One of the few unquestioned
masterpieces of Stephen King, both in book and film form, is Misery. A
deviation from the kind of horror we were used to from him when it came out,
the novel is fundamentally a psychological horror story that one involved his
traditional gross-outs. It’s also fundamentally a two-character piece between
Paul Sheldon, the writer of a successful line of romance novels and Annie
Wilkes, the former nurse who ‘rescues him’ and becomes displeased by the ending
of his most recent installment. King has admitted that Annie Wilkes was one of
his favorite characters to write and you can see that relish in the iconic
performance Kathy Bates gave in the 1990 film that not only won her an Oscar
but put her on the map as one of the greatest actresses of all time in any
medium.
I imagine readers of Meg
Elison’s Number One Fan will open the book expecting very much the same
kind of scenario – after all, the title is one of the book’s iconic lines (we
actually hear a mumbled version in the book’s opening sentences). And indeed,
the bare bones seem to indicate a version of it for this era: best selling
novelist Eli Grey is on her way to a convention when she gets in the wrong
uber, accepts a drink from the driver and then wakes up in his custody. Eli is
the writer of a best-selling sci-fantasy genre called Maginiara with a heroine
named Milicent, an orphan detective who finds that she is the heir to a line of
witches (a female version of Harry Dresden might be the closest equivalent,
though I don’t know this genre well enough to say. She has just written the
eighth book in the series, which has become a series of films and everyone is
anticipated the next installment. Her captor, who we quickly learn is named
Leonard, has taken her prisoner and wants the next novel. Like Annie Wilkes, he
has a darker agenda in mind.
However, if like me, you are
familiar with King’s fiction, you will quickly see that Elison has a broader
theme in mind: several actually. Reading
Number One Fan, I found elements not merely of Misery but also
elements of two slightly less known works in King’s universe that, with Misery,
form a trilogy of sorts all of which have elements here.
In his forward to the story Secret
Window, Secret Garden, King thought this novella was a concluding piece of
three stories he’d written about writing. (He also thought it would be one of
the last stories he wrote on the subject; he didn’t keep that promise long.)
Misery was a work about the hold
fiction had on the reader. One of the books that came a few years later The
Dark Half was a work on the hold fiction had on the writer. A brief
description: the novel is the story of Thad Beaumont, who achieved economic
success writing a series of action novels under the pen name George Stark. When
the truth is on the verge of being exposed, he ‘kills’ Stark off in a public fashion. Then a series of brutal
killings take place and it slowly becomes clear to Beaumont that the killer is
George Stark and that he has a connection far greater than that.
Secret Window, Secret Garden is a novella that first
appeared in King’s collection Four Past Midnight. King said in his
introduction that it falls somewhere between the two. The story involves a writer named Mort
Rainey, who in the midst of a divorce and a horrible case of writer’s block, is
confronted by a southerner named John Shooter, who claims that Rainey has
stolen his story. Shooter is determined
for Rainey to admit what he has done, and quickly embarks on a path of
violence. (Like Misery and The Dark Half, there is a film
adaptation of this story, but I strongly urged you to seek out the original
novella instead. The writers of the film changed the ending in a way that
fundamentally changes the fate of both Mort and two other characters – and also
excludes a denouement that suggests there has been more to the story than we
thing.)
There are elements of all
three of these in Number One Fan, and that is clear because of one of
the fundamental differences between this book in Misery. Whereas in Misery
we only saw things from Paul’s point of view, in this book the story spends
nearly as much time with Eli’s captor that it does with Eli. And by doing so
Elison actually makes some daring narrative choices.
The character is known as
Leonard and he is obsessed with Grey’s novels. But we learn very quickly that
Leonard is a writer as much as he is an obsessed fan. Leonard is delusional,
Elison makes this clear immediately from his perspective. Like Annie Wilkes he
is obsessed with the main character. His obsession is more dangerous. We
quickly learn that she is a sexual predator who has been stalking conventions,
looking for Milicent lookalikes and has drugged and raped two of them.
Leonard also has been in the
presence of Eli Grey several times, has sent her long emails in which he has
asked for advice, and has taken her automatic responses as part of a larger
dialogue between them. It’s pretty clear among the other delusions he suffers
from, he has erotomania, the idea of taking token signs of acknowledgement as
part of a deeper relationship. Leonard has a very tenuous grip on reality but
he tries to put it to constructive use, though its not clear if he has talent.
He spends a lot of time writing fanfiction and is nominated for an award at a
convention which he wins. (I’ll get to that later on as its pertinent.) Leonard
manages to keep writing and eventually finds his way to realizing the dream –
he actually manages to land the hold of continuing a popular franchise of a
deceased author. He gets the first two novels written to huge success – and
then everything falls apart. In a way, his decision to abduct Eli is based in
the idea that he wants to continue his work. There was a draft of Misery (I
don’t remember if it made into the book) where after Paul finished writing the
last novel, Annie planned to kill him and make the binding with his skin – the
ultimate first edition. Leonard, as we quickly see, actually has something
darker in mind for Eli.
I grant you this is a dark
territory but I think Elison has something in deeper mind. We spend as much
time in Eli’s background and Leonard’s and it becomes clear after enough time
that the only difference between the two is that Eli is a more successful
novelist. We are always sympathetic of
the situation Eli is in, and to be clear it’s far worse than the one Paul
Sheldon was in. Eli knows from moment one how screwed she is, Leonard makes it
very clear how determined he is to break her, and the ways he decides to do so
are straight out of Abu Gharib. The thing is the more we learn about Eli’s
backstory, the clearer it becomes that she is as broken as Leonard is and in
many way far harder to sympathize with at times than Leonard is.
We learn that in Eli’s
childhood her parents were poor, her father abandoned her early, they were
constantly migrating from house to house, she and her younger brother
constantly went hungry due to their mother’s drinking and abandonment of them,
and at a certain point Eli realized things were bad enough that she had to call
Child Protective Services to save them. It was something that had to be done –
they were hungry, had been abused and it was clear that no one was going to
step in. But her actions tore her apart from her brother Benny, who never
forgave her for it.
All of this is horrible to be
sure but what is equally clear is that Eli is glad to be rid of Benny. She
misses his first wedding and shows up to the second just in time to see the
bride and groom have a fight that the cops have to break up. (They get married
later that day) Eli comes to a single Christmas a few years, and while both his
wife and Benny resent the class differences, she makes no effort t bridge the
gap and stays sober so that she can make a quick exit. When Eli says that Benny’s
kids are a lot like they were growing up, Eli goes out of her way to say that
he is as bad a parent as their father was. When Benny becomes angry, Eli’s
attitude is that she is exhausting from trying and ‘she doesn’t owe them
anything.”
That’s a pretty cold-blooded
statement to say to your flesh and blood, particularly considering they her
brother was in just as horrible a situation as she was and didn’t have the skills
to get out. She has no interest in making peace with her parents. Her idea of
being sympathetic is occasionally mailing a check for a thousand dollars to her
brother. You’d think someone who’d grown up in an abusive home and who was in
the position to help stop the cycle from repeating would do something more
substantive. But Eli seems determined to erase everything she grew up from.
And this fundamentally extends
to every aspect of her life. She has almost no friends in college and we learn
she spent little time paying attention to her boyfriends needs or watching TV.
She became a lesbian later in life but we quickly learn that she has no
interest in long term relationships or even short-term ones. One of her lovers,
clearly hurt by her says: “She’s a black hole. She’ll always need somebody.” She
only has a single friend, a fellow writer; and her closest relationship is with
her assistant. At one point we see her apartment and its barely furnished. When
Eli is abducted, she knows no one may notice she’s missing for a long time
because she has no real human connections outside of work.
And it’s also worth noting
that Eli’s approach to getting herself saved is not only haphazard but wrong-headed,
at least from comparisons to Misery. Paul Sheldon takes longer to
realize how screwed he is than Eli does, but he quickly realizes that the key
to his survival is to do everything in his power to stay alive. This means not
antagonizing the woman holding him prisoner and doing everything he can to keep
her fantasies, no matter how deluded, active. Part of the reason Misery works
as well as it does is because, like Paul, we don’t know when Annie is going to
snap.
Eli, by contrast, knows how
deluded Leonard is from the start but in almost every encounter with them she
refuses to acknowledge any part of his delusion and goes out of her way to
antagonize him. I should mention that Elison, in addition to being a sci-fi
writer, is a feminist essayist and there is a very good chance she’s making a
larger statement here about the danger women face throughout the world. There
are many times in this novel where it plays out very well, but I often wondered
whether Eli’s attitude is supposed to represent. Eli is smarter than most women
who are the subject of horror movies and novels but that doesn’t mean she shows
intelligence to her situation. There are so many times you get the feeling she’d
rather let Leonard kill her than give into his fantasy and survive. At one
point, she actually has a chance to get out of the basement she’s being held
prisoner in but she spends far too much time at an altar where she realizes who
her captor is – and spends too long being angry at herself for failing to
recognize it. Only once, late in the novel does she manage to briefly break
through with Leonard and in that moment, she finds there actually is common
ground between them. Leonard’s insanity is too deep for her to get out, but you
can’t help but wonder if she’d tried a little harder earlier, she might have
been able to find a way through.
Eli seems to spend the entire
experience determined she will not be a victim.
There are times she seems more determined not to be one than to actually
live. Part of Leonard’s delusion is that he believes he and Eli are soulmates.
The irony is that in so many ways they actually are.
I should also add that Number
One Fan is also a searing indictment of every aspect of the fantasy
industry on every level. Part of me thinks that part of it may have earned
Elison more notes from her editor than anything she puts Eli through. Because
this book does more to lay bare any of the pretensions of the publishing
industry than anything I’ve read before. A few quotes will suffice:
“…a writer can not die, just
as Frank Herbert, V.C. Andrews or Robert Jordan could not be allowed to rest
unmolested whilst the fan base had spendable cash.”
That actually pales to what
comes three pages later:
“Writers will tolerate drug
problems. They will cheerfully promote alcoholism. They’ll overlook years of blatant
sexual harassment, make excuses and carve their statuettes in the likenesses of
great men who just happened to be raging misogynists or racists in their free
time – or on the page. They’ll squabble over politics and they’ll pretend they
never heard of pedophilia when they see that one guy at a party,,,But the one
thing they will not do is suffer a plagiarist to live among them… and he (I won’t tell you who) had stacked two
mortal sins on top of another: he had plagiarized and he had ruined a beloved
and profitable thing.”
Eli’s only moment of common
ground with Leonard comes when she realizes that he could not keep up with the
demands of the publisher and the rapid
horrors of the fanbase. There’s a telling moment late in the novel when the FBI
agent who has been searching for Eli goes to her publisher to see him giving an
interview in order for help. He says that she’s concerned about Eli, but his
first job is to ‘manage her brand, no matter what happens.” Now when he learns
how serious it is, she becomes rattled and shaky – but there’s a cynical part
of me that wonders if she’s scared for Eli, or what will happen if she’s found
dead before the series is finished?
The novel also takes a very dark
look at every aspect of fandom. Early in the novel Leonard is nominated for a
prize for fanfiction that absolutely polarizes because of its sexuality. When
he attends a very small panel, a woman attacks him for his sexual portrayal of
one of the characters. That is a preview of what happens when he actually wins and
receive a room full of hissing from the crowd. Leonard finds himself the victim
of a culture war and even he is shocked when he learns about the people who
voted for him. The next convention he attends, it becomes very clear he has
been cancelled and the security guard (who is non-binary) says they have no
interest in hearing his side of the story. Eli, who attends the same convention
where Leonard is booed, is torched online because she chooses not to say
anything about it. In a way, both of them are victims on the online pileup but
Eli has enough pull to survive it. Leonard just has to wait for it to die down.
That’s the most disturbing
story we hear, but there are many more including the horrible treatment that
the filmmakers give Eli’s work initially, the sexual bullying that Eli goes
through in her writing (she is accused in her letters of being both too
feminist and not feminist enough) and the fact that many of Leonard’s initial
attempts to stalk Eli are at fan conventions. At one point the FBI agent who
pursues Eli’s case realize this is a field entirely new to her. She wonders if
their might be a serial killer out there who only kills women dressed as
Princess Leia. If they were from different cities, different races, and
different jobs would they ever get caught. I’m actually shocked that hasn’t
happened already – or maybe it has and it hasn’t been figured out yet.
Number One Fan is a masterpiece of
psychological horror in its own right and has far deeper implications the more
you think about it. I could easily see this being optioned for a film but I
wonder who would have the courage to cast it or release it anywhere? There were
troubling implications when Misery came out nearly forty years ago and
in a world where the Internet is filled with potential Annie Wilkes’ and
Leonard’s everywhere – and where far more of them have basically become
mainstream – I can imagine the division being far more obvious than it was
before. I won’t reveal the denouement of the novel, except to say that it makes
you think what kind of reception Annie Wilkes would have gotten in the world if
she had survived her encounter with Paul Sheldon.
One last note about the
quasi-trilogy I mentioned at the start. Of the three works I listed, only Paul
Sheldon manages to make it out intact. Mort Rainey dies at the end of his story
and while Thad Beaumont survives his encounter with George Stark, in the interconnected
way King writes his novels, we learn his life falls apart soon after: he is
abandoned by his family, he becomes a drunk and eventually kills himself. Eli
must survive her captivity but she was broken before this and is no more
qualified to deal with her trauma afterwards. The last two pages of the novel
offer the slightest sign of hope but one
of the last chapters involves a scene at a convention that is far more
troubling. Leonard is just the most extreme example of the fanbase that has
been out there since long before King penned Misery. Has Eli managed to
come through the other side? Or will a whole new batch of Leonard’s just come
out of the woodwork?
Note: Because I said I would
be dealing with horror more in October and because I prefer horror novels to
most horror films and television, I will be dealing more with books this month
than I usually do. There will be a bonus entry in Constant Reader later this
week with another entry that has a similar theme – though it is more
deconstruction than horror – and if your luck holds out, I will be writing a
first of its kind article in which I tell you about a horror writer I find the
worst violation of the generation and a book that represents everything I hate
about literature, much less horror. Note: Whichever author you think I’m
talking about, you’re wrong.
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