Stephen King - Misery

12:50.14 - Thursday 6th September 2007   (Link to This Entry)

Something that's been bugging me for years is the end of Stephen King's otherwise brilliant book, Misery, which wasn't repeated in the film starring James Caan and Kathy Bates since the relevent scene was changed anyway.

In the book, Paul Sheldon wakes from a drug-induced sleep to find himself tied to the bed. Annie enters, makes a speech about hobbling and promptly chops Paul's foot off with an axe.

At the end of the book, Annie has crawled out to the shed and has her hand wrapped around the handle of her chainsaw. This smacks of a last-ditch attempt to get a little bit more horror into it, and is tacky as a result - I think it would have been much more effective to have had her going for the axe again since she's already used it on him once.

That said, she also cut off his thumb with a carving knife, didn't she? Maybe it's an escalation of hostilities in retaliation for being smacked in the head with a typewriter.