King likes to connect his books with overt references to events in other novels and stories. In Misery, Annie Wilks picks up a hitchhiker, who claims to be an artist commissioned to do sketches of the Overlook Hotel nearby. The sketches are for a history of the hotel, which was set on fire by a caretaker who went mad. The Overlook Hotel's reputation and history are recorded in The Shining.

The theme of survival, for Stephen King, has its roots in a short story from Skeleton Crew called "Survivor Type."

That story contains some of the same elements as Misery: the seductive influence of drugs, the desire to survive at any cost, and the use of gruesome details to illustrate what "at any cost" means. In both narratives, the graphic horror stems from threatening circumstances: pain, dismemberment, and death.