With mounting anxiety, Paul realizes that he can't use his legs and that he's hooked on pain-killers, completely cut off from civilization and wholly dependent on this rather peculiar woman, who, to punish him for the language in ''Fast Cars,'' makes him wash down his pills with the soapy water she's just used to clean his room, and then forces him to burn his only copy of the manuscript.īit by bit, he comes to understand that Annie Wilkes is not only peculiar but ''dangerously crazy.'' He will have to write a new Misery book just to save his life. Now this situation might seem to have the makings of a comedy, but in Stephen King's hands, it isn't the least bit funny. She wants Paul to get well and write a book bringing Misery back to life. She's extremely upset about the death of Misery Chastain, the paperback account of which she's just finished reading. It's confusing and the language is profane. She doesn't like ''Fast Cars,'' the manuscript of which she found in his traveling bag. She found him in his wreck, recognized him and brought him home to her remote farmhouse. The woman introduces herself as Annie Wilkes, the No. He is being nursed by a large blank-gazed woman, who feeds him drugs periodically to kill the pain. His legs are smashed and screaming with pain. Now he is in bed in a farmhouse somewhere. He had gotten high on champagne, gone driving in a Colorado snowstorm, skidded on a mountainside, and flipped his car. What had happened, it gradually dawns on Paul, is that he had been out celebrating the completion of a ''good'' novel, ''Fast Cars'' - having two years earlier put an end to his best-selling Misery series by killing off its heroine, Misery Chastain. Something very bad had happened to him but he was still alive.'' He smoked too much (or had before all this, whatever 'all this' was). In the opening pages of ''Misery,'' the protagonist wakes up from a coma in excruciating pain and tries to take stock: ''He was Paul Sheldon, who wrote novels of two kinds, good ones and best-sellers.
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