Gerald's Game is a 1992 suspense novel by American author Stephen King. The story centers on Jessie Burlingame, who is left handcuffed to a bed in a remote lake house after her husband Gerald dies of a sudden heart attack during a sexual game. Trapped and alone, she must confront not only the physical challenge of her predicament but also the psychological torment of the voices in her head, which force her to reckon with a deeply buried childhood trauma.
The novel is notable for its intense, claustrophobic setting, taking place almost entirely within the bedroom where Jessie is trapped. King masterfully uses this confined space to explore themes of isolation, memory, and survival. The book is dedicated to King's wife, Tabitha, and her five sisters.
Originally, Gerald's Game was conceived as a companion piece to King's novel Dolores Claiborne, with a planned connecting theme of two women in crisis during a solar eclipse. While this explicit link was largely reduced in the final published versions, both novels remain powerful explorations of female resilience in the face of abuse. For many years, the book was considered unfilmable due to its single-setting nature and internal monologue-driven narrative.
