Charlotte Kersten

Year published: 1995

Category: Horror

Summary:  Roused by a single drop of blood, Rosie Daniels wakes up to the chilling realisation that her husband is going to kill her. And she takes flight – with his credit card.

Alone in a strange city, Rosie begins to build a new life: she meets Bill Steiner and she finds an old junk shop painting, “Rose Madder,” which strangely seems to want her as much as she wants it.

But it’s hard for Rosie not to keep looking over her shoulder. Rose-maddened and on the rampage, Norman is a corrupt cop with a dog’s instinct for tracking people. And he’s getting close. Rosie can feel just how close he is getting…

A brilliant dark-hued fable of gender wars, a haunting love story, and a hold-your-breath triumph of suspense, “Rose Madder” is Stephen King at his electrifying best.

My thoughts:  I’ve never read Stephen King before, and if I hadn’t heard from multiple people that this was one of his weaker books, I’m not sure I’d be inclined to try anything else by him. Overall, I thought it was far too long, pretty boring/repetitive in places, and vaguely unpleasant in a way that didn’t have anything to do with its horror elements.

As far as the villain Norman goes, it seems like King decided to show how awful he is by making him abhorrently racist and sexist at every possible opportunity (before he starts biting people’s dicks off too lol). This succeeded in making me hate him, yes, but I’m not sure that it A) was actually necessary or B) rendered the psychology of an abusive man with much actual insight into abusive dynamics beyond the most glaringly obvious bits.

I liked Rosie as a protagonist and thought that parts of her journey to independence via staying at a shelter program were nicely done, but those parts quickly got lost with the focus on a very flat, boring instalove romance with some dude. I also thought it was super interesting that King made Norman a police detective and started out by showing how impossible it is for an anyone with a police abuser to find any recourse with the criminal justice system…only for Rosie to be lectured by the Good Police at the end of the book about how “what she knows about cops” is actually wrong and her experience was just a case of a few bad apples. Okay lol.

The whole painting world was cool and it was the part of the book I was the most interested in by far. Apparently there are references to other Stephen King lore here, but these were totally lost on me, of course. This was really not a great read overall, and I definitely wish I had picked something different for my r/fantasy bingo square for Horror.