Paul Sheldon is an author at a precarious crossroads, attempting to pivot from the lucrative but creatively stifling world of Victorian romances to the esteemed halls of serious literary fiction. After finishing his latest manuscript, a car accident on a snowy Colorado road leaves him shattered and helpless. He is rescued not by emergency services, but by Annie Wilkes, a former nurse who brings him to her secluded home. As Paul drifts in and out of a morphine-induced haze, he realizes that his survival is entirely dependent on the whims of a woman who claims to be his "number one fan."

The tension of the narrative is built upon the collision between Paul’s desire for artistic liberation and Annie’s pathological refusal to let her favorite fictional heroine, Misery Chastain, stay dead. Whe...

Paul Sheldon is an author at a precarious crossroads, attempting to pivot from the lucrative but creatively stifling world of Victorian romances to the esteemed halls of serious literary fiction. After finishing his latest manuscript, a car accident on a snowy Colorado road leaves him shattered and helpless. He is rescued not by emergency services, but by Annie Wilkes, a former nurse who brings him to her secluded home. As Paul drifts in and out of a morphine-induced haze, he realizes that his survival is entirely dependent on the whims of a woman who claims to be his "number one fan."

The tension of the narrative is built upon the collision between Paul’s desire for artistic liberation and Annie’s pathological refusal to let her favorite fictional heroine, Misery Chastain, stay dead. Whe...