Misery: King Sticks The Landing...For Once
I reread this Stephen King classic to prepare to watch an upcoming productions, and I was reminded of what I love about Stephen King...and what I don't.
Stephen King is an idea guy. He comes up with a premise for a book that will absolutely intrigue me and I have to start reading. The openings of his book are usually captivating, the prose is cinematic, and he build psychological tension like no other. And then, more often than not, he ends up shitting the bed.
I don't know why, but so often when I'm reading a King book, I go in ready to surrender to this world, and I'm loving the build, but then one by one he'll start making decisions that confuse or annoy me. I'm a completionist so I have to finish ready, but rather than being satiated I find myself frustrated with the denouement.
Don't worry, I'm going to get back to Misery in a moment, but first I want to talk about some things I've noticed about his writing.
First, he is very concerned with the body, and all of its products. Not only does he employ violence against his characters that is visceral and involves a lot of emphasis on the body and how it bleeds and bends and breaks, he also includes a lot of fart jokes, ponderances on pooping, people picking their nose, etc. Bodies are messy, even when not in crisis, and this is a hallmark of how he builds his charactersand his world. When Under The Dome was announced, I immediately knew that there would be a scene where someone or something would be cut in half when the dome appears, and sure enough it's on the first couple of pages where some sort of animal (a raccoon, maybe? It's been a while...) is chopped in half by the invisible dome, and a lot of attention is paid to the guts spilling out.
Second, he loves to telegraph future plot points. This is one of his more annoying quirks. He'll often have a character appear and say something, and then the narrator will say something like "If he had know these were the last words he'd ever say, he might have chosen them differently." He does this a lot, especially with character deaths. Sometimes, like in Misery with the young state trooper who discovers Paul at Annie's house before being very violently dispatched by Annie with a wooden cross and a riding lawnmower (see, I told you bodies were messy!), the death happens almost immediately after, but other times, like in one of my favorite King books Duma Key, it will take several chapters. I'm not sure why he does this; there is something about it that feels like anxiety that the reader won't continue, won't finish the story, and so he drops little hooks to keep you from abandoning ship. I'm here for the story, just give me the story! I don't need to have the moments spoiled for me well in advance!
Finally, and probably most relevant to Misery, is how he ends things. There is so much amazing setup, and sometimes it feels like he doesn't know how to close it all up, and so he just panics and starts throwing too many big things at the canvas, and they all end up sticking. "The Mist" is a perfect example: the rolling in of the fog is so mysterious and feels almost supernatural. The way different characters react to the circumstances and to each other is so relatable. And then suddenly, out of all of this psychological turmoil, we get tentacle monsters and giant fleshy wasps like something out of a schlocky 1950s B-movie.
And that is one of the reasons why I love Misery: King actually manages to stick the landing.
Annie Wilkes isn't just Paul Sheldon's number one fan and his captor, she is also an embodiment of how he feels about the Misery books he's written. He had killed off his popular romance character Misery Chastain and hoped to leave her behind in favor of writing "real books" like the manuscript he had just completed before his accident. Annie is big and flabby and sometimes slow, the way many people feel that "trash" fiction will make your mind. She's also strong and easily overpowers him the way that Misery has taken over his life with her success and throngs of adoring fans. Part of what Paul is wrestling with as he writes Misery's Return is about what it means to be a writer of popular fiction: does it have the same kind of value that literary, "serious" fiction has? As he works, he comes to realize that it does; when he finally confronts Annie and sets the manuscript on fire, allowing him to finally kill her, the narration mentions that he had hidden the real manuscript under the bed. In the final scenes, Misery's Return is the book he is celebrating with his agent.
The young trooper had to die after discovering Paul, and all of the other random authority figures had to be rebuffed long enough for Paul to triumph on his own, because otherwise it would have been a cheat just as glaring as Rocket Man who never got out of the cacadoodie car! Annie represents the hold that Misery Chastain has over him, and how much he hates and fears it, what it means about him as a writer. He needs to conquer that himself, without outside help, if he is going to survive either physically or as a creative.
King also cleverly uses Paul's "Can you?" writing trick in how it crafts the ending. While working out the plot of Misery's Return, Paul talks about crafting the plot by asking, "Can you?" Can you explain how Misery was buried alive without the audience calling bullshit? Can you include a certain plot point in a way that is shocking or surprising without being unbelievable? After Paul believes that he has killed Annie in the spare bedroom, he is able to throw a knick-knack through a living room window to alert some state police that have just arrived to his presence. When they break in to secure the scene, they tell him that Annie is nowhere to be found.
This sets up Paul's paranoia for the closing segment, as he sees Annie everywhere. However, the narration also reveals that the police did find Annie's body. She had managed to climb out of the window and make it to the barn (and grab her trusty chainsaw!) before succumbing to her injuries. Allowing Annie to live after the climactic battle would have pushed the readers credulity too far, so instead we get the best of both worlds: Paul is faced with the nightmare scenario that maybe Annie really is this unkillable force, like the enigmatic bee goddess from Misery's Return, even if that is eventually proven to be untrue, but we also get the satisfaction of seeing the villain get their just desserts and Paul get his well-deserved vengeance.
And Paul's lingering paranoia is also somehow perfect. If Annie was the representation of his shame about being a popular author, and he overcame those feelings by writing Misery's Return, these visions of Annie haunting him could represent any lingering doubts that he has, no longer a physical presence but echoes of a voice in his mind telling him that this work isn't good enough or worthy enough. The real threat is gone, but he will always have those nagging suspicions that maybe the worst of what people say about him and his profession are true.
There are very few books where I feel like King gives us a satisfying conclusion; even if I generally like it, there are always pieces that feel slightly out of place or mishandled. Misery is one of the times that I think he absolutely gets it right. And the rest of the narrative is pretty skillfully handled as well. I think the change to the hobbling scene for the movie was more effective for the cinematic interpretation - horror is filled with scenes of dismemberment using various tools, but that scene with the sledgehammer is ingrained in my psyche forever! I think Annie chopping off his foot with an ax and then cauterizing the wound with a blowtorch works extremely well in the book, but to depict it visually might have pushed the film into the realm of camp. Sometimes different choices are needed for different mediums.
Here is a video I did a couple of years ago talking about how I feel about Stephen King, as well as my top 5 King books. Spoiler alert: Misery is NOT on the list! It absolutely would have made the top 10 if I had done that, but there are 5 other fantastic choices in this video!
Comments