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    Gerald's Game
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    Gerald's Game
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    Gerald's Game
    Audiobook13 hours

    Gerald's Game

    Written by Stephen King

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    On a warm October day, Jessie Burlingame lies in the bedroom of her secluded lake home, listening to the far-off sounds of the country; the cry of a loon, the growl of a chain saw, the bark of a lonesome dog. Nearer, she hears the banging of the screen door, left unlatched in the autumn breeze; nearer still, the click of the key locking the second pair of handcuffs that chain her to the bed. Gerald Burlingame, her husband of 17 years, looms over her, grin on his face, gleam in his eye, lust in his heart. This is Gerald's favorite game—little kinky, perhaps, but all in good fun.

    And then, quite suddenly, the fun is over. Gerald's heart fails him in the heat of passion, leaving Jessie hideously trapped and dreadfully alone. As darkness gathers in the room that is now Jessie's whole world, she must face not only the terror of never escaping, but the most excruciating truths about her life: the murky secrets that brought her here in the first place.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighBridge Audio
    Release dateAug 1, 2008
    ISBN9781598877663
    Author

    Stephen King

    Stephen King is the author of more than sixty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes the short story collection You Like It Darker, Holly, Fairy Tale, Billy Summers, If It Bleeds, The Institute, Elevation, The Outsider, Sleeping Beauties (cowritten with his son Owen King), and the Bill Hodges trilogy: End of Watch, Finders Keepers, and Mr. Mercedes (an Edgar Award winner for Best Novel and a television series streaming on Peacock). His novel 11/22/63 was named a top ten book of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller. His epic works The Dark Tower, It, Pet Sematary, Doctor Sleep, and Firestarter are the basis for major motion pictures, with It now the highest-grossing horror film of all time. He is the recipient of the 2020 Audio Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award, the 2014 National Medal of Arts, and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King. 

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    Reviews for Gerald's Game

    3.5/5

    1,863 ratings45 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Grabbed this b/c of the attention it’s been getting on Netflix. Wanted to read before watching. I just wasn’t a fan of this. Some parts were really great and a bit gruesome and unexpected—but for me it was just so drawn out and really lost my interest towards the end.
      Love the King—not this one.
    • 4/5
      Stephen King. 'Nuff said. This has some great twists and turns and reads well. It is King at, maybe not his all time best, but certainly at the top of his game. Suspense, plot twists, creepiness, psychological drama, and good character development - what more could you want?
    • 5/5
      This was WAY better the second time around! I first read this in the mid- to late-90's, I think. I remember finding it interesting and well-written, but it never jumped into my little group of favorites of King's. However, this past summer (as a total solar eclipse was set to occur in my little part of the world), I decided to re-read Dolores Claiborne.... and, on the heels of that, I decided to revisit this book, which I'd basically found to be "just okay".
      I don't know if it's because I've been married for twenty years now and could relate to the intricacies of Jessie & Gerald's relationship, or if it's just that I'm older and have had more life experience than before? I'm really not sure. What I do know is that this book was AH-MAZING! I love the strong feminist stance that ends up shining through the whole story. (Incidentally, I've always admired King's feminist tendencies--he does such a GREAT job of writing strong female characters without making them hideous, nasty bitches or dried up, frigid old prunes. Good on you, Mr. King!)
      I've been spending some time, recently, listening to many of the King books I've known and loved for years.... it's interesting to hear it read in someone else's voice. I've found, overall, that simple nuances are brought forth more frequently than when I'm reading the print version.... I'll never stop reading print, believe me. I just like the new light the audio versions are shining on my old favorites!
    • 5/5
      I first read this book 20 years ago (geez, doesn't seem like it was that long ago), and I remembered the horror of being handcuffed to a bed. To my surprise, the really horrific part of this book is a child being taught to blame herself for being molested. OH and the creepy monster in the dark. Great read.
    • 5/5
      This book is psychologically horrifying. I breezed through it in a day or so many years ago & I've read it multiple times since. Amazing, as always.
    • 4/5
      The book starts out in surprising territory for King: a sexual game being played by Gerald Burlingame, who has just handcuffed his wife Jessie to the bed. This is not the first time this game has been played -- it's an old routine at this point, one which Jessie never particularly liked and has now grown quite bored with, to the point of frustration. She tells her husband that she doesn't want to do it this time, but he presses on. In the ensuing struggle, he has a heart attack and dies, leaving her handcuffed to the bed, in the middle of nowhere.

      That's when the story really starts. King's real strength in this story is not just in telling what happens to Jessie in her predicament, but King uses this device to tell the story of how she got there in the first place. What sort of woman is Jessie? What events led her to this place, this man, this scenario? In the course of the story, as Jessie struggles to free herself from her bonds, we also find out why she is there.

      In the end, "Gerald's Game" is not one of King's easier stories to read. It deals with some real issues, and its terrors are only too plausible. Unlike "The Shining" or "Cujo," it's difficult to put this book down at the end and convince oneself that the same thing couldn't happen to you. It's not a book about the scary monster that comes from under the bed. No, in the final analysis "Gerald's Game" is about the monsters who sleep in the bed with you, cleverly disguised, and about those monsters who were there to shape your past.
    • 4/5
      * spoilers *Jessie Burlingame and her husband Gerald go to their secluded cabin in western Maine to take a romantic weekend together. Recently, Gerald has been spicing up their lovemaking with tying Jessie up that eventually led to handcuffing her. She is growing tired of the game and it makes her feel demeaned, but she goes along with it to make him happy. When they get started, she reaches her limit and demands to be released. Gerald, even knowing her protests are real, pretends to assume it's part of their game and goes to force himself on her. She responds with a double kick to the stomach and groin that leaves Gerald writhing on the floor. He has what looks like a heart attack and dies, leaving Jessie with both hands handcuffed to the bed, the door ajar, and the keys across the room.Jessie is a typical wife with a typical husband. They've been drifting apart for years and both have regrets about their life as they near middle age. The light bondage in their lovemaking was the first fire they had seen in a long time. Unfortunately, Gerald chose to try to take advantage of her vulnerable position even after years of marriage together and I had no sympathy for his fate. However, Jessie is now trapped with no one expecting her. It could be a week before anyone thinks to look for her. Her world suddenly shrinks. Things across the room, including the keys to the handcuffs, may as well be in another universe as there's no hope of access. Her entire world centers around getting a cup of ice water for a little bit because it's an attainable goal and a necessity. She is at the mercy of anyone or anything that walks into the door.Jessie isn't alone, not really. In her mind, she has a variety of voices giving commentary, advice, insults, doubts, or raving more and more as time passes and her panic, thirst, and hunger grows. The first voice that makes itself know is the Goodwife of Goody Burlingame, This hyper feminine voice tells her to keep the peace, keep her feelings buried, and go with the flow. She is the voice of what's socially acceptable, even encouraging her to let her husband rape her to keep her normal life. It turns out this voice is the one of herself at age 10, struggling to cope with her father sexually abusing her. That event happened to coincide with the solar eclipse, so her traumatic event seemed to even take the sun away. She had never really processed her feelings about it and kept quiet about it to preserve her family and her parents' already struggling marriage. Through this new traumatic experience, she returns to the eclipse to remember what happened and process her feelings. Looking back, her father had obviously planned it in advance and had taken advantage of Jessie's guilt and confusion to keep her quiet. These feelings, driven by the Goodwife, kept her in an unhappy marriage and isolated from people who cared about her.The other voices are not as complacent as Goody. The second voice is that of her college roommate Ruth Neary. She is the exact opposite of the Goodwife, brash, direct, and above all honest. Real life Ruth knew Jessie was hiding something and wasn't afraid to push her for the truth. Jessie reacted by abruptly leaving and finding new housing because she didn't want all that stuff to resurface. Ruth's voice is one of the most vocal and gives her much needed reality checks even if it's harsh. Another voice is that of her ex-psychiatrist Nora Callighan who is less vocal, but gives her ways to center herself, calm down, and also unpack her feelings about the suppressed abuse. The real Nora helped her, but got too close to uncovering her past, causing Jessie to push her away as well. The other voices are UFOs that have depraved, weird things to say. They only serve to derail Jessie and keep her from acting with fear.The horror of the book gets under your skin. She's vulnerable to anyone or anything that walks into the unlocked house. The first thing is a dog that eats pieces of dead Gerald. The second may or may not be real. She calls him a Space Cowboy and sees him only at night. His looks are grotesque with exaggerated features, abnormally long arms, and a box full of bones and jewelry. He smells like death and doesn't speak. Her biggest motivation to escape is this nightmarish creature. The biggest failing of the book is the epilogue type ending that tells you what happens after Jessie escapes. Her attempt to lie about what happened to the police is incredibly dumb especially when the evidence all points to the truth. It would have been scarier to keep the audience wondering if the Space Cowboy was real or not. It's my main criticism of Stephen King in general that he can't just leave things to the imagination and overdefines things at times. The only awesome part of the ending is the hope of Jessie getting on with her life and contacting Ruth to hopefully rekindle their friendship.
    • 3/5
      Jessie is trapped: during an ill-fated S&M game, she kicks her husband and induces a fatal coronary. She is handcuffed to the bed in a lakeside cabin in the middle of nowhere, with no means of escape. Voices in her head force her to confront a buried childhood trauma.
    • 2/5
      So, a woman is handcuffed to the bed by her husband, and while in this sate, is widowed. Great idea! If you're wondering why it's so long, she hears voices (rather tiresome) and there's a flashback sequence (rather well done). In fact there's a lot that's well done in the novel but I found myself wondering 'Do I really care?' And the ending goes a bit wrong. I mean, does it matter?
    • 2/5
      A woman, handcuffed by her borderline abusive husband during foreplay, is trapped in their remote cabin when he has a heart attack and dies on her. Even when I really hate the premise of one of King's novels, as with this one, they are still gripping and suspenseful reads. I never want to read this one again, though.
    • 3/5
      Gerald's Game by Stephen KingFirst let me say, I did NOT finish this book. I got one third of the way through and I just couldn't finish it. Too much head noise for me. The book is a psychological thriller about a couple who have been married for 20 years and have taken a romantic trip to their remote lake house in Maine. During a kinky sex episode, the wife is handcuffed to the bed against her will and accidentally kills her husband. She is now alone with her thoughts and fears and her husband is dead. Page after page we read how she feels, hear the voices inside her head, and I guess we are supposed to be scared but I was anything but. Unless of course you count the mangy hound that came in and started feeding on the the dead husband. I was actually bored throughout the few chapters I did read because of the monotonous details of thought and pain and misery. And if that isn't bad enough, I didn't even like the woman. Way over the top!!But if that is your thing, then you might enjoy it. By all means, go for it. I want to add that this is the first book by Mr. King that I didn't enjoy. He is the author of one of my all time favorites, The Green Mile. Published in 1993 by Signet.
    • 4/5
      WARNING: Here, there be language. If naughty words offend you, putter on past.

      GERALD'S GAME is best if you know nothing about it. If you plan to read it, skip this review. It is also the only King novel that I'm sure will never see film. And I kind of like that about it.

      Stephen King took a huge chance with GERALD'S GAME. First off, this is a three-hundred-plus page novel about a woman handcuffed to a bed. Even in a master storyteller's hands, a tale like this can become tedious. The novel does suffer from a metric fuck-ton of repetition, which is the only reason this wasn't a five star read for me.

      I first read this novel the year it was released, when it came in the mail through my mother's book club subscription. I was young, probably twelve or thirteen, and most of the sex stuff was lost on me because I didn't understand what was going on. Nowadays, I'm a thirty-three-year-old boy, and the sex stuff was about as interesting to me as changing a shitty diaper.

      So why did I enjoy this book? Three reasons. The dog, the de-gloving, and the corpse-fucker. Intrigued? Good. Read the book. Appalled? Skip this book.

      This is one of those books that a great many readers will hate. It hops through the years of this woman's life like a broken time machine. There is no rhyme or reason to when these flashbacks occur. This isn't an every-other-chapter, past/present/past/present, type of deal. You'll be plodding along in the present and then all of a sudden you're in the past. If that sounds annoying, skip this book. I didn't mind it.

      King's vulgarisms even caught this foul-mouthed sonuvabitch off guard. More than once, the phrase "A woman is just a life support system for a cunt," was used in one form or another. And I'm talking more than ten times. A sanitary napkin is even referred to as a cunt-diaper. Not in dialogue, mind you, but in the narrative. If you're turned off by that, you know what which book not to read.

      Then you have the tie-in with one of my favorite King novels, DOLORES CLAIBORNE. Both novels were published in the same year and have similar themes (child molestation and the after effects). Oddly enough, the main character's recollection of an event that happens to her during an eclipse of the sun in 1963 runs parallel to Dolores pushing her husband down the well. I thought this was cool, but I'm biased. There's no reason why the MC has this connection with Dolores. None whatsoever. I'm actually shocked this stayed in the book after editing. Then again, most readers will tell you Stephen King hasn't had a good editor since the original, chopped up version of THE STAND.

      Be forewarned. I'm an odd duck. I have strange tastes, and will completely ignore huge plot problems if I find the overall story palatable. In other words, if I find the subject enjoyable, anything the author says goes. It can happen because they said it could happen, that sort of thing. In this book, the three things I listed above were well worth all the repetition, time jumps, and plot holes.
    • 3/5
      Spannend und unterhaltsam.
    • 2/5
      A pretty disappointing book. The first Stephen King novel that I started to skim read to just get to the end. Sad. The first 20 pages or so work really well, but then it just gets long and drawn out. It probably would have been a good short story, or at most a novella, but there is not nearly enough material to make this a book that was priced $23.50 when it came out. I think of it as "Misery" meets "Cujo" and then, well, this came. The positives of it, for me, were that there is a horrifying character at the end that is really well written and I loved the connection to "Dolores Claiborne". But the character is totally wasted and the connection felt more like a commercial idea, a way to sell this book. Anyway, I'm bummed I read this and feel a bit like I felt after reading his short story "Ur". Still, I'm a big fan, and I guess I'll have to put this in the "everyone has a bad day at work" file.
    • 1/5
      I can't believe my mother let me read this stuff.

    • 3/5
      full of details to the extent of boredom. the end was kind of expected and the events escalation was so slow , if this novel hadn't got Kings name on it , I would have closed it 5 min after begining
    • 3/5
      This is not your typical horror show. A woman trying to make it through the weekend after getting chained to the bed. The dog scene is very memorable, it "humanises" the animal to make the raw power of hunger something that is infectious.
    • 4/5
      Love the psychological delving in this one, as well as the subtle glimpse into another book about violence against women. King does an amazing job of portraying a woman and a woman's anxiety.
    • 5/5
      I hovered at 3ish stars until the last portion of the book. Talk about a killer ending!!
    • 2/5
      Despite having read most of Stephen King’s works, it took me over two decades after its release to get to Gerald’s Game, and not until I first watched the adaptation on Netflix. After watching the movie, it made me wonder how this could be a full length novel. There just wasn’t enough material to make it work. And after reading the novel, my theory was spot on. There wasn’t enough in here for a full length novel. Ideally, King should have lopped off about two thirds of this novel and made it a novella, but that probably wasn’t commercially viable in the nineties when it was released, which is unfortunate, because at that length I think this could have worked.Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case, and this novel falls well short of the mark. The premise is good and for the first thirty pages or so, the novel was enjoyable, but it was so thin in terms of plot that there was massive stretches with absolutely nothing go on. So much of the novel was the novel’s protagonist fretting about being handcuffed to the bed while her husband is lying dead on the floor with a heart attack. Granted, it was a traumatic situation, but after a couple hundred pages of that, it got really old. The book dragged. The part at the end with the serial killer is both utterly unrealistic and didn’t add much to the novel. The era of Stephen King that this novel came from was a great one for the king of horror, but this novel was a complete dud.Carl Alves - author of The Invocation
    • 3/5
      One of King's better "what if" scenarios. He gives himself one heck of a restriction - a full novel centered around a single, immobile character - and it pays off.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      A frightening scenario of a bondage encounter gone wrong. Scary and thought-provoking. The better of King's eclipse novels.
    • 3/5
      I have to say first off that I haven't read many of Stephen King's book all the way through and I think that's mainly due to their length. It intimidates me and makes me think that I'll be spending a month reading one book and upon finishing it, become very disappointed that I wasted so much time on it. I'm not so much disappointed about Gerald's Game but I do believe that it could have been better. One main problem with the book was its length. Granted it's not as long as some of King's books but come on, I did not need to know every minute detail about what was going on with the main character while she was handcuffed to a bed. It became very repetitive in the description of her legs and arms cramping and her dry throat. This book is also one of the goriest books that I have ever read by Stephen King (but that may be because I haven't read very many). I had a hard time reading through certain parts of the book that were extremely gory and disgusting, but low and behold, I made it! The only reason that I decided to give this book a 3 out of 5 was because I love the way Stephen King writes and this book surprisingly scared me a few times, with "death" creeping around every corner. I know that I need to read more of his books in order to compare it more accurately but from what I have read I would say that this is not one of his best. I would recommend it for King readers just because it's King and who can go wrong with King? But I would give a fair warning in advance: Extremely gory and boringly descriptive.
    • 5/5
      From looking at the other reviews of this book it seems that most people either love it or hate it. Almost all of this story deals with the human mind's response to a "fox in a jaw-trap" situation (think 127 hours) so it's a bit different from King's usual fare. As the story progresses our narrator gets more and more unreliable which sets the stage to make the final denouement even more chilling.Warning: readers with weak stomachs should probably give this one a miss as the gore factor gets pretty heavy in places.
    • 3/5
      Gerald and Jessie Burlingame have taken an off-season trip to their lakeside cabin. Gerald likes to play games that involve handcuffs. After securing Jessie to the bed, he suffers a heart attack and dies, leaving Jessie cuffed to the bed, with no one else around for miles. Or so she thinks...Gerald's Game is an absolutely claustrophobic suspense book. It makes Misery seem epic in comparison. It's almost like King challenged himself to write a book, the entirety of which takes place in a small room and the main character's head. Not only does he succeed, he manages to turn the tale into a real nail-biter.It also includes the scariest single scene I've read in any of Stephen King's books, or any book for that matter. Gerald's Game is the one book that made me feel uneasy about putting down the book and turning out the light. On the other hand, it also includes the most unbelievable, unlikely and coincidental plot twist ever encountered in a King book. The fact that the most chilling scene and the most unbelievable are one in the same is part of the problem with the book. I know that it is why I remembered the book as weak from my previous read.Knowing ahead of time about the blessing/curse of that, I was able to enjoy the book a LOT more on a second read. King makes Jessie a believable character who's own past is as much an impediment to her freedom as the handcuffs are. This is carried out much more smoothly and less obviously than I am making it sound here.Definitely worth a read. And if a part of it seems wildly unbelievable, just go with it. The rest of the book will make up for it.
    • 5/5
      Stephen King plays does well with claustrophobic situations; in Misery he presented the story of a writer physically confined to a house; in Dolores Claiborne, the story of a woman confined to an awful marriage. Gerald's Game plays similarly with both physical and emotional confinement, though in terms of both intensity and craft I'd say it is the strongest of the three.Gerald's Game has a fairly simplistic set-up. Jessie and her husband Gerald have been playing bondage games for several months, but never before with hand-cuffs and never before in their secluded lake house. When a triggering incident makes Jessie suddenly uncomfortable, she asks to be set free--and Gerald proceeds to begin to rape her. Jessie strikes back, but the exchange ends horrifically, with Gerald dead and Jessie still shackled to the bed. We're given a stunningly intimate view of her several day ordeal, which features, among other things, flashbacks to childhood abuse, a stray dog eating her husband, and the totally freaky appearance of a deformed man that Jessie comes to call the "space cowboy."King's set-up could have easily been used in a pornographic way, one that hinged fundamentally on the objectification on the scantily clad Jessie locked to the bed. Instead, he gives us a surprisingly feminist story of survival--and not just survival from immediate danger, but also survival from the sexual violation that so many women and men keep buried in their pasts. I've wondered before how King writes women--particularly middle aged women--so well, but I realized the answer to this question, ironically, during a passage of Gerald's Game told in the perspective of the stray dog who snacks on Jessie's husband. King always approaches his characters with both empathy and respect; he's never afraid to paint a nuanced or complicated portrait.This novel was originally planned to be packaged in one volume with Dolores Claiborne, as they share a central event and the characters view one another, briefly, in a psychic flash (the only supernatural element included in either novel). It's a shame it wasn't. They share more than an eclipse--they both include vivid and well-crafted portraits of amazing women.
    • 4/5
      Few books are truly terrifying – where the mere mention of the title sends chills down your spine. Gerald’s Game is such a book. Gerald and his wife, Jesse, get more than expected out of a weekend at a secluded cabin in Maine. Seeking adventure, Gerald handcuffs his wife to the bed for an adult game. In the midst of this “game” Gerald dies. Soon Jesse realizes there is no phone to call for help and no one to hear her screams; she is still handcuffed to the bed, and the cabin’s back door has been left open. Alone with only her thoughts, Gerald’s corpse, and whatever happens to wander in through the open door, the reader accompanies Jesse as she confronts her deepest fears.
    • 1/5
      Being my first Stephen King book, I expected to be blown away and shocked by the great description and horror scenes. After about five chapters, my hopes died, and I was no longer expecting a great read. The more I read, the more I felt this way. If you are a big King fan, I do not recommend this book. I know he has many fantastic books, but unfortunately, this was nowhere near the quality of the others.
    • 3/5
      One of the few King books I haven't read more than once. Overall, a good read. Some nice gross scene's, but not anything that stands out that I want to read again. Average.
    • 4/5
      This book was not what I expected by the title. Absolutely catching, every twist and turn had me turning pages and guessing the out come. Good read for an adult audience.