Haunted by Stephen King's Misery

This week I'll summarize and give my thoughts on Stephen King's Misery. Be sure to follow me on Instagram, Tik Tok, Facebook, and youtube under Haunted Reader Podcast for updates and said any messages or book recs to ahauntedreader@gmail.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome to Haunted Reader. I'm Elizabeth. Each week I sit down and tell you what book I'm haunted by. I'll give an in-depth summary of the book, then give my thoughts at the end. I mostly read horror and thrillers, but occasionally we'll have fantasy and young adult books as well. This week's book I'm haunted by is Stephen King's Misery. Reminder, my goal this year is to read as many Stephen King books as I can. After this book, we have one more Stephen King book, and then we'll have a mix of a few other books after that. Warning, this book depicts violence, mental health issues, abuse, adult language, and many more. So let's get into this week's book. Section 1, Annie. Misery takes place in Sidewinder, Colorado. Paul is in a haze, remembering a beach he visited as a child when he smells something awful and hears someone yell, breathe, Paul. Realizing someone is giving him CPR, he finally wakes up in an unfamiliar room and asks where he is. A woman tells him he's in Sidewinder and then says, I'm Annie Wilkes, and I'm your and before he can she can finish, he finishes the sentence for her with the saying, number one fan. Paul keeps going in and out of consciousness. He remembers he is Paul Sheldon, a writer, and married twice, and that something bad has happened to him. In his mind, he keeps envisioning Annie as an African idol. In reality, she was a bigger woman who wore cardigans and wool skirts. He got a feeling of unease and close terror anytime she was around him, which is why he thought of the idol. She would come into the room every six hours to give him pain medication, which was made up for the story, called Noverall, which keeps him sleepy and causing him to go in and out. She had to give him a liquid diet since the meds caused stomach issues and respiratory issues, since Paul was a heavy smoker on top of that, which is why Annie ended up having to do CPR. Paul broke out of his haze and within the next ten days realizes that he is hooked on the Noverall, and Annie was dangerously crazy. She had told him why he was there and how she couldn't believe when she found his ID that he was Paul Sheldon, because he was her favorite author. When he asked about his wallet, he saw a look on her face that he didn't like, a look that said that she was ready to explode. But he had managed to calm her down and make her relax. While feeding him soup, she explains to him that she had to go into town that day for groceries to find his and to find his new book, Misery's Child, because the news had said that day the weather was going to be fine. But at noon the report had changed that a snowstorm was coming. He interrupted to ask how far they were from town when he saw a major change in her face. She answered that they were a ways away, then went blank for several moments, then snapped back to normal and continued talking and mentions her pig named Misery. Then she mentally checks out again and snaps back, saying how she got five miles into the drive back when the snow started, and while driving, saw an overturned car on the side of the road and stopped to help. That's when she found Paul. In between her telling him how she pulled him out, Paul remembers he crashed his car because the snow caught him off guard while he was out celebrating finishing his new book, Fast Cars. He asked how long had he been there. She said about two weeks, and then she fed him without with an IV while he was unconscious. She also said that she hopes he'll remember her. He owes her his life. She comes in later with pain meds and tells him she's finally got the newest misery novel and is about halfway through it. She keeps withholding his meds from him while asking if she could read the new fast cars manuscript. Out of desperation, he finally says yes. And she gives him his meds. The next day she comes in to feed him his soup and tells him she doesn't like the fast cars, especially the foul language. During her rant about it, she spills soup on the bed and yells at Paul, Look what you made me do. Paul says he's sorry and she smashes the bowl against the wall. She goes blank and says, I have such a temper. Paul apologizes again, and Annie tells him he should be sorry. She tells him she's putting fast cars away and is going to finish Misery's child. Paul says he doesn't want Annie mad because he depends on her, and Annie says, Yes, you do, and that he doesn't want her mad and leaves. Later, Paul is waiting for his meds when Annie comes in to clean the soup and tells him he can't have it till she's done cleaning up the mess that he made. She takes her time cleaning it, and after her last wipe down of the wall, she gives Paul his pills and makes him drink the water she used to clean the wall right out of the mop bucket. After he does so, she asks if he'll make her mad again. Then he says no, and she kisses him on the cheek and says, I love you, and leaves the room. Later on, Paul wakes up while Annie goes out to do chores, and he thinks about how she's like all the women who only want misery books from him, and how he's aware his mind won't let him think about the situation he's in, besides the fact he wants to live. He remembers a time he went to the zoo and was sad for a bird, and how his mother always said his imagination was so vivid, but then remembers when Annie was mad, she said, Do you think that when they put me on the stand in Den and he realized whatever happened to her in Denver is why she isn't a nurse anymore. He then falls asleep and dreams of being in a hospital with multiple versions of himself and Annie dressed as Misery. When he awakes, Annie is in the room with him. The next morning Annie comes in and is thrashing the thrashing the room, yelling at Paul for killing for the killing of Misery in the new book, and then tells him she has to go away for a while. She was gone for 51 hours. While she was gone, he finally looked at his legs and realized they were pulverized. He also had to pee, so he does so in a cup in his cupped hands, thinking he could then drink it to lessen his thirst. He also worried Annie would die while out and leave him trapped. When she comes back, she gives him water and explains she doesn't think correctly and can't remember a lot of the things she does. He asks for his pills and she says first he has to do something and brings in a grill. She tells him he must burn fast cars to get his pills, and at first he refuses because it's the only copy, but due to desperation, he does it anyway. Annie has a moment of panic as the ashes fly around, but then wheels out the grill. Paul thinks for the first time I'm going to kill her. He woke up sometime later and realized while he was asleep, Annie put him in a wheelchair. Later, back in bed, he screams for his pills. When Annie brings them, she says he'll get his other gift in the morning. He had a hard time sleeping and kept thinking about where his car might be and when it would be found. He realized it wouldn't matter if it was found. If a cop showed up, Annie would kill the cop. The next day, Annie brings Paul his next gift, which is a royal typewriter with a missing letter N, a board to put it on, and paper, and tells him how he's going to write a book and he's going to call it Misery's Return. At first he says no because Misery died in the last book, but then asks Annie if he writes the book for her, if she'll let him go. She hesitates but agrees. She makes him a big dinner, then makes him go to bed, so that way he can start the novel first thing in the morning. The next morning she puts him in the wheelchair to have breakfast. After breakfast, he asks her for different paper. She tells him it's the most expensive paper the store had. He shows her its smudges and then tries to explain he's on her side, and it makes her more mad. She agrees to go get the paper, but runs across the room before she leaves and punches him as hard as she can in his shattered knee. She storms out and leaves him in the chair. After she leaves, he finds one of her bobby pins on the ground. He struggles but manages to pick it up and uses it to unlock the door, but breaks a piece off inside of the door. He manages to get the wheelchair through the door, but he makes marks on the door on his way out. He makes his way to the bathroom. Inside the bathroom he looks around and ends up finding a box of different pills and medication in a linen closet. He finds an overall and takes five boxes. He hears a car and freezes. Once it passes, he makes sure everything is in place and leaves the bathroom. He decides to head to the living room to find a phone and sees in the living room a photo of Annie's mother, knickknacks, one he almost knocks over, and the phone. He picks the phone up and realizes it's fake. He realizes he hears a car coming and knows it's her. He manages to make it back and get the door locked before she makes it into the house to his room. When she gets in the room, he realizes that he left the Nuverall in his lap and covers it with his hands. She asks why he's doing that with his hands, and he tells her that she needs he needs to use the bathroom. She smirks and goes to get it and his pills. While she was gone, he shoved the pills into the back of his pants. When she comes back in with the urinal, he asks for a few minutes before she puts him in the bed. While she's gone, he puts the overall under the mattress. After he was done, he falls asleep for 14 hours. This brings us to section two titled Misery. This section starts with an excerpt of Misery's Return. I don't think the excerpts are super important to go into, so I'll mostly skip over them. Annie reads the pages he's wrote so far and tells him they aren't right and feels like a cheat because the way he brings her back doesn't line up with the misery's child. She then explains about how as a kid she used to go to see cartoons with her brother that ended in cliffhanger, and how one of them made her really angry because they cheated the ending of the cliffhanger in the next episode. He can see that she's getting angrier and angrier as she's explaining this until she is screaming in his face. She tells him to fix the way he brings her back and slams the door. He begins to think he should dodge some medicine to think clearer. He also remembers a game he used to play for storytelling in camp. When he remembers this game, he starts to fall asleep and dreams of Annie with the mop bucket and jolt's awake. He thinks about how to try to have an idea. How trying to have an idea is different than getting an idea. For fast cars, he got the idea for it on a walk, but Misery's return, he was trying to have an idea, and he was struggling. Finally he got an idea and was running with it. He wrote for hours until Annie finally made him stop. He slept soundly. The next day, Annie read the first six chapters. She tells him it is so good. He can't wait and that she can't wait to keep reading and suggests something he could use for the story, something like a bee sting, and he tells her maybe. The rest of the day he couldn't write a lot. The next morning, laying in bed, he noticed the marks his chair left on the door he escaped from when he escaped the room. Suddenly Annie burst into the room, she handcuffs him to the bed and tells him to be quiet. He then hears a car pull into the driveway. She tells him to be quiet or she'll kill them and him. She runs out to meet the man in the car. Paul can see him hand her a piece of paper and hear yelling. After he leaves, Annie comes back in and starts pacing in his room. As she's ranting to herself, Paul dry heaves. Annie threatens to leave him in his puke if he does it. She asks him what Alina's. He asks her to remove the handcuffs. Once she takes them off, he explains it's a hold on her property for not paying her taxes. She says she always pays her bills on time. She just forgot this time. He then realizes Annie has no sense of time because her mind is getting worse. Paul tells her to take the$420 left in his wallet to pay for the taxes. She kisses him and Paul has to hold his breath because she smells awful. Before she goes, she asks to be he asked to be put in his wheelchair. When she was gone, he used a bobby pin to get the door open. His arms were getting stronger because he was using the typewriter as a lifting tool to work them out. First he had cleaned the marks left by the wheelchair the first time he left the room. He decided that that was enough for the day, and he reclosed the door and went back to the room to write by the t to keep writing. By the time Annie came home, he had wrote five more pages. Over the next three weeks, Paul felt at peace and was writing twelve pages a day. Him and Annie had fallen into a routine. Paul had to admit that Annie's beasting suggestion is why the story had formed so well. One night he woke Annie in the middle of the night to be put in his chair to write booknotes that had hit him in the middle of the night. Things were going good until the day it rained. Annie came in with his meds late that day. She was still in her robe, which along with her hands and face were covered in food. She had big red marks on her face and she threw his pills at him. When he asked if she was okay, she said no, and grabbed her lip until it bled. She left the room and he could hear her slapping herself, and he became scared. He had decided to try and put himself in his wheelchair. When Annie came walking into the room and saw that he had managed to get into the wheelchair, she told him if he can put himself in his chair, he can fill in his own ends, which she had been helping him do with until now. When he tried to get back into the bed later he fell and screamed, but she didn't come back. He got into bed and took two Noverall he had stashed away under the mattress and fell asleep. When he woke up, Annie was there with a glass full of Noverol and a rat that she had caught in a trap. She explains that they come up from the basement. Mid explanation, she blanks out for three minutes, then continues talking like she never stopped. She takes the rat from the trap and squeezes it to death. She then asks Paul if she should kill them both. He tells her not to until he has finished the book. She tells Paul he can fin he can finish it, or she can end them both now because she can never let him leave. He tells her that he wants to finish it. She tells him that she has to go to the store to her laughing place for a while, and that her laughing place is actually somewhere she just goes to scream. And that she doesn't know when she'll be back, and she leaves. Two hours later, Paul leaves the room using a bobby pin. When he goes into the kitchen, he sees the entire house is a mess with food and such things laying everywhere. He went to check the doors and realized that all the doors to the outside were triple locked and he couldn't get them undone. He thought about leaving out through a window but realized that he wouldn't be able to walk anywhere or pull himself along through the mud. He decides to grab some food to take back to his room. After making sure everything was back where it should be, he was headed back to his room and decided to try and go into the living room. He picks up her photo album that says Memory Lane. He sees her parents' wedding announcement, then the birth announcements for her and her brother, then an announcement for a fire that kills five people, then one for her father that died in a freak fall down the stairs. Then he sees another announcement of a USC student who fell down the steps in a similar fashion as her father. Paul is realizing that these clippings are murders that were completed by Annie. Next is a clipping about her graduating nursing school. Then there are six obituaries for elderly patients that died in the nursing home she worked. Then there is a new staff announcement from Harrisburg PA with Annie in it, followed by three more obituaries. Annie's death count at this point is 16. She then moves to Pittsburgh and then Duluth, then Fargo, then on to Denver. In Duluth, there were two more, Fargo 3 and Pittsburgh 2. In Denver, the new arrivals announcement shows that she is now working in a receiving hospital. Then one more obituary before Annie's wedding announcement. Next, there's a new staff announcement for Annie at Niederlin. After the staff announcement is the announcement of Annie's house being for sale before she bought it with her husband. Next is Annie's divorce papers. After the divorce papers is another new staff announcement with Annie and Boulder, followed by six more obituaries. Then there was an announcement that Annie was announced as the head maternity nurse. While Annie was head nurse, there were eight infant deaths and they began to investigate Annie. After she's released from the interrogation, there are three more deaths. There are clippings of articles of her trial and the evidence. Also, the nickname The Dragon Lady is seen several times in these clippings. Annie ends up being found not guilty. The next clipping is a hiker found mutilated. The next clipping is a missing ad for Paul. Annie's death count is 42, which is huge in my opinion. Side note. Paul cries that he had only been reported missing two weeks ago, and he had been at Annie's for nine weeks at this point. An hour later, after taking Nuverall, he falls asleep. Over the next few days, Paul wrote and kept himself comfortable while listening to Annie's pig squealing and thinking of the ways to kill Annie, including grabbing a knife from the kitchen to hide under his mattress. After getting the knife and putting it away, he fell asleep. He wakes up and Annie is back with a hypodermic needle and in his room. She asks if he wants the good news or the bad news first, and he says good, since the bad news is she's gonna kill him because she doesn't like the book. She says no, she loves the book and doesn't want to read anymore until he's done actually. She says the good news is that his car is gone. The storm caused it to move and to be hidden like the hiker she killed. Confused, Paul asks her what, and Annie tells him she knows that he knows that she had killed the hiker. And he knows exactly who the hiker was. And that's because the threads are broken on her book. He's aware he feels off and that she keeps checking the edge of the bed and hears a wood clanking sound coming from the end of the bed. She lets him know she's known for a while he could get out of the room, and that was the bad news. She explains how she picked up the hitchhiker and brought him home because he said he was working in the area, and they became lovers. But then she found out that he had lied to her and he wasn't working for anybody. And when she confronted him, he laughed at her. Paul asked if that's when she killed him, and she says she must have, but she doesn't remember doing it. But she knew she had to kill him. She tells him all of the things she noticed the first time he got out. The marks on the door, the things moved in the parlor, the bathroom and the rattling and the doorknob from the broken bobby pin. Annie keeps questioning him about how many times he's been out of the room and refuses to believe him when he says three times. While arguing, she pulls out the knife he took and tells him he found it under the mattress and says she found it after she had given him his pre-op shot. He stares at her while she is ranting about how three times the lie. Finally he tells her he grabbed it when he was out the third time. He asks her what she meant by pre-op, and she asks him if he was out at least seven times. He said if that's what she wanted to believe, then that's what she could believe. She asks him if he had ever heard of the Kimberley Diamond Mines, and then explains that when miners were caught stealing and ran off with the diamonds, they would be hobbled, so they could still work but not run away. She tells him for escaping the room she was going to hobble him. She pulls off the covers and he begins to scream. Then she picks up an axe and she pours betadine on his ankle and the axe while he screams. She then hacks off his left foot and ankle and cauterizes it with a blowtorch. She uses her mop bucket to pull at put out any remaining flames. She tells him you'll be fine and picks up the foot and says, Now you're hobbled, and don't blame me, it's your own fault, and leaves. Paul then passes out from the pain. This brings us to section three called Paul. Sometime later, Paul is working on the book when the letter T breaks off of the typewriter. He thinks of saying something to Annie, but realizes it's better not to say anything at all and just keep writing. As he continues to write the letter E, then breaks off of the typewriter. He looks at the calendar in his room that says May, but he knows it's really June 21st, and Annie is outside on her riding lawnmower.

unknown 21:59

He just

SPEAKER_00 22:00

The next day he'll write the rest by hand because Annie has gotten too weird for him to say anything to. He kept forcing himself not to think about the hobbling or a situation and realizes that he wanted to live to finish the book after all. He remembers how he felt when his dad had passed away and how his dad was sinking into his death figuratively, and now he was also sinking after his hobbling and was in a semi-coma barely breathing. When he first woke up, was Annie was there, but wouldn't let him back to work. She was frightened by how close to death he was again for the second time in her care. She took the best care of him for the first few days after he had woke up. She read what he wrote while he was in the semi-coma and filled in the ends for him. Then, when he sh he wanted to write more, while thinking about this, Annie goes by on the riding law mower and waves, so he waves back. He convinced her to let him start writing again and she agreed because she wanted more of the book. At first, he could only write for short periods of time because of the pain. He started writing for longer, and her need for the rest of the story cost him his left thumb. Before that happened, Annie made them Sundays and asked for the rest of the story, and he told her no. Then argued, and when he shouted at her, she dropped it. Things seemed okay after that until he complained about the typewriter and the missing N. When he complained, she said she'd give him something to keep his mind off the N and cut his left thumb off. Later that day, she brought in a birthday cake and sang happy birthday, even though it wasn't his birthday, with the thumb as a candle in the middle of the cake. She told him as long as he was good, he wouldn't have to eat the special candle. While remembering this, he had fallen asleep in his wheelchair, and when he woke up, he saw a police car pulling into the driveway. At first he thought he was seeing things. After she cut off cut off the thumb, he had a fever, and also he realized his writing was changing, but the book was almost done. Looking at the typewriter now, his mind kept telling him not to scream for the cop. He was having an internal bath battle whether to scream or not. Finally, Paul screams and the cop looks towards the room. Paul throws a glass ashtray to break the window. He yells for the cop again, and he tells the cop to watch out for Annie. The cop looks and Paul at Paul and pulls a picture out of his wallet to look at, then back at Paul again and goes, It's you. Paul suddenly realized Annie is charging up behind the officer with a wooden cross she made for where she had to bury her cow. Paul yells behind you. Look out, and Annie stabs the cop in the back with the cross. The cop makes his way to the window, and Annie pulls the cross out of his back as he is turning towards her. She reaches he reaches for his gun and she stabs him in the stomach with the cross. She stabs him again and again, and Paul yells for her to stop. She stabs him two more times and walks away. After she walks away, Paul realizes the cop is still alive and was crawling towards his car. He makes his way to the driveway when Paul hears the mower. He tries to warn the officer and tells him to shoot her. The cop fumbles his gun, and when he tries to reach for it, Annie runs the gun and his arm over with the mower. He tried to roll away as Annie backed up the mower and ran over his head, and Paul vomited. She stormed to Paul's room to tell him she would be back to deal with him later. Annie went back outside and put the body in her barn. She put the straps of fabric and the cross in a garbage bag and throws them in the barn as well. She puts the gun in her waistband and pull puts Paul's picture and the bullets in her pocket. She hands Paul the ashtray that he had thrown through the window. She tells him he would kill he killed the cop by not keeping his mouth shut. Paul asks what's gonna happen to him, and Annie says they'll talk later, and washes the driveway and the mower. He then realizes she never washed the blades under the lawnmower. She came back in and went upstairs, and Paul could hear her dragging something down into the cellar. She came to his room with a large tote bag and takes out takes him out of the room. She carries him down into the cellar and she drops him onto the mattress that she had dragged down the steps. She props him up with pillows and gives him some soda. She also leaves a needle out on a nearby tray. She says she's going to talk and he's going to listen to her. She says if no one comes looking for the cop before dark, they'll be fine. But if someone comes before night, she shows him that inside the tote bag she has the cop's gun and says she'll shoot them, him, and herself. She tells him her plan to take the cop's car to the laughing place and ride an old bike back. She's going to put a chain across the driveway that says she's at the flea market. She says more cops will come, but she should be back by the time that they start coming back to question her. She won't tie Paul up and will even let him peek when they come back. While he's peeking though, he needs to remember that she has the gun. She even has a plan for the cops when they arrive. She's going to tell them that yes, she saw the cop. No, he she didn't see Paul, and she would know because he's her favorite author. How she invited the first cop in to look around, but he said no, so she gave him a cold Pepsi and sent him on his way. She's going to put the dead officer's prints on the bottle and ditch it on the side of the road. She says they'll have to they'll have about a week before officers come back a second time, and that Paul will have to write faster. She lets him know that the only reason she's telling him all this is because he needs to know what to do to stay alive. And if it wasn't for the book, she'd end it all right now. He also says he wants to know how the book will end. He tells her he also knows once he writes the end and she reads it, she'll end them both. They both agree it's almost over. She brings him food, drinks, and a bedpan. She says he can work on the book. He says he can work on the book longhand, but Annie tells him she can't leave any lights on. He panicked when she left him in the dark, and Annie left laughing. He was hallucinating things in the dark of rats and the dead officer. He sleeps a little, then decides to use the hypodermic needle. As he's falling asleep, he realizes a shape in the corner is the grill he used to burn the fast cars manuscript, and then he falls asleep. In the morning he woke up and took two Novarole. Looking at the grill in the morning gave him the idea to burn Misery's return. He knew it would hurt him, but it would hurt Annie much more. Annie came back and took him back upstairs, not realizing that while she was gone, he managed to get the can of lighter fluid into the back of his underpants. When they got to the room, he asked for a shot, and when she left to get it, he put the lighter fluid under the mattress. She comes back and gives him his shot and says she's going to get some sleep. If no one comes, she plans to sleep till the next day. She tells Paul to wait till his legs feel better to write, but he says he'll still try to write later on, and that he doesn't want Annie to read anymore till it's finished. Later, Paul puts himself in the wheelchair and hides a lighter fluid under a loose floorboard, then writes for the next four hours until he was ready for sleep. He managed to put himself back in bed and crashes. The next day he hears a car coming and Annie tells him to get out of sight because it's the state police. He can see from the spot two officers get out of a large get out of the car. A large officer and a smaller officer in plain clothing. He nicknames them David and Goliath. He considered yelling but was worried of what Annie would do and he wanted to take her down himself. Paul heard on the radio the officer Annie had killed was searching for Paul because his car was found, but no one made the connection. His search for Paul was why he was missing. Paul could hear Annie and the officers come into the house. He could hear them questioning her and how she stuck to the story that she told him he was going she was going to say with perfect composure. After they left, Annie stood in the doorway staring at him. She questioned why he didn't yell, and says be he tells her it's because he wants to finish the book. For the next two days he wrote constantly, but on the third a news van pulled into the driveway. A news anchor and cameraman jumped out, and Annie comes out with a rifle. She fires a warning shot into the air, and they jump back into the van and take off. Annie goes back inside and into the into Paul's room. She is starting to spiral and rips the skin off of her forehead with her fingernails while Paul is screaming for her to stop. She continues to hurt herself and leaves the room. It takes Paul a long time, but he starts to write again. The next day another cop shows up and asks her for her statement. After he leaves, she asks Paul how much longer till he's done, and he says two to three days. He continues to write, and when Annie catches him up late writing, she says, You're not doing this just for me anymore, are you? Paul realizes but doesn't say it out loud, that it was never actually for her. He writes until dawn, then goes to bed. A lot of gawkers start to show up at Annie's at Annie's, so she chains off her driveway. She asks Paul again when the book will be done, and he says tomorrow around 6 p.m. Later that night she brings him ice for his hand and after icing it for a while, then he goes back to writing. And he writes till dawn again and falls asleep. The next morning, as soon as he woke up, Annie came into the room to give Paul a break breakfast and is excited. His hand is too swollen for him to write longhand, so he tells her he needs the typewriter back. She's so excited when he's done with his soup, she brings him in caviar she bought. He eats a lot of it, but Annie ends up hating it. And she also tells him that she bought a bottle of champagne for when he finishes the book. He tells her when he's done he'd also like to have one of his cigarettes. She says that she won't be in the room when he smokes it because she hates them. He asks her to leave it on the window ledge for when he's done with the book, and when he's done smoking, he'll call her in. He finished writing the book and listened for where Annie was hearing she was uh for where Annie was. She was upstairs. He began his preparations starting with pulling up the floorboard. Five minutes later he called for her. She came down excited and told him she was grabbing the champagne. She opens the door to see Paul surrounded by piles of paper with the title page on of the book on the top, and Paul holding a match. She asks what he's doing, and he tells her it's the greatest misery book yet. He tells her he's going to do a trick he learned from her. She drops the champagne as she comes forward and soaks some of the paper. As she comes forward, he drops the match. She leans forward and grabs the burning pages, and Paul hits her in the back of the head with the type or back in the back with the typewriter, shoving her into the burning paper. Paul stood up on his one foot. Annie was starting to burn as she crawled closer. She got stuck on top of the typewriter, and Paul fell on top of her. She was trying to get him off her and one off her, and when she yelled, he began stuffing wads of burning paper down her throat. She threw Paul off. She got to her feet, clawing her throat and fell, hitting her head on the mantle and collapsed. Paul crawled his way over to the bed and put out the flames on top of the bed, and then made his way to his wheelchair, when Annie had all of a sudden opened her eyes. She started getting up, so Paul crawled to the door. She grabbed the stump of his leg, he looked and he looked back and saw that she was turning purple. He pulled his leg away and kept crawling. He turned back again and her face was almost black, and her eyes were bleeding as she reached for him, and he reached for the door. She started to strangle him and collapsed. Paul got through the door and bolted in the bolted it and he sat in front of it for a moment until he saw her fingers move under the door. He got to the bathroom and locked himself inside and fell asleep. When he woke up, he replayed what happened to himself. He wanted to burn the house down to call for help to the house, but he didn't expect Annie to fight back so much, so he was unable to grab the real book which he had hidden underneath the mattress. He finally leaves the bathroom crawling to the parlor, fearing Annie is around every corner. Then he hears a car and a voice. He crawls faster and sees the officers from the other day. He throws a knick-knack through the window, yelling for help. They found Paul and tell and he tells them Annie is dead in the bedroom, and to be careful when they go look. To be careful when they go look. When they go to look, they look inside, and there is no one there. They tell Paul this and he screams. This brings us to section four called Goddess. Nine months after the officers found Paul, Paul was making trips back and forth between a hospital in Queens and an apartment in Manhattan. His legs had to be rebroken and he'd have a limp. He was drinking a lot and not really writing. Misery's return was fast-tracked to be published. He went to his apartment and thinks Annie was has jumped up from behind the couch, but remembers the day and how his publisher wants a real account of what happened. But what happened in his apartment wasn't real. Because after they found Paul, they found Annie dead in her barn holding a chainsaw. Then remembers something funny he saw on his way home, and he begins to write another book. And that is a summary of Misery by Stephen King. This book is one of my favorites, actually. Um, along with the movie. I really enjoyed the movie because I also really love Kathy Bates. I see why they changed things between the stories. Um, like for example, the hobbling and cutting off the ankle to smashing the ankle with the hammer. It was kind of a little easier for TV back then. But the movie is still just as good as the book, in my in my opinion. The book will always be better, but this movie holds up pretty close. The dive into mental health and addiction is told in a very honest way, which I also really enjoyed. I find the idea of a seemingly normal woman being a crazy killer eerier than I find any kind of slasher or monster. I give this book five ghosties, five being the best out of scale of one to five. The way he shows the ugliness of untreated mental health, which is a severe issue then, and is still a severe issue that we have going on in today's world. And on I also really appreciate the way that he tells Paul's struggle of addiction with being in constant need of no-verall and what he would do to get the no-verall, like burning his own manuscript or selling himself short, just to make Annie happy to make sure he got the thing he was addicted to. And I also found that Paul and even Annie's fight for survival kept me turning the page, especially towards the end, seeing how they kept fighting to make sure that one at least one of them had survived. Paul fighting for himself and Annie fighting for herself. I really could not put this book down. It was just too good. I was taking it everywhere with me. I also like the fact that it just from the first page, it was just go, go, go, go, go with this book. Um, you there was just right into the story, and that was that, which I found was really cool. Um, but yeah, that's all I got for you guys this week with this book. Um, please rate and review the podcast. Also, make sure you follow me on Instagram. I have TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, all the socials basically, under a haunted reader pod or haunted reader podcast. And then also, if you have any book recommendations or anything like that, uh, you can email me at a haunted reader at gmail.com. And until next time, stay spooky and keep reading.