Stephen King was a mess when he wrote Misery. He was fucked-up on drugs and booze and dealing with a fanbase that didn’t much like him deviating from the horror upon which he made his name. Sure, he satiated the masses with It in 1986, but he was still stung by their anger at 1984’s The Eyes Of The Dragon, a fantasy tale that didn’t have enough blood and guts. Would he forever be beholden to his base? It was anxieties like these, not to mention the creeping feeling that he was becoming imprisoned by his addictions, that led to Misery, a story that burst out of him after he dreamed of a writer being held hostage by a psychotic fan. That fan turned into Annie Wilkes, an unstable nurse who, after finding her favorite author, Paul Sheldon, in the wreckage of a car crash, treats his injuries, tortures him into subservience, and, eventually, forces him to resurrect the character of his recently shelved romance series. Though the piece finds horror in the obsessive fan, it’s more about King reckoning with his fame, his legacy, and whether he had the strength to break free of his bonds, be they inflicted or self-imposed. Kathy Bates won an Oscar for her work as Wilkes in the 1990 film adaptation, and Lizzy Caplan will play a younger version of the character in the second season of Hulu’s Castle Rock. Whoever she stans in a pre-Sheldon universe, we don’t envy them. [Randall Colburn]