Notice: Some moderate spoilers for the two media sources listed below:
Book: Misery, by Stephen King.
This is a horror story about a bestselling author whose car gets buried in a snowstorm. He’s rescued by a huge fan of his, but it turns out the fan is the crazy stalker type, and she keeps the author trapped in her farm house, demanding he write her perfect version of a sequel to his novel series.
I was reading it during class in high school one day and I got to the part about the “hobbling.” Anyone who saw the movie version remembers this part as where the crazy lady takes a sledge hammer to the captive author’s foot and breaks it at the ankle, effectively hobbling him so he can’t run away anymore.
But the book was worse. It was so much worse.
In the book, she takes an axe and cuts his foot off. But because it’s a dull rusty axe, it takes her several swings to effectively hack it off, all the while the author is screaming bloody murder, unable to stop this woman from painfully hacking away at his foot. The way Stephen King described the way the axe embedded deep in the author’s leg and squeaked on his bones as she dislodged it for another swing… /shudders
I had to set the book down for a moment. My teacher asked me if I was okay, because he said I was suddenly as white as a sheet of paper. When I couldn’t find the words to explain what was wrong with me, he told me to go to the nurse. He sent someone to help me walk there, as I was light-headed and wobbly, and having trouble standing on my own. Never in my life have I ever had a book affect me so physically and emotionally in my life, and I’m a huge fan of gory and grotesque horror.
TV show: Season 4 finale of Dexter.
I really enjoyed Dexter, a show about a serial killer who lived by a code and tried to only murder bad people. And my all-time favorite character on the show was his girlfriend, Rita.
When the series began, she was a broken shell of a human being. Which Dexter preferred, because the relationship was simple. She didn’t need much affection or attention and was the perfect cover to make him appear to have normal relationships without having to fully commit to someone emotionally.
But as the series went on, Rita became stronger, more capable, and more confident and outspoken. Through a relatively healthy relationship with Dexter, she was learning how to heal and grow as a person. She was even changing Dexter for the better; he found himself feeling attached to her and daydreaming about giving up the serial killer life to settle down and be a good father and husband.
Throughout season 4, Dexter met his match in another serial killer, Arthur Mitchell, who also had a family of his own, except he kept them under his control by fear and intimidation. It was an incredible acting performance by John Lithgow, who up until this point, I had only known as the funny man on 3rd Rock from the Sun. He was absolutely terrifying as a serial killer!
In the season 4 finale, Dexter finally gets his hands on Arthur and dispatches him, as he’s done with many other bad people. But the finale twist was that Arthur had gotten his hands on Rita shortly beforehand, and Dexter returns home to find her in the bathtub, murdered.
I was so enraged that they killed off my favorite character that I shut off the TV and never watched another episode of Dexter again. Which was apparently a wise decision, as the show apparently took a nosedive after that season and never recovered. To this day, most fans agree that Dexter ended at season 4.