Misery Loves the Company of Dreams

Somewhere in Danse Macabre, Stephen King tells the following story about a recurring nightmare of his:

"I'm writing a novel in an old house where a homicidal madwoman is reputed to be on the prowl. A door on the far side communicates with the attic, and I know -- I know -- she's in there, and that sooner or later the sound of my typewriter will cause her to come after me....At any rate, she finally comes through the door like a horrid jack in the box, all gray hair and crazed eyes, and weilding a meat-axe."

These words were published in 1981, but King dates the dream as originating from a date roughly ten years earlier -- more than a decade and a half before the publication of Misery in 1987. And while it might be an oversimplification to say that the novel draws its plot from this nightmare, it certainly seems to find at least part of its inspiration therein. So if I may, I'd like to depart from the standard formula of simply reviewing the novel in question to addressing the issue behind the novel -- the nightmare that I believe drove it.

Everyone has conscious and unconscious fears. Misery is, in my estimation, a sort of tour-de-force of both as they exist, or existed, within Stephen King when he wrote the book. All the themes -- destructive compulsion, slavery to deadline, adoration turned to hatred, wretched helplessness, the perversion of the nurturing relationship, the degradation of torture -- are primal and visceral in nature. They strike not at the complex areas of the human mind but the simplest. Anne Wilkes attacks Paul Sheldon psychologically as well as physically, but the overall atmosphere of the book is of a child's nightmare made into flesh. That is to say, primitive. Sheldon, weeping with terror and pain but also with powerlessness, is a frightful figure, an animal tormented into making particular sounds for the pleasure of its master. Clearly this image resonates with King; it is his idea of hell, perhaps, made all the more frightening by the knowledge that he has many "Number One Fans" in real life, any number of which would be only too happy to give him a hobbling. It is in the end a courageous book, because King is not merely trying to scare us -- he is clearly trying to scare himself -- and probably succeeding.

I dream quite a bit, and my dreams, in addition to being quite vivid and colorful, often follow something akin to a plot or storyline. This is quite the double-edged sword, because when I have a nightmare it is a real sonofabitch. In 1993 or so, I had a particular nightmare that I have never forgotten. Everything was blackness, absolute blackness, but I knew that I was someplace icy cold and remote -- Alaska, perhaps, and in the dead of winter. I must have been in some kind of vehicle, because at some point I switched on a spotlight which made a perfect circle of light in the ink-black night. In the light were several burned-out, abandoned police cars sunk to midwheel in thick, densely packed snow. On the snow were the largest, most vicious-looking wolves you can imagine, feeding hungrily on a human corpse. Their eyes blazed yellowly like lamps, their gray coats long and winter-thick, and their jaws were smeared and slathered with blood. They looked fearlessly into the light -- at me -- with their gory fangs gleaming. Looking at them I knew, with that peculair certainty common to dreams, that civilization had been destroyed or destroyed itself, and I was looking at the successors of mankind. When I awoke, it was not with the usual gasp and pounding pulse that a nightmare brings, but a kind of dread, a feeling that I had been given a glimpse into the ultimate fate of my species.

I've yet to write anything about this dream, but sometimes I think about the interesting one-two punch that it dealt me. On the one fist was the primal fear of being hunted and eaten -- probably while still alive -- by a merciless predatory beast. (At night, no less; and in the snow -- one of the least hospitable elements for human beings.) On the other fist was the presence of the police cars. One doesn't need to be a genius to see the symbolism there -- the complete collapse of human authority and power. I don't like to read too much into dreams, but I think there was a strong psychological element to this nightmare, something which spoke directly to my own fears -- however subconscious they might be. Maybe I won't produce a Misery from it, but perhaps it will yield at least a nasty little short story.

My point here -- yes, I have a point -- is that horror is a nebulous term, laying somewhere (if I may paraphrase King) between terror and the gross-out. It involves a certain level of fear but also a certain level of repulsion, and it is an intensely personal feeling, never exactly the same for two people. Yet because all humans are related, our fears are related too -- and our nightmares. King's nightmare resonated with him to the point where he felt compelled -- or inspired -- to spin it into a novel. He not only confronted but exploited his fear, and in the "Number One Fan", the axe-wielding Anne Wilkes, created an iconic horror villain. The ability of a writer -- not merely a horror-writer but any sort of writer, for we are writers before and after we are stuck with the genre label -- to do this is, to attack head-on the thing head-on that they most dread, is, I believe, an ill-discussed and ill-examined facet of our craft. Indeed, it belongs perhaps not to the craft side of writing but to the artistic side, because it involves moral courage. Anyone can write a "shocking" book by smashing someone else's religious or moral or sexual or psychological taboos; not many have the stones to attack their own. But King did. And that's why the axe of Anne Wilkes cuts so deep.