In Stephen King’s 1922, the narrator who murders his wife is named Wilfred James.
Wilfred is a Nebraska farmer who opposes his wife Arlette’s plan to sell their property and move to Omaha. He involves their teenage son, Henry, in a plot that results in Arlette’s murder. Wilfred then tries to conceal the crime, but guilt, fear, and increasingly disturbing events destroy the life he hoped to preserve.
The story is told as Wilfred’s written confession, which gives it the tone of a personal account rather than a conventional third-person narrative. Its title refers to the year in which the central crime occurs and evokes the rural American setting of the period.
The work was published as part of King’s 2010 collection Full Dark, No Stars. It is technically a novella, not a full-length novel, despite sometimes being described casually as a novel in trivia lists.