Misery is a novel written by the American author Stephen King. The book was published June 8, 1987 and was turned into a full length film. The book is about a author named Paul Sheldon who gets in a car crashed and brought back to health by his biggest fan Annie Wilkes.

The Book starts off with Paul crashing his car on a  icy road in Colorado. Annie Wilkes finds his car and brings him back to her house in a secluded part of town. Paul broke his hip and both his legs so he is not able to walk and it will take him a while to get back to full health. Paul was in Colorado working on his newest book. His best selling series Misery is Annie’s favorite series of all time and when she discoveries that Paul killed off her favorite character she is furious. She attacks him and forces him to write her the Return of Misery and have it be the only physical copy to exist. But first he must destroy his new book that he had been working on all year. He burns the book and gets started on “Misery’s Return”.  As Paul starts working on the new book you can clearly see that Annie is crazy. She attacks Paul over and over again throughout the book. Paul try’s  many escape attempts but they all fail and when he finally gets caught trying to escape he suffers something worse than death. When Annie catches Paul trying to escape she goes through with Something called the “Hobbling”. The hobbling is when you take a person and chop there foot off with an axe hobbling them hence the name. Paul can no long try to escape and is forced to finish his new book for Annie. When the police start getting suspicious of Annie  and investigate to see if she knows were Paul is. Will the police find Paul or will he stay with Annie forever?

I absolutely loved this book. It was full of fear and anger which gave all the characters a great personality. One scene in the book Annie Paul finds a book called “Memory Lane” and it has a full timeline of Annie’s life. She is a nurse who killed more than ten people throughout her life some including the elderly and even new born babies. When Paul finds this he is full of fear and asks himself “How many people did she kill?” (P. 221) You ask yourself this question and wonder why did this woman kill so many people? The same reason she has held Paul captive for four months, because she is crazy and always has been crazy. Her character is the definition of crazy.

The way the author wrote this book is from the third person perspective, which is an odd form for this type of book. If it was written in first person than it would change the way the characters were seen. If it was written from Paul’s perspective Annie would be even more terrifying. The reader would feel what Paul was feeling hear what he was thinking about Annie. The reader never hears what is going in in Paul or Annie’s head, just what they speak and act. This book would be even better if it was written from a first person Perspective.

One final thing that made “Misery” so good was the setting. The way the author describes the scenery of Colorado is fantastic. The way the roads and house are written about let the reader know where the story is taking place and let you imagine the layout of Annie’s house the the road Paul was driving on, and his infamous crash. If this wasn’t talk about then the reader would have no idea were the book was taking place for the next 320 pages that this novel is.

If I were to rate this book 1-10. 1 being the worst book I have ever read and 10 being the greatest book of all time I would give “Misery” a 7.5 out of 10. Stephen King really puts terror in your body as he makes a perfectly normal woman and turns her in to a crazed lunatic you feel for the main character and try to understand what its like to be in that position. “Misery was a fun read and I definitely reccomend it to anyone who wants a good adrenaline rush form one thriller of a book!