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Summary
Summary
A different kind of bedtime story from Stephen King, as a game of seduction between a husband and wife ends in death. But the nightmare has only just begun...
Author Notes
Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine, on September 21, 1947. After graduating with a Bachelor's degree in English from the University of Maine at Orono in 1970, he became a teacher. His spare time was spent writing short stories and novels.
King's first novel would never have been published if not for his wife. She removed the first few chapters from the garbage after King had thrown them away in frustration. Three months later, he received a $2,500 advance from Doubleday Publishing for the book that went on to sell a modest 13,000 hardcover copies. That book, Carrie, was about a girl with telekinetic powers who is tormented by bullies at school. She uses her power, in turn, to torment and eventually destroy her mean-spirited classmates. When United Artists released the film version in 1976, it was a critical and commercial success. The paperback version of the book, released after the movie, went on to sell more than two-and-a-half million copies.
Many of King's other horror novels have been adapted into movies, including The Shining, Firestarter, Pet Semetary, Cujo, Misery, The Stand, and The Tommyknockers. Under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, King has written the books The Running Man, The Regulators, Thinner, The Long Walk, Roadwork, Rage, and It. He is number 2 on the Hollywood Reporter's '25 Most Powerful Authors' 2016 list.
King is one of the world's most successful writers, with more than 100 million copies of his works in print. Many of his books have been translated into foreign languages, and he writes new books at a rate of about one per year. In 2003, he received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In 2012 his title, The Wind Through the Keyhole made The New York Times Best Seller List. King's title's Mr. Mercedes and Revival made The New York Times Best Seller List in 2014. He won the Edgar Allan Poe Award in 2015 for Best Novel with Mr. Mercedes. King's title Finders Keepers made the New York Times bestseller list in 2015. Sleeping Beauties is his latest 2017 New York Times bestseller.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
While this is one of the best-written stories King has ever published, it will offend many through sheer bad taste. Jessie and Gerald Burlingame have been married for 20 years. Kinky sex is Gerald's game; lately he has taken to handcuffing his wife to the bedposts. During one such session, via a series of bizarre circumstances, Jessie accidentally kills her husband, and for the next 28 hours she is trapped. King effectively uses this tragicomic conceit to take us deep into the mind of ``Goodwife Burlingame.''sic For the first third of the book he is at the top of his form, creating in Jessie one of his most intense character studies. Then, Jessie's ruminations lead her to remember a long-repressed episode of incest that is startling not because it becomes a central element of the plot, but because the details of the sexual relationship between father and daughter are salaciously--and lengthily--described. The gory stuff--how Jessie escapes her handcuffs, for example--is prime King, but this is subsumed in the book's general tastelessness. A lame wrap-up to what might have been a thrilling short story only further compromises the enjoyment readers might have found in this surprisingly exploitative work. 1.5 million first printing; $750,000 ad/promo; BOMC main selection. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
King takes it over the top, way over the top, in an exquisitely horrifying frightfest about a woman forced to face her deepest fears--and then some. Jessie Burlingame, 39, is getting plenty tired of being handcuffed to the bed of her Maine summerhouse by her attorney- husband, Gerald, so that he can play his silly sex games. So when Gerald refuses to uncuff her, she kicks him in the family jewels, accidentally smashing them to kingdom come--and the terror begins. Each hand cuffed to a bedpost, the keys out of reach, Jessie howls for help--and is answered by a feral dog that proceeds to chow down on Gerald's face in lavishly described, muscle-shredding detail. As the long hours pass, cramps bite like iron jaws into Jessie's own flesh; but they're nothing compared to the thirst raging through her. Can she somehow reach the glass of water on the shelf above her head? It takes the most tightly controlled writing King's ever done to find out, but soon even the thirst pales beside the guilt- gargoyles that Jessie's mind begins to throw up, all pointing at the sun-eclipsed day so long ago when she became much more to Daddy than just his little girl. The minutes tick by, each an agony--and King's just warming up. Night falls: What's that shadow in the corner? The one with the smirking face of Death? And how can Jessie, growing into a heartbreakingly brave heroine, escape? She tugs and tugs at her wrists but can't slip them past the cuffs. Is there a hot, sticky lubricant at hand? He's not really going to describe that, is he? But, with a ferocious gleam in his eye, King does, out-splatterpunking everyone else on the planet in a tour de force that--even given some overindulgent psychologizing, awfully strong echoes of Cujo and Misery, and a long, peculiar anticlimax--is his most wrenching novel to date. This one is really scary.
Booklist Review
It's fall in rural Maine, and Gerald and Jessie Burlingame have retreated to their forest cabin for a little fun of the sexual variety. Bondage, to be exact, with Jessie spread-eagled and handcuffed to a bed and Gerald having his way with her. And then he suffers a fatal heart attack. Most of the rest of King's unusually short (for him) new novel is concerned with Jessie's ordeal as she struggles to get loose while Gerald's body rots. The stress of the situation has her personality splitting into several distinct voices of conscience, each a nagger, each with its own wisdom and foolishness. Eventually, after gruesome sufferings and strategems that involve plenty of pain and bleeding, and after hallucinatorily replaying the previous worst incident of her life and confounding it with the present one, she escapes. Her trials aren't over, though. She still has to deal with the corpse-like figure she thinks invaded the cabin just as she freed herself and that pursued her to her car and has haunted her during her convalescence. Was--is--it real? Somewhat like King's earlier naturalistic shocker, Misery, this book is grim and nasty. Unlike Misery, it's not semiconsciously misogynistic. Quite the reverse: it seems to say that virtually no man and no men's institution can treat a woman decently. A very disturbing stylistic tour de force, this may be King's darkest book. (Reviewed May 1, 1992)0670846503Ray Olson