Gerald's Game

The story begins with Jessie Burlingame and her husband Gerald in the bedroom of their secluded cabin in western Maine, where they have gone for an off-beat romantic weekend. Gerald, a successful lawyer with an aggressive personality, has been able to reinvigorate the couple's sex life by handcuffing Jessie to the bed. Jessie has been into the game before, but suddenly balks. As Gerald starts to crawl on top of her, knowing her protests are real but ignoring them anyway, she kicks him in the stomach and in the groin, and he then falls from the bed to the floor, hits his head, has a heart attack, and dies. Jessie is alone in the cabin and unable to move or summon help.

The only things that show up are a hungry stray dog named Prince that starts feeding on Gerald's body and a terrifying, deformed apparition that may or may not be real, whom Jessie first mistakes for the ghost of her long dead father but dismisses it later. Jessie begins to think of this bizarre visitor as "The Space Cowboy" (after a line from a Steve Miller song, "The Joker"). A combination of panic and thirst eventually causes Jessie to hallucinate. She hears voices in her head, each one ostensibly the voice of a person in her life, primarily Ruth Neary (an old college friend) and Nora Callighan (her ex-psychiatrist), both of whom Jessie hasn't spoken to in decades. These voices represent different parts of her personality which help her extract a painful childhood memory she has kept suppressed for all these years. She was sexually abused by her father at age ten during a solar eclipse that occurred in her Maine hometown. She also begins to realize how unhappy her marriage was, and that she sacrificed the life she wanted for the security of Gerald's paycheck by being a trophy wife without children.

This internal dialogue is mixed with descriptions of Jessie's more and more desperate attempts to get out of the handcuffs, first by trying to break the headboard she was cuffed to then by trying to slip off the bed and push the bed to the bureau where the keys were placed. Finally she does escape after one of the voices in her head tells her that if she stays another night, The Space Cowboy, who she dreamed of as a manifestation of Death, will more than likely take a part of her to add to its trophy "fishing creel" filled with jewelry and human bones, killing her in the process. Jessie escapes the handcuffs by slicing her arm open all the way around on a broken glass and giving herself a degloving injury in order to lubricated her skin enough for the cuffs, which were made for men and not women and thus almost loose enough for her to slip out normally, but passes out due to blood loss shortly after. When she awakens, it is now nighttime, and the Space Cowboy has made his way back into the house. Jessie confronts him and throws her wedding ring at his box of jewelry and bones, thinking that is what he wanted all along, then turns and runs out of the house. She is able to make it into her car and finally escape the house, but is terrified to discover the Space Cowboy sitting in the backseat of the car. Jessie crashes out of fear and is knocked unconscious, and it is revealed that she only imagined the Space Cowboy in the backseat.

The story cuts to months later with Jessie recuperating from the incident and being looked after by a nurse. An ambitious law associate of her husband's assists her in covering up the real incident to protect her and the entire lawfirm from scandal, as well as assisting her in her recuperation. At the end, we get to read the letter that Jessie writes to Ruth Neary detailing what happened after the incident and her recuperation process, which is slow but very meaningful. One of the passages in the letter revolves around a serial necrophiliac and murderer named Raymond Andrew Joubert making his way through Maine; it turns out he was the Space Cowboy, confirmed when Jessie confronted him in a court hearing and him knowing who she was on sight by mimicking a Hear-No-Evil gesture that the Space Cowboy did when she was still in the cabin. Jessie also mentions what became of the stray dog that gnawed on Gerald. The dog is shot and killed. Its owner had abandoned it in Maine and driven back to Massachusetts, simply because he didn't want to pay for the dog's license.

The only true supernatural event in the story occurs as described during one of Jessie's flashbacks, when, during a particularly stressful incident at the time of childhood, she has a waking dream.

In King's subsequent novel Dolores Claiborne, it is revealed that the main character, Dolores, has a telepathic connection with Jessie Burlingame on two occasions, during the solar eclipse, when Jessie is assaulted, and later when she is handcuffed to the bed. The two novels were initially conceived to be part of a single volume, titled In the Path of the Eclipse. Later editions of Dolores Claiborne have a foreword that explains the connection between the two.

There is also a mention of sheriff Alan Pangborn and Norris Ridgewick near the end of the novel. Pangborn appeared in The Dark Half, The Sun Dog, and Needful Things. Ridgewick appeared in The Dark Half, The Sun Dog, Needful Things and Lisey's Story.

In the later King novel Lisey's Story, Lisey often refers to the unbalanced fans her husband's horror novels have created as "Space Cowboys." Juniper Hill was mentioned in both.

When Jessie is thinking about boogeymen and things that children are afraid of in the dark, she refers to them as It.

Raymond Andrew Joubert, the fictional deformed and insane multiple murderer and necrophiliac who terrorizes Jessie Burlingame of "Gerald's Game," has the same last name as the real John Joubert (criminal), a notorious Nebraska serial killer in the 1980's. Nebraska is used many times in King's works, most notably as the setting of "Children of the Corn." Gatlin, Nebraska, from "Children of the Corn," was also mentioned in "It." Hemingford Home, a neighboring town to Gatlin, was also the town where Mother Abagail lived and rounded up the good survivors of the superflu in The Stand, and was also the location of "The Last Rung on the Ladder".

• Solar eclipses in fiction
• List of books portraying paedophilia or sexual abuse of minors