Misery - Softcover

STEPHEN KING

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0450417395 ISBN 13: 9780450417399

Publisher: NEW ENGLISH LIBRARY, HODDER AND STOUGHTON, 1988

Synopsis

Item is new aside from name inside on 1st page.

About this title

Review:

In Misery (1987), as in The Shining (1977), a writer is trapped in an evil house during a Colorado winter. Each novel bristles with claustrophobia, stinging insects, and the threat of a lethal explosion. Each is about a writer faced with the dominating monster of his unpredictable muse.

Paul Sheldon, the hero of Misery, sees himself as a caged parrot who must return to Africa in order to be free. Thus, in the novel within a novel, the romance novel that his mad captor-nurse, Annie Wilkes, forces him to write, he goes to Africa--a mysterious continent that evokes for him the frightening, implacable solidity of a woman's (Annie's) body. The manuscript fragments he produces tell of a great Bee Goddess, an African queen reminiscent of H. Rider Haggard's She.

He hates her, he fears her, he wants to kill her; but all the same he needs her power. Annie Wilkes literally breathes life into him.

Misery touches on several large themes: the state of possession by an evil being, the idea that art is an act in which the artist willingly becomes captive, the tortured condition of being a writer, and the fears attendant to becoming a "brand-name" bestselling author with legions of zealous fans. And yet it's a tight, highly resonant echo chamber of a book--one of King's shortest, and best novels ever. --Fiona Webster

About the Author:

Stephen King is the bestselling author of more than thirty books of which the most recent are THE GIRL WHO LOVED TOM GORDON, HEARTS IN ATLANTIS and his non-fiction book ON WRITING. He lives with his wife, the novelist Tabitha King, in Bangor, Maine.

About this edition

• Publisher: NEW ENGLISH LIBRARY, HODDER AND STOUGHTON
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0450417395
• ISBN 13: 9780450417399
• Binding: Paperback