When successful romance novelist Paul Sheldon awakes in a secluded home, rescued from a car crash by his “number one fan” Annie Wilkes, fiction quickly becomes stark reality. While he semi-consciously convalesces under her “care,” Annie secretly reads the unpublished manuscript of his new novel Misery and becomes enraged upon discovering that he has killed off her favorite character. When Annie demands that he rewrite his novel, Paul quickly realizes that the only way to avoid his own personal unhappy ending is to outwit the sociopathic bibliophile that seems bound and determined to keep him permanently bedridden.