Gerald's Game

by Stephen King

(New York: Signet, 1993)

Paperback, 445 Pages, Fiction

ISBN: 9780451176462, US$7.50

ABCD Rating: CHECK OUT

A Different Kind of Bedtime Story…

From the Cover: On a warm weekday in October, in the lovely summer home of Gerald and Jessie Burlingame, a game is about to begin. It’s a game to be played between husband and wife, and a game that has Jessie being innocently handcuffed to the bedposts. Then, in one horrible, violent act, Gerald is dead and Jessie—well, she’s alone and still chained to the bed. But Jessie’s about to have company that goes beyond all of her worst nightmares.

My Review: Gerald’s Game is a interesting novel in Stephen King’s career. It comes at an odd time in his career, a transition of sorts, away from pure horror (of course, he heads back there rather quickly after writing Gerald’s Game, but that’s a discussion for another day). He had all-but destroyed his fictional town of Castle Rock in Needful Things the year before Gerald’s Game and three years prior had put what was supposed to be the final nail in the coffin of Richard Bachman with The Dark Half. Gerald’s represents, as I’ve said, a severe transition in King’s writing and comes as part of a kind of triptych of “women’s issues”: Gerald’s Game (1992), Dolores Claiborne (1992) and Rose Madder (1995). King seems to have been experimenting with the “Female Voice” in these novels (some of his only ones with a female as the main protagonist, the other exception being The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon and Lisey’s Story) although he also seems to have abandoned it for the more familiar male protagonist that he favors (The Green Mile, Desperation and Bag of Bones come immediately on the heels of Rose Madder).

Gerald’s Game is an interesting book in King’s canon because of these reasons, and I think because of the fact that it is such a departure from King’s standard horror novel of people in supernatural peril and because it is a uniquely female novel (so to speak) in his œuvre that, and also because of the highly sexually-charged subject matter (dealing as it does with bondage games and incest) it is a “forgotten” King novel (when I was running Teasers from the novel, more than one person commented that they hadn’t heard of this book).

Well, what do I think of Gerald’s Game? The jury is still out for me. I’m not sure if this is a tour de force novel for King and a breakthrough for King into the authentic female voice or if it is an excessively masochistic and misogynistic novel wherein the main female character is sexually bound both literally (to her marriage bed) and figuratively (to her husband and father) and displayed as a violently erotic spectacle, chained to her bed clad in nothing more than a pair of barely-there bikini panties … and endures every masochistic and misogynistic desire that King can throw at her. (I guess I’m more in the later camp than I realized.)

As far as King novels go … it is not his best (I still maintain that The Shining is as tight and perfect a novel as King has ever written), but in terms of female characters and, more importantly, authentic female characters Gerald’s Game (in spite of its masochistic and misogynistic tendencies) comes much closer to authenticity than does Rose Madder, but maybe not even as good as Dolores Claiborne does because while Gerald’s Game is told in the third-person limited-omniscient voice (with only a limited peek into Jessie’s first-person voice at the end), Dolores Claiborne is entirely told in the first-person voice of the titular character.

So, I guess the bottom line is that I would give a qualified recommendation of Gerald’s Game: it is, as I have said, a pretty decent attempt on King’s point to create the authentic female voice, but … and this is a BIG BUT … but, it is an incredibly violent and disturbing novel on a lot of levels, so unless that is your cup of tea, I’d give Gerald’s Game a pass.