Like Alfred Hitchcock, King works best in cramped quarters: a mother and child trapped in a car by a rabid St. Bernard (“Cujo”), a bedridden novelist trapped in a farmhouse by his “number-one fan” (“Misery”). This time it’s a woman who spends most of the book cringing into the mattress. Gerald, an uptight lawyer, puts the brio back in his briefs by handcuffing his wife, Jessie, to the bedposts–then dies of a heart attack. Worse: the keys are over on the bureau. Still worse: even if she could get to them, she couldn’t unlock a cuff without a hand free. Worse yet: she’s in a remote lakeside house in Maine. Worse than that, even: there’s this hungry stray dog that–well, you don’t want to know. But of course you want to know. King is neither a deep thinker nor a master stylist, but he has a supreme gift: he can make you see his world right through the page, like the novelist in “Misery” looking through “the hole in the paper” at his imagined scenes as he types.
What makes “Gerald’s Game” a puzzling performance is that King’s imaginative gift threatens to subvert the entertainment value. The distant chain saw Jessie hears as she ponders how to get out of her handcuffs is just a conventional tension builder (it works); the way she escapes is a mere horror-comic gross out (it works). But at the center of the book is no sci-fi monster from beyond the macroverse: it’s Jessie’s long-suppressed memory of being sexually abused at the age of 10 by her father. No highbrow novelist could orchestrate this episode more cunningly, and its elements echo in the most distant corners of the book: the Marvin Gaye song playing on the radio, the smoked glass through which she was viewing a solar eclipse, the semen she washed out of her underwear.
But can horror entertainment accommodate a scene of incest that credibly teeters between the erotic and the disgusting? When that starving dog finally does what you knew it would, the scene is so over the top that dread shades into laughter–helped by King’s broad japing about doggy dinners. But when a child is abused (as King himself realizes), laughter is neither permissible nor possible. So, is “Gerald’s Game” your standard Stephen King novel with a deadly serious episode spoiling the fun? Or is it a novel about incest with gratuitous gore for the groundlings? And while we’re asking questions that ultimately have no answers, why couldn’t we put the damn thing down?
