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Gerald's GameGerald's Game (1992) is a novel by Stephen King. The story begins with Jessie Burlingame and her husband Gerald in the bedroom of their solitary cabin in western Maine, where they have gone for an off-beat romantic weekend. Gerald, who is a lawyer with an aggressive personality, has been able to re-invigorate the couple's sex life by fastening Jessie to the bed with handcuffs. Jessie has been into the game before, but suddenly she balks at the idea and things go from bad to worse in a very short span of time. As Gerald starts to crawl on top of Jessie pretending her protests are fake, she kicks him hard in the crotch which causes him to go into shock and then cardiac arrest. If there was any chance of him being okay, it ends when he falls off the bed and splits his head open on the floor. Jessie is alone in the cabin and unable to move or summon help. There is nothing to do but see if anyone shows up. The only thing that does show up is a stray dog that gnaws a bit on Gerald, the disembodied voices of some of Jessie's old friends that start to discuss an event in her childhood (which is later revealed to be a molestation by her father)...and an unpleasant, deformed apparition that may or may not be real; Jessie begins to think of this bizarre visitor as The Space Cowboy (after a line from a Steve Miller song, "The Joker"). This internal dialogue is mixed with descriptions of Jessie's more and more desperate attempts to get out of the handcuffs. Finally she does escape after one of the voices in her head tells her that if she stays another night, The Space Cowboy will more than likely take a part of her to add to its trophy medical bag filled with jewelry and human bones. Jessie escapes by slicing her hand open all the way around on a broken glass and then using the blood and the medical procedure of "degloving" to escape. At the end, we get to read the letter that Jessie writes to one of the persons whose voice she has heard in her head. The only true supernatural event in the story occurs as described during one of Jessie's flashbacks, when, during a particularly stressful incident at the time of childhood, she has a waking dream. In King's subsequent novel Dolores Claiborne, it is revealed that the vision was actually a telepathic contact between the main characters of the two novels.
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