For #LBCWSwan (our White Swan based book club), we are reading Misery by Stephen King.

• Time – 6pm
• Date – 25th June
• Venue – White Swan, Leeds city centre

Misery

Misery Chastain was dead. Paul Sheldon had just killed her – with relief, with joy. Misery had made him rich; she was the heroine of a string of best sellers. And now he wanted to get on to some real writing. 

That’s when the car accident happened, and he woke up in pain in a strange bed. But it wasn’t the hospital. 

Annie Wilkes had pulled him from the wreck, brought him to her remote mountain home, splinted and set his mangled legs.

The good news was that Annie was a nurse and had painkilling drugs.

The bad news was that she was Paul’s Number One Fan.

And when she found out what Paul had done to Misery, she didn’t like it. She didn’t like it at all. And now he had to bring Misery back to life. Or else….

Stephen King

Given that I’m not a huge fan of the horror genre (life is genuinely scary enough, thank you very much), I tend not to have read many of the prolific Kings oeuvre. However, this is one that I did encounter as a teenager – and I remember really enjoying it. While being deeply grossed out.

This time round, I decided to listen to the audiobook – so I could ‘read’ while still working in the allotment. The run time is 12 hours and 12 minutes (a pleasing number!) and the narrator is Lindsay Crouse.

It’s an excellent version. For some reason I couldn’t immediately figure out, the voice artist particularly impacted me – the slow, rich intonation, the accent that both alternatively drawls and clips the ends of sentences – there was something both familiar yet deeply unsettling about it.

It’s taken me 4 hours to realise why.

Lindsay Crouse is best known – to me – as the warped authority figure of Professor Maggie Walsh from Buffy! The perfect narrator for this book!

Anyhoo, since I know it, y’all had to too!

Misery is one of the authors best known works, in part because of the sublime and chilling 1990 film adaptation, starring Kathy Bates and James Caan, trailer below.