Picture the scene: I'm 13, and I'm tearing through King novels at a frankly terrifying rate. I'm reading them all, revelling in their strange worlds, their broken protagonists, their aliens and vampires and ghosts and madness. I know what sort of writer King is, and he's the writer for me. Everything I love, it's there in his stories. Then my father gets a new King novel when we go on holiday, and I read it. I'm puzzled.

The book is one of King's simpler plots: a husband and wife are having some BDSM-tinged sex when the husband – the titular Gerald – is killed, after Jessie (his wife) tells him that the game has gone too far, that she wants it ended, and he ignores her. She kicks him in the groin and he falls off the bed, splitting his head open, leaving Jessie handcuffed to the bed with no visible means of escape. Jessie then spends the rest of book in basically this one location, attempting to free herself by breaking the bed or moving it closer to the handcuff keys. (When she finally manages it, it's through a particularly grotesque method that has haunted me whenever I've seen anybody cut their hands since – something apparently known as degloving.) Much of the book takes place inside Jessie's head: both in terms of her internal monologue, and the voices that she hears talking to her. Trapped there, with time to ruminate, the voices reveal secrets to her that she's kept buried, changing her attitudes and feelings about both herself and her now-dead husband. (Oh, and Gerald? His body gets eaten by a starving stray dog that wanders into their house, because of course it does.)

It's a fascinating set-up, the sort of thing that you can conceivably see King setting himself as a challenge: the equivalent of all those bottle episodes of television shows, where characters are trapped in a room for the duration and forced to work out their issues. Of course, the teenage me thought it was stupid. I can't say that I entirely understood why she was handcuffed to the bed, or why that would be a thing she would agree to, so maybe the rest was a mystery to me. The only time I remember the book picking up was at the end, when a spectral serial killer known as The Space Cowboy arrives and has a little fight with Jessie. That's what I wanted from King! Ghostly manifestations of weird killers! And there it was! He didn't let me down.

Reading as an adult, Gerald's Game seems just as dark as it should be; the fact that Jessie tells him to stop and he doesn't now elicits a nasty churn in my gut. I'm pleased when he dies. I don't remember having that feeling back in the day: King was a master of the hatefully-likeable protagonist, and some of the attitudes of his characters in the early novels err on the side of uncomfortable. But Gerald is a bad man, and his death earned. Jessie's torment is painful to read, and her desperation – especially as she comes to terms with the abuse that she suffered as a child, buried for so long – is harrowing. The book is actually hugely affecting – until the final stretch.

Because what I loved as a kid is far less effective to my adult sense. The Space Cowboy – a mixture of Jessie's imagination and a real serial killer – is pretty much the strongest example of deus ex machina in his entire oeuvre. The character exists solely to give Jessie the impetus to free herself, and it pretty much ruins the ending. Now, reading it, I want King to see this through. Don't introduce the bullshit weirdness: stick with Jessie and what's truly affecting. Keep us with her. Have her escape, have her leave the cabin, and that's it. Cut to black. Don't tell us what happens afterwards, in the outside world, because this is a book about the internal one. It's a book about a scared woman coming to terms with who she is, what's been done to her, and finding the strength to overcome. The Space Cowboy threatens to undo that.

But then, different readers want different things. I can totally understand that King's audience at the time would want this weirdness, because I did! I was desperate for it. Maybe I didn't quite realise what a good writer he was back then, though; and how little he had to rely on the gimmickry. Maybe he didn't either – but he would exercise his subtlety muscles a lot over the subsequent decade.

Connections

There's a strong connection to Dolores Claiborne, with both main characters having a psychic connection that enables them to share visions on a couple of occasions. (Most interestingly, this is likely because they once began life as two halves of the same novel, a project that was to be titled In The Path of the Eclipse.)

Next time: We're seeing the other half of King's project: Dolores Claiborne.