Well, I had a book challenge to read a book that has been on my TBR pile for 5 years. This one has been on my list for decades. I don’t know why I never wanted to read “Misery.” Maybe because I liked the movie so much and I had an inkling I wouldn’t like the book? I don’t know. This was a drag from beginning to end. At one point I kept looking to see if Stephen King even wrote this book.
My main issues were the following:
1) Paul and Annie were not interesting. King has done much more with other protagonists and villains and I just didn’t see shining through in this book. Paul was just blank throughout the story. We find out about Annie, but via a book that Annie keeps that are newspaper articles about her.
2) Telling the story via Paul just got boring after a while. If I had to read Annie, read about her breath, and read the word Africa I was going to lose it. It was repetitive to the point that I don’t think you would miss anything if you just read the first few chapters and last couple.
3) The book flow just dragged. I just got tired of reading about Paul, Misery, reading the excerpts from the book he was writing, etc. I kept waiting for something to happen. Eventually it did, but I just didn’t care. I think that King could have struck a ton of chapters to get this to a novella length would have worked better. It just read like filler after a while.
I know Constant Readers will say that you have to read all of King’s works especially since there are Easter eggs about the Overlook Hotel in this one.
Finding out that King meant to write this under Richard Bachman makes sense though, because nothing about this book screamed Stephen King wrote it to me. Glad I finally read it. Now back to the stacks.