1992 1st year edition; Viking publishers and Penguin Books publishers; hardbound with black boards and red foil lettering on cover and spine; book very good condition with unmarded pages; decorative dust jacket very good.
Description -
Gerald's Game is a 1992 suspense novel by American writer Stephen King. The story is about a woman whose husband dies of a heart attack 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, and Marcella Spruce." Originally the book was intended to be a companion piece to King's novel Dolores Claiborne, with the connecting theme of two women in crisis caught in the path of an eclipse, though this aspect was greatly reduced by the time the books were published.
Plot -
Jessie Burlingame and her husband Gerald have gone to a secluded cabin in western Maine 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 enjoyed 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, has a fatal heart attack, and dies. Jessie is alone in the cabin, unable to move off the bed or call for help.
Eventually, a stray dog starts feeding on Gerald's body. Jessie is troubled by a terrifying, deformed apparition, whom she initially mistakes for the spirit of her long-dead father. Jessie begins to think of this visitor as the "Space Cowboy" (after a line from a Steve Miller song, "The Joker"), saying out loud that he is "not anyone", and that he was only "made of moonlight".