Is Gerald's game a true story?

When Netflix announced they were adapting Stephen King's 1992 book Gerald's Game into a movie, it seemed an odd choice out of the author's vast body of work. Aside from the fact it's not one of King's more beloved books, it seems the least adaptable to film, at least on the surface, as it revolves around a woman trapped handcuffed to a bed after her husband dies during one of his sexual games. One person, one room, and a lot of internal thoughts. The story is so deeply personal, many were perplexed it came from a guy who usually sticks to straightforward monsters. So, was Gerald's Game based on a true story King actually knew?

In a 1992 Fresh Air interview, the author explained that his inspiration for the story started with Cujo, his bestselling book about a violent, rabid dog trapping a woman and her sick son in a car. Two people, trapped in a small place. As King explained in the interview, he thought, wouldn't it be interesting if you had only one character in a room? But why would this woman be in a room by herself? As King revealed to Fresh Air, "the answer that I came up with was bondage. And that forced me to consider what causes people to do this sort of thing." Researching bondage, he worked backwards from there to figure out how the rest of the woman, now named Jessie's, story went down.

On a less disturbing note, King wrote his books Gerald's Game and Dolores Claiborne to interrelate with each other. Both are less outright horror and more the horror of man's inhumanity to man, and both feature terrible life-changing events during a total solar eclipse in 1963. The solar eclipse was very real — Maine was right in the path of totality at the time, and the event seems to have deeply impressed itself on King to spur not one but two novels' most traumatic moments.

An author's talent is taking disparate elements from reality and piecing them together into something more than the sum of its parts. With Gerald's Game available to watch, you can see for yourself whether truth is stranger than fiction.