In Stephen King's book "Misery" the antagonist is a female who is infatuated with a series of books and characters created by a writer named Paul. When he has a car wreck and nearly dies she finds him, gets him breathing and stable, moves him to her isolated home, and begins to nurse him back to health. However, after she reads his most recent and last in the series, she finds out his intent is to kill off her favorite character. The woman is unable to maintain a distance between the real world and the world of the characters in the book. She begins to torture Paul and commanding him to rewrite the novel so that her character can continue to live.
"She was crazy but he needed her."
In one scene she is giving him some pills to take. She is already angry with Paul. Instead of giving him fresh water to drink her lifts up her floor mop bucket that is filled with gross water and demands he drink it with his pills. She has threatened to make him vomit up the pills if he tries to dry swallow them.
“Do it,” she said. “I know you can dry-swallow them, but please believe me when I say I can make them come right back up again. After all, it's only rinse-water."
The woman also becomes attracted to Paul. This creates another conflict as he does not have any feelings for her other than to escape.
"“You're good, she said gently. “I knew you would be. Just reading your books, I knew you would be. A man who could think of Misery Chastain, first think of her and then breathe life into her, could be nothing else.” Her fingers were in his mouth suddenly, shockingly intimate, dirtily welcome. "
Paul needs to escape but he can't. He looks out the window and thinks to himself.
"Here, all unseen, was the door to another world.
In order to protect her secret about kidnapping Paul, Annie, the woman, kills a trooper.
"Paul now knew as much of the story as he needed to know, he supposed. Annie had listened to the radio constantly since her long sleep, and the missing state cop, whose name was Duane Kushner, was big news. The fact that he had been searching for traces of a hotshot writer named Paul Sheldon was reported, but Kushner's disappearance had not been linked, even speculatively, with Paul's own. At least, not yet."
The final conflict is a physical cofrontation with the insane woman.
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