The book worm chronicles: Stephen King’s Misery
The third book I recommend for is “Misery” By Stephen King. He captures Obessive behavior a person has towards an animate object or another person.
Paul Sheldon is the main character in the book. Sheldon is a bestselling novelist and famous author of a series of Victorian romance novels featuring the character Misery Chastain. After finishing the manuscript of the unrelated “Fast Cars,” his newest crime novel, at the Hotel Boulderado in Colorado. He is an alcoholic and cannot escape the temptation so rather than going home to New York City, Sheldon has the sudden urge to drive to Los Angeles.
On his way, a snowstorm hits and Sheldon crashes into a snowbank. Annie Wilkes, the second main character, finds Sheldon and rescues him from the car wreck and, even though both his legs are broken, she takes him to her home instead of to a hospital.
Why you ask? Because she is Paul Sheldon’s number-one fan. Going through Sheldon’s stuff, she finds the manuscripts for “Fast Cars” and is not happy with the violence and profanity in the book.
After reading this, we see she is crazy. There is another reason we find out why she is upset with Sheldon. Wilkes is reading about her favorite character Misery Chastain in “Misery’s Child,” the last book of Sheldon’s Misery series.
He kills her favorite character and she is not happy about it. She rages at Sheldon for doing such a thing to the poor Misery Chastain and leaves him alone in her house without water, food or painkillers for over two days.
When she returns with a typewriter and tells him he will destroy “Fast Cars” and write a new book to bring back Misery Chastain or he can die with his book.
From time to time Wilkes goes on errands and in her absence, Sheldon manages to gather the strength to sneak out of his room. He searches the house and finds the phone is dead, he steals a knife from the kitchen, and, while returning back to his room, he finds a scrapbook full of newspaper clippings detailing her life.
Sheldon deduces that Wilkes is a serial killer with 39-dead people to her name, including several babies at a Boulder hospital.
The last magazine clipping is of Wilkes and she is listed as a missing person, which means nobody knows where she – and, meaning they do not know where he is as well.
A state trooper arrives at Wilkes house looking for Sheldon. She of course, denies having ever seen him, but Sheldon sees an opportunity for escape, so he alerts the trooper by throwing an ashtray through the window of his room.
Because of this, she stabs the trooper with a wooden cross and comes back to the room with an intention to kill Sheldon. The only way to survive is for Sheldon to promise to write and finish the book for her.
After finishing the book ,Sheldon burns it in front of her. As she tried to put out the fire, he hits her with the typewriter in the head. But she is not dead ye. As she tried to get Sheldon, he crawls out of the room and locks himself into the bathroom where he passes out from the pain against the door.
By the time he awakes, the police have arrived, and Sheldon finds out Wilkes somehow lived long enough to escape from his room by crawling through the window. She died while trying to get a chainsaw from the barn to kill him.
This book is ahead of its time showing how obsession can make someone go mad by just being without something or someone for a short period of time. Technology is our obsession, can you go without your technology without thinking about it?
