Ever notice how so many fresh-looking but aged Stephen King hardcovers fill shelves at consignment shops?It's fascinating, if you are a fan of King's like me, to note which novels they are. I never see the ones people talk about, like It or Misery. What I always see are those books he wrote between the late 1980s, when he was supposedly churning out manuscripts in a drug-induced frenzy, and 1999, when getting run over put him out of action for a while.
They are the King books Time forgot, books that cumulatively topped the best-seller lists for months but didn't become popular movies and which no one remembers outside of a few of his most loyal Constant Readers. Books like Gerald's Game.
Making a movie of Gerald's Game would be a challenge for any director. Alfred Hitchcock set one of his film's entirely in a single apartment, but at least the characters in the apartment enjoyed freedom of movement. Not so Jessie Burlingame, our protagonist in Gerald's Game. She is handcuffed to a bed in the vacation home she shares with her husband Gerald, now lying dead at the foot of the same bed. He tried to get too aggressive during a bondage game, and she kicked him so hard he suffered a fatal heart attack. Never mind him, though, what about her? Jessie wants to get free, but the cuff keys are out of reach. As night descends, she recalls her suppressed and damaged childhood, realizing she needs to face it to summon the strength she needs to escape the trap she finds herself in now.
"She wants to change the past, but the past is heavy – trying do that, she discovers, is like trying to pick up the house by one corner so you can look under it for things that have been lost, or forgotten, or hidden," King writes.
Nearly all the way through Gerald's Game, the action is centered inside poor Jessie's head. She is beset by her memories, by fears, and particularly a number of females who live collectively inside her head and with whom she converses as she tries to figure out what to do and steel herself to act accordingly.
I think I can offer one reason why copies of Gerald's Game can be had second-hand in such pristine condition: It's practically unreadable, at best not something a person is likely to read over and over, poring over favorite pages or special scenes. It's a monotonous series of flashbacks taking place in the head of a woman who can do little other than spend a long chapter painfully maneuvering herself to drink from a glass of water while she listens to the sound of her late husband's body being chewed on by a starving stray dog. King's powers of description are enough to make you feel like you are right there with her, just not enough to make you want to be there. I suspect a lot of skimming went into the typical reader's experience.
Gerald's Game carries the added weight of being written during a time when King was discovering himself as a male feminist, and calling out his sex for their collective mistreatment of women. He leads the book off with a quote from a short story by W. Somerset Maugham: "You men! You filthy dirty pigs! You're all the same, all of you! Pigs! Pigs!"
And that's what you get in Gerald's Game, men as pigs. Gerald himself is a flabby ladder-climber who brings on his own demise. Several times Jessie pauses to think about him, but only long enough to realize she's not really all that sorry he's gone.
"He had made what almost amounted to a second career out of not hearing what she said unless it was about meals or where they were supposed to be at such-and-such a time on such-and-such a night..." King has Jessie remember in the first moments after Gerald's demise. "The only other exceptions to the general Rules of Ear were unfriendly remarks about his weight or his drinking. He heard the things she had to say on these subjects, and didn't like them, but they were dismissible as part of some mythic natural order: fish gotta swim, bird gotta fly, wife gotta nag."
As the novel and Jessie's stream of consciousness draw on, we learn her upset at Gerald's failure to stop his aggressive sex play drew on something that happened long ago with Jessie's father, when he used a 1963 solar eclipse as a pretext to molest his then-pre-teen daughter. Then he fixed it so she was the one who felt guilty about it. Other depraved men abound in the book; even that poor dog eating Gerald once was owned by a man who took the mongrel on a one-way ride to save some money. As he left the confused animal in a cloud of dust, King tells us the ex-owner was singing "Born Free" and laughing at his cleverness, just in case we already didn't hate him enough.
King dedicates this book to his wife, Tabitha, and her five sisters; what guilt trips did they put him through at family gatherings to inspire this? He originally wrote Gerald's Game in tandem with another book about bad men and the women who suffer from them, Delores Claiborne, using the 1963 solar eclipse as a linking device. Apparently the eclipse forms a kind of psychic channel between the two women, but it's not an idea with a payoff in either book, rather it is a kind of suffused-sisterhood concept holding to the concept of male cruelty, which is even more pronounced in Delores Claiborne than here and comes up most strongly two novels later in Rose Madder, before either his conscience or his in-laws let him up and he finally gave his inner Alan Alda a rest.
The main problem with this novel isn't the man-as-villain thing; horror fiction thrives on simplistic tropes and men behaving badly is indeed believable-enough material to work from. It's more what King does with it that makes me sigh and shake my head. The more Jessie talks and talks to herself, conversing with the various spirit women in her mind, the more you are reminded of King's own voice, that of a bright-but-spastic 12-year-old boy.
Watching her husband's prone body tremble as the stray dog begins to tear out hunks of meat, King has her think to herself: "Get down, Disco Gerald! Never mind the Chicken or the Shag – do the Dog!"
King doesn't skimp on the gore in Gerald's Game; in addition to the title character's fate you also have the memorable moment of Jessie attempting to pull herself free of her handcuffs through a process known in medical circles as "degloving," pulling back the skin from her hand until the tendons beneath are fully exposed. Blood flows copiously, which Jessie needs as a lubricant to help pull her flesh away from constricting metal. Imagine this sort of thing stretched out for a dozen or so pages, and you have a fair idea of how Gerald's Game reads.
There is also a creepy character that appears late in the novel, which Jessie in 12-year-old boy mode dubs "the Space Cowboy" and associates with a particularly nasty kind of death. This is the one trace of the supernatural in Gerald's Game, and its resolution is the one part of the book with any real sting. Alas, it's also more than a bit nonsensical. In this, as with everything else in Gerald's Game, King seems more interested in using the experience to tease out Jessie's coming-out as a fully realized, heroic example of woman power than developing any constructive ambiguity.
The biggest weakness for me throughout Gerald's Game is Jessie. As a character who occupies center-stage all by herself, she's neither engaging nor sympathetic. King usually builds out his protagonists in fuller and more complicated hues; you come to care for them however ridiculous their situation. Here it's reversed; the situation is utterly believable but the character is too ridiculous. King wanted to make Jessie a heroic figure, but left out the stuff that makes us care. No wonder you most often find her today taking up space in consignment racks.
Making a movie of Gerald's Game would be a challenge for any director. Alfred Hitchcock set one of his film's entirely in a single apartment, but at least the characters in the apartment enjoyed freedom of movement. Not so Jessie Burlingame, our protagonist in Gerald's Game. She is handcuffed to a bed in the vacation home she shares with her husband Gerald, now lying dead at the foot of the same bed. He tried to get too aggressive during a bondage game, and she kicked him so hard he suffered a fatal heart attack. Never mind him, though, what about her? Jessie wants to get free, but the cuff keys are out of reach. As night descends, she recalls her suppressed and damaged childhood, realizing she needs to face it to summon the strength she needs to escape the trap she finds herself in now.
"She wants to change the past, but the past is heavy – trying do that, she discovers, is like trying to pick up the house by one corner so you can look under it for things that have been lost, or forgotten, or hidden," King writes.
Nearly all the way through Gerald's Game, the action is centered inside poor Jessie's head. She is beset by her memories, by fears, and particularly a number of females who live collectively inside her head and with whom she converses as she tries to figure out what to do and steel herself to act accordingly.
I think I can offer one reason why copies of Gerald's Game can be had second-hand in such pristine condition: It's practically unreadable, at best not something a person is likely to read over and over, poring over favorite pages or special scenes. It's a monotonous series of flashbacks taking place in the head of a woman who can do little other than spend a long chapter painfully maneuvering herself to drink from a glass of water while she listens to the sound of her late husband's body being chewed on by a starving stray dog. King's powers of description are enough to make you feel like you are right there with her, just not enough to make you want to be there. I suspect a lot of skimming went into the typical reader's experience.
Gerald's Game carries the added weight of being written during a time when King was discovering himself as a male feminist, and calling out his sex for their collective mistreatment of women. He leads the book off with a quote from a short story by W. Somerset Maugham: "You men! You filthy dirty pigs! You're all the same, all of you! Pigs! Pigs!"
And that's what you get in Gerald's Game, men as pigs. Gerald himself is a flabby ladder-climber who brings on his own demise. Several times Jessie pauses to think about him, but only long enough to realize she's not really all that sorry he's gone.
"He had made what almost amounted to a second career out of not hearing what she said unless it was about meals or where they were supposed to be at such-and-such a time on such-and-such a night..." King has Jessie remember in the first moments after Gerald's demise. "The only other exceptions to the general Rules of Ear were unfriendly remarks about his weight or his drinking. He heard the things she had to say on these subjects, and didn't like them, but they were dismissible as part of some mythic natural order: fish gotta swim, bird gotta fly, wife gotta nag."
As the novel and Jessie's stream of consciousness draw on, we learn her upset at Gerald's failure to stop his aggressive sex play drew on something that happened long ago with Jessie's father, when he used a 1963 solar eclipse as a pretext to molest his then-pre-teen daughter. Then he fixed it so she was the one who felt guilty about it. Other depraved men abound in the book; even that poor dog eating Gerald once was owned by a man who took the mongrel on a one-way ride to save some money. As he left the confused animal in a cloud of dust, King tells us the ex-owner was singing "Born Free" and laughing at his cleverness, just in case we already didn't hate him enough.
King dedicates this book to his wife, Tabitha, and her five sisters; what guilt trips did they put him through at family gatherings to inspire this? He originally wrote Gerald's Game in tandem with another book about bad men and the women who suffer from them, Delores Claiborne, using the 1963 solar eclipse as a linking device. Apparently the eclipse forms a kind of psychic channel between the two women, but it's not an idea with a payoff in either book, rather it is a kind of suffused-sisterhood concept holding to the concept of male cruelty, which is even more pronounced in Delores Claiborne than here and comes up most strongly two novels later in Rose Madder, before either his conscience or his in-laws let him up and he finally gave his inner Alan Alda a rest.
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| A cottage like this one, overlooking Maine's coastline, is the setting of King's novel. Image from http://www.coastalmainecottagerentals.com/. |
Watching her husband's prone body tremble as the stray dog begins to tear out hunks of meat, King has her think to herself: "Get down, Disco Gerald! Never mind the Chicken or the Shag – do the Dog!"
King doesn't skimp on the gore in Gerald's Game; in addition to the title character's fate you also have the memorable moment of Jessie attempting to pull herself free of her handcuffs through a process known in medical circles as "degloving," pulling back the skin from her hand until the tendons beneath are fully exposed. Blood flows copiously, which Jessie needs as a lubricant to help pull her flesh away from constricting metal. Imagine this sort of thing stretched out for a dozen or so pages, and you have a fair idea of how Gerald's Game reads.
There is also a creepy character that appears late in the novel, which Jessie in 12-year-old boy mode dubs "the Space Cowboy" and associates with a particularly nasty kind of death. This is the one trace of the supernatural in Gerald's Game, and its resolution is the one part of the book with any real sting. Alas, it's also more than a bit nonsensical. In this, as with everything else in Gerald's Game, King seems more interested in using the experience to tease out Jessie's coming-out as a fully realized, heroic example of woman power than developing any constructive ambiguity.
The biggest weakness for me throughout Gerald's Game is Jessie. As a character who occupies center-stage all by herself, she's neither engaging nor sympathetic. King usually builds out his protagonists in fuller and more complicated hues; you come to care for them however ridiculous their situation. Here it's reversed; the situation is utterly believable but the character is too ridiculous. King wanted to make Jessie a heroic figure, but left out the stuff that makes us care. No wonder you most often find her today taking up space in consignment racks.
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