By Nikhil Tindale

TW: Violence, substance abuse

Reading Misery, by Stephen King, is an experience akin to climbing through an intestinal tract. The author’s intestine to be exact. It is an absolutely horrific read that I thoroughly enjoyed. It’s a page turner certainly. I found myself up late at night flipping through page after page but this motivation was largely from the need to figure out how it all unfolded. I’ve had experience with King’s work before (Specifically his 1978 novel “The Stand”) and I’d found it alright. He’s a great writer of dialogue and much like Zadie Smith he has an excellent grasp of voice, except unlike Smith, I found his acerbic writing style to wear on me by the middle of the book. Ultimately a 7/10. I liked some ideas in “The Stand” but generally found it lacking the unique qualities that genre-fiction kind of needs. Misery was not like this. I was never bored while reading Misery. The book opens with a harrowing description of a resuscitation due to overdose written with trance-like prose that will persist later into the book. Then slowly the reader gains clarity, awakes from the dream, and realises what is actually happening. The ‘what’ that is happening is bad. It’s very bad. I’ll give a brief summary: Writer Paul Sheldon finishes his manuscript and decides to go out for a drive during a snowstorm while inebriated. Paul Sheldon’s car inevitably crashes, crippling his legs beyond repair. Luckily, he is saved by a nurse. Unfortunately this nurse is Annie Wilkes – a severely Bipolar sociopath who promptly locks him in her guest room, addicts him to the fictional codeine-based pain reliever Novril, and proceeds to torture Paulie. This is, of course, a very engaging opening in the way a public hanging is engaging. You may wonder why King would write this. Well, during this period King was under a, shall we say, Bowie level drug addiction and struggling. Annie Wilkes is his addiction personified and she is terrifying. Annie lapses between sullen nothing, motherly care and violent outbursts. This is an extremely bad combination if you happen to be a crippled man with no form of escape entirely at her mercy. King does not hold back on descriptions of Annie’s violence. It’s hard to imagine that something so grotesque was ever a best seller and yet it was. I attribute this to one quality. It’s very, very difficult to put down. A page turner if there ever was one and so much narrative momentum over the course of 500 pages. It’s a captivating read, but I feel let down a little by the ending. There are two endings and one is extremely disquieting and poignant (I won’t explain because of spoilers). Then there is the second, which is a lot happier and yet let me down in a way. It’s hard to explain. If you want to make yourself physically ill and unable to stop reading I would highly recommend this book.