He fried to turn over, as if he could get away from her, but his broken legs and drugged body refused to obey. Annie poured some of the liquid on to his left ankle and some more onto the blade of the axe. 'There won't be much pain, Paul. It won't be bad.' It's no good screaming - no one can hear. And if you think things arc as bad as they can get, just listen to the 'morse'. Paul Sheldon is a world-famous writer. On his way to deliver the typewritten pages of his latest book, he has an accident on a snow-covered road. When he wakes up, he's in bed . . . But it's not a hospital bed. And though the woman who saved him is one of his greatest admirers, she's also dangerously insane. And in her lonely country house, she has Paul, his legs badly broken and in extreme pain, completely in her power. When she learns what he has just done to Misery Chastain, her favourite character from his books, Paul knows he's in trouble, deep trouble. The one thing you don't do with Annic Wilkes is make her angry. She knows how to cause pain. The only question is, how much can a man stand? Stephen King is probably the most popular author now writing. There are over 150 million copies of his novels in print and he makes $2 million a month from his books and the films of his books. He was born in 1947 in Portland, Maine, USA and became a full-time writer after his first novel, Carrie (1973), was sold for $400,000. Many of King's books have been made into films. The screen version of Misery was one of the most popular films of 1990. Kathy Bates won an Oscar for playing Annie Wilkes. James Caan played Paul Sheldon. You tan also read Stephen King's The breathing Method and The Body in Penguin Readers.

To the teacher:

In addition to all the language forms of Levels One to Five, which are used again at this level of the series, the main verb forms and tenses used at Level Six are:

. future perfect verbs, passives with continuous or perfect aspects and the 'third' conditional with continuous forms

. modal verbs: needn't and needn't have (to express absence of necessity), would (to describe habitual past actions), should and should have (to express probability or failed expectation), may have and might have (to express possibility) could have and Would have (to express past, unfulfilled possibility or likelihood).

Also used are:

. non-defining relative clauses.

Specific attention is paid to vocabulary development in the Vocabulary Work exercises at the end of the book. These exercises are aimed at training students to enlarge their vocabulary systematically through intelligent reading and effective use of a dictionary.

To the student:

Dictionary Words:

. As you read this book, you will find that some words are in darker black ink than the others on the page. Look them up in your dictionary, if you do not already know them, or try to guess the meaning of the words first, and then look them up later, to check.