misery
I finished “Misery” by Stephen King and if it says anything, I dropped “Insomnia” to pick up this quicker read. 300 pages instead of 800 feels like a breeze. And my official rating is 3.8/5. Hm, I feel like this is quite a common score recently.
Overall, it was a good read. Perfectly suited for October! It was disturbing, captivating, scary, and told a good story, BUT there was still something about it that I didn’t personally love.
Perhaps it’s simply my outgrowingness of disturbing literature or a book that needs to leave you on the edge of your seat because of its grotesque and goose-pimpley nature. I can’t quite explain why but I just prefer something … more. I also have deep-rooted fears of being put in situations as such, so this could harbor some negativity towards reading and completing a story of this kind.
Either way, however, King is an impeccable writer if you can appreciate painful descriptions and a lengthy plotpoint. Maybe I didn’t really love this book. I would recommend reading “Misery” as a first King novel because it’s a lot less hardcore in the department of trailing on and on in comparison to books like “It” or “Insomnia.”
In regards to the actual plot, I hated Annie, which of course, like, yes. But I don’t know if I loved Paul either. And being that these were essentially the only characters, it can perhaps make it less enjoyable to not appreciate either of them completely; however, I do think King did a magnificent job at allowing such a captivating story with such little substance of characters. I appreciated the realness and plausibility of the plot because this all easily could happen in the real world, but I didn’t love how Annie’s mental illness was portrayed, nor did I understand the necessity of the constant comparisons to Africa, the goddess, etc. (veering on the side of dare I say, racist?(!))
Perhaps my conclusion is simply that you can absolutely understand King’s level of proficiency as an amazing author through this novel, but it is not personally my cup of tea. BUT (of course) my plan is to continue on my King journey, as I so often tend to marathon authors, so I will be picking up “Long Walk” or another shorter story at the library in the next couple days.
It is TBD if I will ever finish “Insomnia” as I’m barely a fourth through and have very little will-power to pick up its hefty weight again. But we’ll see what tomorrow brings me.