fun fact, telling someone they’re gonna have a bad time is now more likely to be recognised as an Undertale reference than a South Park reference, even though South Park did it first and Undertale was referencing South Park when it used that line.

To conclude, Misery is a very tense book that draws the reader in and takes them prisoner alongside Paul. They will be unable to leave, much like Paul, and the tension is cranked up to the max until the delightfully cathartic climax, where Annie finally gets a taste of her own medicine.

This is where I'd put the Family Guy parody with Brian and Stewie as Paul and Annie, but unfortunately it's not on Youtube, so this picture will have to suffice.