As his biggest fan, she's driven almost entirely by a desire to see him write the books that she wants him to write. She lives in the middle of nowhere, and used to be a nurse, and she can, she tells him, nurse him back to health. Paul has a car crash – the irony – and is rescued from the wreck by Annie Wilkes, his "biggest fan".
And then he writes an utterly different novel, Fast Cars, packed full of violence, and swearing, and catharsis. So, he does what any sane writer who wants to write other stories would do: he kills her off, in a book that, at the novel's start, is still unpublished. His main character, the wonderfully named Misery Chastain, is loved by his fans, but not so much by her author. Paul Shelton is a much-loved author of a specific kind of genre fiction: the bodice-ripper. Misery has no supernatural elements, focusing instead on a story that is actually desperately sad, and, to my mind, hugely personal to King.
The books authored by that pseudonym, as I've harped on about before, were nastier in a way than King's traditional output their bad guys were more human, and the books less supernatural. It began life as what would have been the final Richard Bachman book before King killed him off. While I might have my hyperbole hat on, this book deserves it.
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