Hello everyone, welcome to the Stephen King cast, one man's musings on the works of Stephen King.

Each week I will review one entry in the bibliography of Stephen King and the chronological order of publication.

And this week I'm reviewing 1987's classic nail-biting thriller whose antagonist is just as chilling as any of King's iconic monsters.

A lean, mean novel clocking in in just over 300 pages that reads like a two-person play,

so it shouldn't come as a surprise that it later was adapted as a play,

but not before its infamous cinematic adaptation whose performance by Kathy Bates earned a well-deserved Academy Award,

a novel that's about the thrilling battle of wills between

the victim and the victimizer and author's worst nightmare come true and a therapeutic exercise

of an author who took the opportunity to exercise very real demons. Of course, I'm talking about

1987's misery. As I'm going to get into throughout the episode,

misery is King's opportunity to examine the pitfalls of celebrity,

the insatiable demands of an artist's fans,

and addiction in its many forms.

The novel itself would have been a Bachman book

had King's pseudonym not been made public at that point.

He wrote it as a response to the harsh backlash that he received from the publication of Eyes of the Dragon

when his fans demanded that he stick to horror.

The fantasy stuff they made clear would not fly.

The novel, as I stated earlier, is later made famous by Kathy Bates, whose performance as Annie Wilkes is just as terrifying as Jack Nicholson's turn as Jack Torns.

I'm going to go into a lot more detail next week in the movie review, but for now, let me just say that Annie Wilkes is an incredible villain with an equally incredible performance by Kathy Bates.

Now, the novel itself, it's just, it's a great stripped down personal novel.

The last novel was a fantasy, and the one before that was the ultimate statement on horror,

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