WeHa Book Club

I’m still relatively new to reading at such a rapid pace. I finished seven novels in 2023, twenty-six in 2024, sixty last year and am on pace for sixty again this year. Naturally, this leads to a pretty wide variety of authors and genres, which is great! It keeps things from getting stale.

With that said, a return to Steven King feels like a warm (albeit terrifying) blanket. I almost forget just how prolific he is whenever I take a break from his work, but it doesn’t take long to remember. King is simply the best writer we’ve got. Subjective, of course, but I’m yet to find anyone who comes close. You’d be hard-pressed to find a single book better than his best and if you do, there’s no way that same author has been writing at that level for 5+ decades. The quality and volume are unmatched.

After completing The Dark Tower series last December, I decided to step away for a little while. I did read King Sorrow by King’s son, Joe Hill, which scratched the itch a bit, but was, of course, not the same. Misery marked my return to King, as well as my final first-read of one of his true ‘classics’.

Plainly put, I loved it.

Narrow in scope, Misery primarily focuses on two characters:  Paul, a writer of novels, and his obsessive, psychotic #1 fan, Annie Wilkes. The writer wakes up in a bed after sustaining severe injuries in a car accident and his #1 fan – a former RN – nurses him back to health. But of course, as this is a King novel, horror ensues.

While not quite reaching the heights of some of my all-time favorite King novels like Pet Semetary, The Wizard and the Glass, and 11/22/63, it landed among that next tier of King greats, including The Stand, IT, Carrie, and Salem’s Lot.

Annie Wilkes is one of the most haunting characters I’ve encountered in all of my reading. She’s not a big scary sewer-clown with fangs that snatches children. She’s real. People like her exist. And that level of unrelenting drive, combined with severe paranoia and a sociopathic willingness to be violent when corned, created a smothering, seemingly inescapable force that I often found uncomfortable to read about.

I was happy to be done with her by the end of the story and yet I’m not sure I’ll ever be done with her. She’s just with me now. Or, at least, the possibility of her. It doesn’t hurt that Kathy Bates delivered such a memorable portrayal in the movie version – one of King’ s absolute best silver-screen adaptations. This one is going to stick with me for a long time. And isn’t that the ultimate test for how good a story really is? Its lasting effect?

Must-read. Fantastic. Blah blah blah. Stephen King is the G.O.A.T.

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Misery by Stephen King