Memory was slow to return. At first there was only pain. The pain was total, everywhere, so that there was no room for memory.

Then he remembered that before the pain there was a cloud. He could let himself go into that cloud and there would be no pain. He needed only to stop breathing. It was so easy. Breathing only brought pain, anyway.

But the peace of the cloud was spoiled by the voice. The voice - which was a woman's voice - said, 'Breathe! You must breathe, Paul!' Something hit his chest hard, and then foul breath was forced into his mouth by unseen lips. The lips were dry and the breath smelled of the stale wind in the tunnel of an underground railway; it smelled of old dust and dirt. He began to breathe again so that the lips would not return with their foul breath.

Along with the pain, there were sounds. When the pain covered the shore of his mind, like a high tide, the sounds had no meaning: 'Bree! Ooo mus bree Pull' When the tide went out, the sounds became words. He already knew that something bad had happened to him; now he began to remember.

He was Paul Sheldon. He smoked too much. He had married twice, but both marriages had ended in divorce. He was a famous writer. He was also a good writer. But he was not famous as a good writer; he was famous as the creator of Misery Chastain, a beautiful woman front nineteenth-century England, whose adventures and love life now filled eight volumes and had sold many millions of copies.

He felt trapped by Misery Chastain, so he wrote Misery's Child. In the final pages of this book Misery died while giving birth to a daughter. Her death made Paul free, and he immediately started to write a serious novel, about the life of a young car-thief in New York.

He finished the novel late in January 1987. As usual he finished it in a hotel in the mountains of Colorado; he finished all his books in the same room, in the same hotel. Now he could drive to the airport and fly to New York for the publication of Misery's Child, and at the same time he could deliver the typescript of the new novel, which was called Fast Cars.