Gerald's Game

Gerald's Game  

First edition cover
Author(s) Stephen King
Cover artist Rob Wood
Country United States
Language English
Genre(s) Horror novel
Publisher Viking
Publication date May 1992
Media type Print (Hardcover)
Pages 352
ISBN 978-0670846504
Preceded by Needful Things
Followed by Dolores Claiborne

Gerald's Game (1992) is a psychological horror novel by Stephen King. The story is about a woman who accidentally kills her husband while she is handcuffed to the bed as part of a bondage game, and, following the subsequent realisation that she is trapped with little hope of rescue, begins to let the voices inside her head take over.

The book is dedicated to King's wife Tabitha and five other people: "This book is dedicated, with love and admiration, to six good women: Margaret Spruce Morehouse, Catherine Spruce Graves, Stephanie Spruce Leonard, Anne Spruce Labree, Tabitha Spruce King, Marcella Spruce."

It is one of the most popular of Stephen King's standalone novels to have never been adapted for television or film.

Plot

The story begins with Jessie Burlingame and her husband Gerald in the bedroom of their secluded cabin in western Maine, where they have gone for an off-beat romantic weekend. Gerald, a successful lawyer with an aggressive personality, has been able to reinvigorate the couple's sex life by handcuffing Jessie to the bed. Jessie has been into the game before, but suddenly balks. As Gerald starts to crawl on top of her, knowing her protests are real but ignoring them anyway, she kicks him in the stomach and in the groin, and he then has a heart attack, falls from the bed to the floor, hits his head, and dies. Jessie is alone in the cabin and unable to move or summon help.

The only things that show up are a hungry stray dog named Prince that starts feeding on Gerald's body and a terrifying, deformed apparition that may or may not be real, whom Jessie first mistakes for the ghost of her long dead father but dismisses it later. Jessie begins to think of this bizarre visitor as "The Space Cowboy" (after a line from a Steve Miller song, "The Joker"). A combination of panic and thirst eventually causes Jessie to hallucinate. She hears voices in her head, each one ostensibly the voice of a person in her life, primarily "The Goodwife" or "Goody Burlingame" (a somewhat Puritanical version of Jessie), Ruth Neary (an old college friend), and Nora Callighan (her ex-psychiatrist), both of whom Jessie hasn't spoken to in decades. These voices represent different parts of her personality which help her extract a painful childhood memory she has kept suppressed for many years. She was sexually abused by her father at age ten during a solar eclipse that occurred in her Maine hometown. She also begins to realize how unhappy her marriage was, and that she sacrificed the life she wanted for the security of Gerald's paycheck by being a trophy wife without children.

This internal dialogue is mixed with descriptions of Jessie's more and more desperate attempts to get out of the handcuffs, first by trying to break the headboard she was cuffed to then by trying to slip off the bed and push the bed to the bureau where the keys were placed. Finally she does escape after one of the voices in her head tells her that if she stays another night, The Space Cowboy, who she dreamed of as a manifestation of Death, will more than likely take a part of her to add to its trophy "fishing creel" filled with jewelry and human bones, killing her in the process. Jessie escapes the handcuffs by slicing her arm open all the way around on a broken glass and giving herself a degloving injury in order to lubricate her skin enough for the cuffs, which were made for men and not women and thus almost loose enough for her to slip out normally, to slide off her right hand. She is then able to move behind the bed, push it over to the bureau and use one of the keys to unlock her left handcuff. However, she has lost a lot of blood and passes out shortly after. When she awakens, it is now nighttime, and the Space Cowboy has made his way back into the house. Jessie confronts him and throws her wedding ring at his box of jewelry and bones, thinking that is what he wanted all along, then turns and runs out of the house. She is able to make it into her car and finally escape the house, but is terrified to discover the Space Cowboy sitting in the backseat of the car. Jessie crashes out of fear and is knocked unconscious, and it is later revealed that she only imagined the Space Cowboy in the backseat.

The story cuts to months later with Jessie recuperating from the incident and being looked after by a nurse. An ambitious law associate of her husband's assists her in covering up the real incident to protect her and the entire law firm from scandal, as well as assisting her in her recuperation. At the end, we get to read the letter that Jessie writes to Ruth Neary, detailing what happened after the incident and her recuperation process, which is slow but very meaningful. One of the passages in the letter revolves around a serial necrophiliac and murderer named Raymond Andrew Joubert making his way through Maine; it turns out he was the Space Cowboy, confirmed when Jessie confronted him in a court hearing and Joubert mimicked Jessie's arm positions while she was in the handcuffs. He also repeated her frightened exclamations that Joubert was "not anyone," and that he was only "made of moonlight." Jessie also mentions what became of Prince who gnawed on Gerald. He is shot and killed. Initially, his owner had abandoned him in Maine and driven back to Massachusetts, simply because he didn't want to pay for the dog's license.

The only true supernatural event in the story occurs as described during one of Jessie's flashbacks, when, during a particularly stressful incident at the time of childhood, she has a waking dream.

Connection to other works by King

In King's subsequent novel, Dolores Claiborne, it is revealed that the titular main character shared a telepathic connection with Jessie Burlingame on two occasions, first during the solar eclipse when Jessie was assaulted by her father, and later when she is handcuffed to the bed. The two novels were initially conceived to be part of a single volume titled In the Path of the Eclipse. Later editions of Dolores Claiborne have a foreword that explains the connection between the two.

Sheriff Alan Pangborn and Deputy Norris Ridgewick are mentioned near the end of Gerald's Game. Both characters appeared previously in The Dark Half and Needful Things, set in the fictional town of Castle Rock.

In the later King novel Lisey's Story, Lisey often refers to the unbalanced fans her husband's horror novels have created as "Space Cowboys." The psychiatric institution Juniper Hill has also received frequent, albeit brief, mention in King's stories.

When Jessie is thinking about boogeymen and other things in the dark that children are afraid of, she refers to them as It.

Raymond Andrew Joubert, the fictional acromegalic, insane multiple murderer and necrophiliac who terrorizes Jessie Burlingame bears the surname of John Joubert, a notorious serial killer active in Nebraska during the 1980s. His crimes are based upon the atrocities committed by the infamous Ed Gein. King has used Nebraska as a setting for his stories on several occasions, most notably Gatlin in "Children of the Corn" and neighboring town Hemingford Home where Mother Abagail convened the virtuous survivors of the superflu in The Stand.

The police photograph of the wicker box owned by Joubert is contained in Evidence Box #217, which is the number of the room in the Overlook Hotel that Danny Torrance was advised to stay away from in The Shining.

See also