3.5 StarsBeing a lifelong King fan has its ups and downs, for sure, but it always makes things interesting. Like the time that this book was confiscated by a "concerned teacher" when I brought it to school with me. I think I was somewhere around 14 or 15ish, and had already been reading King for 5-6 years by that point. But she didn't care - this teacher didn't think Stephen King was appropriate reading material, that he wrote trash, and that I was better off reading, I dunno, Milton or something. (I think I got lucky in that whole required reading regard. Because I homeschooled at the tail end of my highschool adventure, I missed out on a lot of that required reading torture - so when I got around to reading the classics as an adult, I actually enjoyed them. Mostly.)Anyway, I eventually did get my book back from her, and finished it, but I don't recall much about the book from my first read. The confiscation and a few other key points were all that remained - the bed, the handcuffs, the dead hubby... and a courtroom. Nothing specific or detailed about the courtroom - just that there was one. Usually, with King, my memory is pretty damn good, so I figure that this one hadn't impressed me way back when. Way-back-when me probably reacted similarly to my more recent reaction after finally getting around to reading Flowers in the Attic: "Meh... that's it?" I can just imagine the hype, the fact that it was King, the confiscation, all combining to create this idea in my 15ish year old head that this book must be EPIC... and then... Not so much. But now-me, who has *coughcough* more years experience of life and stuff, can appreciate the nuance of this story better. I still wouldn't go so far as to call it a favorite, or even top 10, but compared to my non-memory assumption of boredom, it's come up on the list. On the surface, this is a woman struggling for survival in a shitty situation: handcuffed naked to a bed, in a cabin near a lake in the off-season, and nobody knows she's there. Her dead husband is rotting on the floor nearby, after suffering a heart attack. (OK, probably not rotting JUST yet, but it sounds much more dramatic that way.) That's the surface story - and then there's the parallel, which is that in order to free herself physically, she's got to free herself mentally, from her self-induced mind-prison of suppression and shame, centered around another time when she was helpless (this time from innocence and ignorance rather than a pair of cuffs) and someone took advantage of her. Jessie Burlingame as a character is one that, I think, requires a bit of maturity to appreciate. My younger self probably didn't understand her. Even now I found myself thinking of her as cold and closed-off, almost prudish at times - especially towards the beginning of the book, when she's trying to offer consolation sex to her husband to get out of the bondage game he's interested in - and she no longer wants to play. "I'll get on top," and "You can lay back and put your hands behind your head and I'll do the other thing," sound to me probably how they would have sounded to Gerald - unenthusiastic and begrudging. About as exciting as a 2-for-1 sale on root canals. But as we learn more about her, and her secrets which have been locked away for so long, it starts to make sense and form a clearer picture of the woman she grew to be. She experienced something disturbing and traumatic in her childhood... but the secrecy and the shame and the suppression of everything related to that incident is what truly did her harm. And that was all self-inflicted. It's no wonder that she's sexually repressed. Her methods of coping with stress and trauma are interesting. She's split herself up into pieces, and each one thinks that they know best. Goodwife Burlingame is the "grin and bear it" type, the "don't rock the boat" type - who takes all the bad that life has to offer as her due for being a woman. Punkin is the pretty girl locked away so as to not be a temptation to men... Then there are her 'outside' aspects - parts of herself that are based on, or imprints of, influential people in her life. All of these parts form a conflicted whole. I could understand her - even though I found myself not actually liking her very much, and was often extremely frustrated by her lack of initiative.I get that there's a duality in this story - that she had to work through her traumatic past and find acceptance, and, in my opinion, give herself permission to try to free her physical body. I get that she had to go through this process... and I can appreciate it to a point. But, I did find myself willing her to get on with it already. Every single thing was such a production with Jessie. Every thought and movement was debated and criticized and argued over in her head - and then detailed abundantly on the page. I think that this is a product of King's style, though. He was trying to show her thought process, and her split-apart personalities' input, and progress the plot while at the same time ratcheting up the tension as much as possible. And it worked - there were moments when I was reading along at lightning speed to see what would happen next... but then at other times, like when we're in Jessie's headspace, which is a lot, that I just got so tired of the beat-around-the-bush method of thinking - her absolute refusal to think about That Day, and the coaxing, berating, unrelenting aspect arguments that force her to do so anyway. It's so frustrating when, as the reader, I'm just sitting here thinking - can we maybe set aside this ancient history issue for a moment and maybe give just a tiny bit of thought to your current predicament? When she finally does that, all of her aspects constantly have to interrupt and it just got to be a bit much for me. I understood the symbolic breaking the chains, and appreciate it on one level - but I was impatient with it at the same time - especially since it seemed so frivolous to be stressing over the trauma of nearly 30 years prior when she's slowly dying of dehydration and has extremely limited options to avoid that fate. Do I think that she had to "free" the Punkin aspect so that she could help Jessie in return? No. What I think is that Jessie has to go through all of that mental trauma to learn how to cope with life. She has to learn to face her issues and deal with them rather than hiding from them. Which is good and noble and all that - but even during the process of this life-lesson, she's still shirking her own responsibility for saving her own life. She ignores the fact that she's chained up in favor of the more pressing memory-analysis... which eventually triggers a few helpful hints pertaining to her current situation. But if she'd just put all of that energy into finding solutions for freeing herself right away - I think she could have been free a lot sooner. Of course, if that was what she did, there wouldn't be much of a story to tell, would there? Writing-wise, I don't think that this is one of King's best. This has a lot of similarities to Dolores Claiborne, but I think that the latter is a far better book. The style and the narrative just fit better there. In Gerald's Game, the narrative feels... too Kingish, almost. Too quippy and modern (for the time) in an almost masculine-feeling way, which doesn't fit with my impression of Jessie. But this isn't so much of an issue for 90% of the book - it really only started to bother me at the end, when Jessie's writing her therapy/thank-you letter, and the narrative voice, which previously had been 3rd person, shifts into a 1st person mode, but keeps all the same stylistic markers. For example, she mentions being "on medication (the technical hospital term for being stoned out of your gourd)" which... doesn't really seem like a Jessie-ish thing to say. It's just little things like that, things that just feel a touch out of place, that take me out of the story and have me thinking about the hand that wrote it rather than the story it's supposed to be telling. One last thing - The space cowboy's a creepy mofo, that's for sure. I almost wish that there was no closure on that particular horror though. I think that leaving that open ended would have actually been better than the unusually happy ending that we actually got. Sometimes life doesn't give us the closure we want, and we have to learn to live with that. I would have liked to see Jessie do that. Anyway - I'm glad that I re-read this one. I did have some issues with this one, but overall, it's much better than I recalled (or didn't recall) it being.
This book and I have a long history. When I was 9 or so, my mother gave me permission to read books from the “adult section” of the library. She gave me a note to hand to the librarian and all. So, after summer rec, I went into the library and decided I was ready to read some Stephen King. My sister read his books and she said they were better than the RL Stine ones. I had already gone through all the goosebumps and RL Stine “teen books”(don’t know if they are called anything special) and was ready to move onto the good stuff. Well, I didn’t know which King book to start out on, so I grabbed the one I saw first. It was a hard cover, a nice thick book with a set of handcuffs on the cover. I sauntered up to the counter and handed the librarian, my card, my book and my permission slip signed by my mother who worked across the street. I got checked out, and walked the steep hill back to my aunt’s house ready to dig into this book on a hot summer afternoon.(I like to think that the librarian had no idea what the book was about, and even with my permission slip would have stopped me HAD she known what it was about, though I don't know for sure.)What a surprise I was in for. I didn’t get very far in before coming across a line mentioning someone’s fist being inserted in places I didn’t know a whole lot about. I looked around the room making sure no one else read the line I just did, closed the book and headed back down to the library where I turned the book in explaining to the librarian that I wasn’t quite as ready for Stephen King as I thought I was.Fast forward to now. I decided I had better read this book before it gets completely destroyed in Hollywood. I’ve had it on my kindle for a while and finally made the decision to read it. I was off to a slow start because of the release of Mr. Mercedes and then later, the release of Four. If I had to describe this book in one word it would be brutal. It was absolutely one of the most fear-inducing books I have ever read. It made my skin crawl, my heart ache, my stomach knot, my hands shake. I was scared in every way imaginable and my heart broke for Jessie and all that she had been through in her life.There were parts of this book that I struggled even to get through. The sequence where you learn what happened to her on the day of the eclipse was the most disturbing thing to read. The secret that she was so ashamed of, the burden that was placed on her at such a young age just hurt my heart. As if being handcuffed to a bedpost isn’t bad enough, Jessie has to see her dead husband and all that his corpse attracts. The mind doesn’t crack as quickly as we would think it would, or in Jessie’s case, as quickly as she needs it to. She wants the sweet escape that insanity would bring her. Instead she is forced to recall the worst moments of her life, hear voices in her head and see a walking nightmare of a man standing in the corner of the room while she lies there like a piece of meat on display in a case. But wait, is that a man? Or a shadow? Is she hallucinating? Maybe she’s delusional from the lack of food and water….is that a footprint? What I can tell you is that this book had me scared beyond comprehension. I didn’t want to get out of bed in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom; I almost envied Jessie’s shackles. I slept with a flashlight on the nightstand the whole time I read this. (No, that’s not a joke). I was absolutely terrified. Though it took me a long time to finish it and it seemed that I would never finish it, I did love this book. It’s weird though. I feel like reading this book was so similar to Jessie being handcuffed to the bed. The time seemed to drag on forever and I felt like it would never end as she certainly felt. I definitely recommend this book, but beware, it’s a brutal read. Might I suggest you read it in broad daylight in a wide open space with lots of people around you? Just in case…
What do You think about Gerald's Game (1994)?
Suzanne wrote: "I have this! Still haven't read one of his, Carol.. Where to start?! Your teview has given me food for thought ;))"Boy! You have lots of great Stephen King reads ahead of you.....as do I. I read Gerald's Game a couple years ago, and am frustrated bc any time I get a "like" on one of my older reviews and see I didn't mark it "own a copy" I mark it not to add to my update feed and it pops up anyway....oh well.....perhaps that is a good thing. Glad you noticed it Suzanne. I love his books!!!! :-)
—Carol
Do you hear that sound? It's the sound of a million pairs of legs slamming closed, a million "not tonight, honey, I have a headache"s, as men everywhere stare at their newly purchased, shiny handcuffs and their newly purchased, no holes in the waistband or crotch Jockey shorts, realizing with a sinking feeling that no, they will not be having any sex ever again, thank you very much, Mr. King. Okay, maybe not. But I suppose it's a possibility--I mean, I know people who can't walk past storm drains and the imagery in this book is no less terrifying than the imagery in IT. In this, Jessie Burlingame's husband has a heart attack during sex, leaving her handcuffed to the headboard for an unspecified length of time with very little chance of rescue. The only company she has are the voices in her head, her husband's dead body, thankfully not on her but on the floor a short distance away (he fell off the bed), and a hungry stray... and I'm sure anyone reading can fill in the rest. Oh, and a shadow man she, in her delirium, starts calling the Space Cowboy, who might be as much in her head as the voices or who might actually be real. As always, Stephen King leaves nothing to the imagination, and all the scenes are appropriately gory or difficult to read (especially the scenes/flashbacks of her childhood molestation by her father, though not an ongoing one, not that it really makes it any better). No character in this book is spared--they're all good and bad, abusive and abused, and that's a really brilliant way to approach what is a very sensitive subject. Going through Jessie's memories of her father is very realistic and interesting, her victim-blaming especially, and I like how even though it didn't seem to tie in at all, it finally all became one overall story.
—Traci
I've re-read Gerald's Game several times since its 1992 publication, and have just finished listening to it as an audiobook. Here's what I know for sure: 1) this story has lost none of its power over me, despite the fact I know everything that's going to happen (quite an impressive feat for a largely plot-driven suspense piece) 2) it is without question, one of King's most underrated, overlooked novels. As of this writing its Goodreads rating is 3.26. Keeping it company in the basement is the much maligned Tommyknockers (incidentally another favorite of mine) and From a Buick 8 (also 3.26 but as this is my least favorite King novel I tend to agree with that number).3) finally, if you aren't already a raving fan of this book I'm not going to change your mind. That's fair. We can't all love the same thing, especially when it comes to books. What I hope I can do is capture just a smidge (like lightning in a bottle) the reasons why -- if you haven't yet -- you must give this book a chance. For a lot of Constant Readers, Gerald's Game will always be linked to its sister novel -- Dolores Claiborne -- as both books were released the same year and King meant them to be companion novels to one another. Their narratives are cleverly linked by a solar eclipse. As a literary device it is an interesting one, but for me it isn't what makes these novels so special or spectacular. In fact, you could remove that connection and neither novel would suffer from its absence. No, what makes each novel memorable is the writing, the characterization and most of all, King's sheer balls to the wall commitment to the delivery of the story and its outcome. As companion novels, there are some notable similarities; namely, the exploration of female abuse at the hands of male aggressors. There are painful descriptions of domestic battery and sexual molestation. King bravely (and quite successfully I would argue) enters the terrain of victim humiliation, degradation, and the lingering psychological effects such acts guarantee. In many ways, these are King's most feminist novels and I don't think it a coincidence that Gerald's Game is dedicated to his wife Tabitha and her five sisters.Yet for me, this isn't what defines Gerald's Game which I would argue has much more in common with Misery, King's Bachman novel The Long Walk, and his short story "Survivor Type". I say this because in all of these what King is really doing is looking at the human body under brutalizing physical duress... at the body in extremis and what humans are genetically hardwired to do to survive and go on living another day. Excruciating physical peril undeniably comes with a psychological component and no one writes that better than King using his own heady and addictive brew of storytelling. Jessie Burlingame -- our "damsel" in distress -- is facing certain death. She is trapped, chained in handcuffs to the bed she shares with her husband Gerald in their summer house on the lake. But it's not summer. It's fall, and the lake is empty. Everyone has gone home. There is no one to hear her scream or beg for release. One of the reasons I love Gerald's Game so much is the "solve the puzzle" locked room mystery of it. It's like one of those brain teasers (you know the one about the melted icicle?) In this case, you have one woman handcuffed to a bed. How do you get her out of them (playing fair, no tricks, no deus ex machina). How will she suffer? What demands will be placed on her body, on her mind? This is where King shines. (view spoiler)[One of my favorite scenes from the entire novel is Jessie's quest for the glass of water resting on the bed's headboard. It is agonizing suspense I almost couldn't stand it. Sheer mastery of the craft I tell you. It would have had Hitchcock foaming at the mouth to film it. (hide spoiler)]
—Trudi
