Gerald's Game (Paperback)

Jessie Burlingame is the wife of successful corporate attorney Gerald, her husband of 20 years. Gerald has a little personality quirk, a kinky sex game he likes to play occasionally with his good and faithful wife: he likes to handcuff Jessie to a bed in the bedroom of the remote little cabin they own on the woodsy shore of Dark Score Lake, as a prelude---one supposes---to love.

He has even picked up a special set of police handcuffs for the occasion. And within the amount of time it takes for a set of handcuff lock tumblers to go 'snicker snack', Gerald's game takes a horrible, fatal twist, leaving Jessie manacled to a piece of heavy wood furniture, her only companions the stiffening corpse of her husband and a barking, unseen dog.

And of course, this being vintage Stephen King Country, those aren't the only companions Jessie has---there are Others, naturally, but they just prefer to make their appearance when the sun goes down, when Jessie's increasingly frenzied imagination has plenty of elbow room to do its frightful work.

King likes to write about modern American men and women who are placed in dire peril and whose faculties are stretched to the limits of sanity and beyond, but "Gerald's Game" ups the ante by burying the reader deep inside Jessie Burlingame's panicked mind; this is a book about interiors, not exteriors. The narrator never leaves Jessie's fevered and restive brain, and, with the exception of dreams and flights of fancy, what we have could easily be shot as a one-set play.

Because King is able to bring his considerable talents to bear on such an intimate canvas, "Gerald's Game" is a long, dark, wickedly sick joke, relentlessly creepy. Despite the spare and limited setting, there are lots of nasty visitors to this dark banquet, not least of which are the voices in Jessie's head, the corpse of her husband, her long dead father, a wandering and hungry (rabid?) dog, spooky sounds in the darkened cabin, and that chestnut of the terror tale: Something in the Woods that wants in.

"Gerald's Game" is the Master at his finest, a taut, brilliantly paced little page-turner with a harrowing twist that would make "Sixth Sense" director M. Night Shyamalan envious. Keep the night light on for this one.

No matter what the particulars, this book has a tiresome plot common to many works of lesser authors (submissive-but-savvy-chick frees herself from psychological male dominion with the help of two patently contrived plot "metaphors"). The lead character was annoying, unsympathetic, and shallow (and no, hearing many voices of other equally annoying and cardboard-thin characters does not give you depth). The pace was mind-numbing--it was fluorane in print. But all of this can be forgiven (though not enjoyed), if there were not something more deeply troubling here.

Two aspects in particular make me skeptical that this is the same author who produced such works as Hearts in Atlantis and The Green Mile and Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption. The first was the dialogue, internal and external. It was beyond--or should I say below--cliche. I have never heard dialogue like this from King. The second I have already alluded to--it is the transparent contrivance of the metaphors ("the day the sun went out" was an especially tiresome and repetitious piece of melodrama). It just felt phony--something else I have never expected to find in a King book.

King is a master. This book is not worthy of him. Either (1) he cut a few corners, or (2) fired and missed badly and published the work when it should have been scrapped, or (3) did not write it at all. It will no doubt impress some of the easily impressed, but I cannot recommend it after reading so much better from him.