Misery

by Stephen King

This book was creepy. He never scares me, but boy is he creepy. It's also a short one, which is good, because his long books can sometimes be tedious to read and get boring every once in awhile, but this wasn't. It was a constant ride through creepiness, and he perpetuated my belief that living in Maine and Colorado is a bad idea.

Update:

I was rushed when I first posted this, so now I'm going to go into a little bit more detail (and give the next book on the list). So Misery was everything that I said in the last post, and it's everything I talk about in other Stephen King books I've read, but this one is different from Lisey's Story and The Green Mile. The first thing is that this book is about the interactions of basically two characters: Paul Sheldon and Annie Wilkes. There are other Stephen King books with this many, or fewer, main characters, but I haven't read them. It was very interesting because King captured more of each character so that the reader fully understood everything. By the end of the book, I was able to predict what could happen just by the descriptions of how the character was acting, and while that could make a book bad, this only made me love the book even more.

I do have to say that King did make the villain (Annie Wilkes) very 2-dimensional in a cheap 3-dimensional way. She was your stereotypical crazy person, and he failed to show that these people (in Annie's case it appeared to be Psychotic Bipolar 1 Disorder) do have relatively normal states, which were completely absent from the book form. She was either manic or depressed, but rarely was Annie in Annie's state, and his history of her made it seem like she had been rocketing back and forth for years like this, which would completely drain her or make her commit suicide. So I do feel that King, in an attempt to make the story more frightening, denied a character her humanity.

In terms of entertainment: 4 stars. In terms of quality of writing: 3 stars.

Next is a non-fictional book called The Secrets of Mariko about a journalist living with a Japanese family for a year.