Gerald's Game

Jessie Burlingame is accidentally left handcuffed to the headboard of a bed in a remote lake house when her husband Gerald dies of a heart attack during a sexual game. She must free herself from the cuffs before dying of thirst—and while doing so, she confronts buried memories of childhood sexual abuse that surface as the ordeal strips away her defenses.

Almost the entire novel takes place in a single room. The book is essentially a one-woman psychological thriller—Jessie alone, handcuffed to a bed, speaking to internal voices. King wrote it as a challenge: can pure interiority sustain a full novel? It is the closest he has come to literary minimalism, and it was written to be a companion piece to Dolores Claiborne.

Both novels were published in 1992 and are explicitly linked by a single event—a solar eclipse—during which the two protagonists briefly perceive each other across miles. King has said the two books are companion pieces about women surviving extreme situations, and that he intended them as a pair.

Yes. A Netflix film adaptation directed by Mike Flanagan was released in 2017, starring Carla Gugino as Jessie. It received strong reviews and is widely considered one of the better King adaptations—praised particularly for maintaining the novel's psychological intensity rather than adding genre set-pieces.