In Cujo, King spent the majority of the novel keeping two people trapped in a car, stalked by a rabid dog. In Misery, a man was kept hostage by an insane fan. Each of these novels centered chiefly on two main characters. Suppose, then, King decided to write a novel with only one character. Gerald's Game is it.

Unfortunately, the novel comes from two distinct directions: the story angle and the message angle. The story is one of King's most compelling: Jessie Burlingame's husband Gerald enjoys kinky sex games with his wife. Actually, he probably depends on them. When the Burlingames try out their handcuff game down in the house by deserted Kashwakamack Lake, Jessie decides she's had enough. She experiances a flash from her childhood (another game she didn't like), and kicks out, rebelling both against her husband and her past. Gerald suffers a fatal heart attack, falling to the floor. And Jessie is still handcuffed to the bed.

This is really interesting stuff, the setup for a nerve-jangling novel. And on some points, King delivers. Jessie's battle to get a waterglass and actually drink from it is an unlikely, yet stunning, source of excitement and tension. Women she has known in her life become her "voices," sides of her personality she assigns personification. The interplay of the voices is great, too, if a little one- dimensional. And there are the flashbacks: Jessie, you see, once spent another afternoon on a deserted lake with a man. But she was ten, and the man was her father, and he played a game with her then, too. This memory is the core of the novel, and it's a disturbing and frightening core. It actually might go a long way to explaining why Jessie let herself be used by Gerald.

But then there is the message. All men are bad. The trouble with Gerald's Game is its insistance on this message, over and over. What King perhaps didn't realize is the way to combat one form of sexism isn't with another form. Jessie breaks free from the handcuffs (a harrowing and gore-strewn adventure), but she doesn't really escape. Jessie decides that all her solutions come from hate and distrust of men, just as she once belived that all her problems could be resolved by repression. In life, there are no blanket answers, and though the story here is exciting, the message needs some work.

Personal Observations

It was the summer of 1992, the summer of my seventeenth birthday. The previous year, I'd bought my first Stephen King hardcover with my own money: Needful Things. I had been greatly disappointed in it at the time (perhaps my expectations were too high for anything to fill them), and I hoped King hadn't "lost his touch." Then, for my birthday, my mom bought me Gerald's Game.

I read it in three days out by the pool of our condo complex. I could not put the book down. It was a freaky story with a lot of sex for your average seventeen-year-old to digest, at upped the gore quotient from Needful Things, and the stuff about Joubert was thrilling for one who had recently enjoyed Silence of the Lambs at the theater. In my mind, King was back.

Looking back on those days, I kind of have to smile. Of course, Needful Things is a far better novel than Gerald's Game, but it took a few more years and a couple of more reads of both to realize that. Not that Gerald's Game is bad, it just chokes on its message. There's a lot to say about the war of the sexes in Gerald's Game, and there are no competant men to stand up for themselves.

At final study, King is brilliant at the story level (as always), but as a mediator for the gender wars, he lets us down a little. The readers would have to wait until his next novel (Dolores Claiborne) to get a perfect balance.

Audio Adaptation

Lindsay Crouse, who did a wonderful reading of Misery, is back as the voice(s) of Jessie Burlingame. As with Misery, Crouse does a wonderful job. Her voice is strong and matched to the character, and she handles the shifting of Jessie's voices with ease. But.

But the letter at the end goes on far too long. Maybe we don't notice the length of the anticlimax on the page, but in our ears it's almost intolerable. It seems longer than it actually is, and that's not what audiobooks are meant for. So, kudos to Crouse, but if I were you, I'd skip the last cassette and just read the ending.