While Stephen King is widely considered the master of literary horror, he’s also proven he can effectively write outside of the spooky genre. For instance, he’s published quite a few thrillers over the years, including Dreamcatcher (2001), Billy Summers (2021), and Misery (1987).
Despite being published almost 40 years ago, King is still receiving accolades for Misery, which focuses on author Paul Sheldon, who has the misfortune of coming across Annie Wilkes, a deranged fan who is very passionate about his book series. The publication Collider recently named the novel “the most intense thriller book of all time.” The ranking, published on August 17, also included suspenseful works like Ripley’s Game by Patricia Highsmith from 1974, 2000’s House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, and The Big Nowhere by James Ellroy, published in 1988.
Misery has a score of 4.22 out of 5 from 854,838 readers on Goodreads.
Stephen King Shared What His 1987 Book Was Really About in a 2014 Interview
In a 2014 interview with Rolling Stone magazine, King said that Annie represented his substance abuse issues, referencing that he battled with a cocaine addiction until the mid-’80s. He explained that as a father to three young children and a best-selling author in the ’70s and 80s, he tried “to balance things out” while using drugs.
“But little by little, the family life started to show cracks. I was usually pretty good about it. I was able to get up and make the kids breakfast and get them off to school. And I was strong; I had a lot of energy. I would’ve killed myself otherwise. But the books start to show it after a while. Misery is a book about cocaine. Annie Wilkes is cocaine. She was my number-one fan,” said King to Rolling Stone.
Late filmmaker Rob Reiner, who directed the acclaimed 1990 Misery movie based on King’s 1987 novel, said that King was inspired by a real-life crime while penning the book in a May 2025 panel for Turner Classic Movies. According to Reiner, who died in December 2025, Annie “is based on a real person,” who “was a nurse.”
“There was a woman who used to have this Munchausen by proxy kind of attitude, and she would get in this maternity ward, and these babies would get sick, and she would make them sick and then try to bring them back, and she couldn’t. And then she would go to the funerals of these little infants,” said Reiner during the panel. “And then she got, you know, shifted from hospital to hospital. They finally figured out this is a woman that’s, you know, doing that. And Stephen King read that, and he based the character on that woman.”
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