Gerald's Game
First edition cover
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| Author | Stephen King |
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| Cover artist | Rob Wood |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Suspense |
| Publisher | Viking |
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Publication date
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May 1992 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 332 |
| ISBN | |
Gerald's Game is a 1992 suspense novel by Stephen King. The story is about a woman who accidentally kills her husband while she is handcuffed to a bed, and, following the subsequent realization 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 her sisters: "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."
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 day off. 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. He falls from the bed to the floor, cracks his head, has a heart attack, and quickly dies. Jessie is alone in the cabin, unable to move off the bed, 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 years. 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 had been, and that she sacrificed a potentially happy life for the security of Gerald's paycheck by being a trophy wife without children.
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