Misery: A Novel

🌟 Editor’s Pick — Why It Belongs on Your Shelf

Stephen King distills terror to its most intimate scale, crafting a two-hander in which bestselling novelist Paul Sheldon is rescued and then imprisoned by his “number-one fan,” Annie Wilkes, so that writing turns from vocation into a survival ritual and the friction between reader demands, artistic autonomy, and the market becomes a relentless engine of suspense that needs no supernatural crutch to feel harrowingly real. First published by Viking in 1987, Misery went on to share the inaugural Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel, and its 1990 film adaptation—directed by Rob Reiner—cemented the story’s cultural legacy when Kathy Bates won the Academy Award for Best Actress for embodying Annie’s terrifying devotion. King has also said outright that “Annie Wilkes is cocaine,” a confession that reframes the novel’s captivity and dependency as a ferocious metaphor for addiction and the perils of fame, which is precisely why this lean, propulsive classic still reads like a pressure cooker of empathy, obsession, and willpower.