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Title Gerald's Game

Author	Stephen King
Cover artist	Rob Wood
Country	USA
Language	English
Genre(s)	Horror
Publisher	Viking
Released	1992
Pages	332
ISBN	ISBN 0-670-84650-3

Gerald's Game (1992) is a novel by Stephen King. It stands as one of the few properties in King's work that hasn't been adapted for television or film.

The story begins with Jessie Burlingame and her husband Gerald in the bedroom of their solitary cabin in western Maine, where they have gone for an off-beat romantic weekend. Gerald, who is a successful lawyer with an aggressive personality, has been able to re-invigorate the couple's sex life by fastening Jessie to the bed with handcuffs. Jessie has been into the game before, but suddenly she balks at the idea. As Gerald starts to crawl on top of Jessie pretending her protests are fake, she kicks him hard in the crotch which causes him to have a fatal heart attack. Jessie is alone in the cabin and unable to move or summon help. There is nothing to do but see if anyone shows up.

The only things that do show up are a hungry stray dog that starts feeding on Gerald's body and an unpleasant, deformed apparition that may or may not be real; 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 people in her life, primarily Ruth Neary (an old college friend) and Nora Callighan (her ex-psychiatrist), both of whom Jessie hasn't spoken to in decades. These voices represent different parts of her personality which help her extract a painful childhood memory she has kept suppressed for all these 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 the state of her marriage to Gerald, which has produced an unhappy housewife in Jessie, who realizes that she has given up her life's choices to fulfill her husband's wishes of him bringing home the paycheck.

This internal dialogue is mixed with descriptions of Jessie's more and more desperate attempts to get out of the handcuffs. Finally she does escape after one of the voices in her head tells her that if she stays another night, The Space Cowboy will more than likely take a part of her to add to its trophy medical bag filled with jewelry and human bones. Jessie escapes by slicing her hand open all the way around on a broken glass and then using the blood and the medical procedure of "degloving" to escape. The story cuts to months later with Jessie recuperating from the incident and being looked after by a nurse. An ambitious law associate of her husband's assists her in covering up the real incident, as well as assisting her in her recuperation. At the end, we get to read the letter that Jessie writes to one of the people she heard in her head, detailing what happened after the incident and her recuperation process, which is slow but very meaningful. One of the passages in the letter revolves around a serial necrophiliac and murderer making his way through Maine, and how he might relate to the Space Cowboy. The novel even mentions what became of the stray dog that gnawed on Gerald. The dog is shot and killed. However, there is evidence that links the dog to its owner, who had abandoned it in Maine and driven back to Massachusetts, simply because he didn't want to pay for the dog's license.

The only true supernatural event in the story occurs as described during one of Jessie's flashbacks, when, during a particularly stressful incident at the time of childhood, she has a waking dream. In King's subsequent novel Dolores Claiborne, it is revealed that the vision was actually a telepathic contact between the main characters of the two novels.