‘MISERY’
Stephen King
AUTHOR-CENTRED READING
‘Misery’ was written by Stephen King in 1987. Stephen King is a prominent writer and has many fans ranging around the world. He was the recipient The National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
‘Misery’, similar to all Stephen King novels, is a novel shaped around fear and terror. This novel compared to Stephen Kings book ‘Carrie’, shows that they both display the genre of horror writing, and involve similar characteristics when it comes to the plot, and the story’s characters.
Looking at the blurbs of both books, they are completely different, yet they both do the same thing, in inviting the reader to read the book itself, to become enraptured in the horror of the book. The novel ‘Misery’ has a blurb that is disturbing, yet makes the reader want to open the book. “He was a writer. She was his number one fan. She’d pulled him out of a car wreck bought him home, and splintered and set his mangled legs. All he had to do in return was to write: a very special book… about her favorite character, the one he’d killed off and now had to bring back to life. Because if he didn’t…. she would be very cross and do things that would make him scream and scream”- this blurb is fairly frightening when a reader first picks up the book to read, but it also entices the reader into reading more. This is the same as the blurb for the book ‘Carrie’ “Carrie White was no ordinary girl. Carrie White had a gift- the gift of telekinesis. And when, one horrifying and endless night, she exercised that terrible gift on the town that mocked and loathed her, the result was both stunning and macabre”- although a lot shorter this blurb is also the same as the blurb for ‘Misery’.
Both books, are alike one another. In ‘Misery’, there is the central character that is ‘trapped’, they are restricted from others, by a psychotic character that happens to be nursing the main character back to health, in...