A few days later,
Paul complained to
Annie that the
typewriter’s thunks were irritating him, and she cut off his thumb. Now, he realizes she was actually enraged that Paul had denied her request and she had to accept it. Paul reflects on the powerful influence art has on people, evoking real feelings of grief and outrage over the fates of fictional characters. He himself has lost sleep over characters who died gruesome deaths, and he vomited after finishing
Lord of the Flies at age 12. He even knew a woman—
Mrs. Roman D. (“Virginia”) Sandpiper, who turned a room in her house into “
Misery’s Parlor.” Paul calls this kind of literary obsession “the
Scheherazade complex.”