Published in 1995, Rose Madder is dedicated to Joan Marks. We don’t know for sure, but most people assume King is referring to Joan H. Marks, a prominent pioneer in the field of genetic counseling, a trained psychiatric social worker, and the director of the Genetics Counseling Program at Sarah Lawrence College (1973-1998), but I can’t establish her connection to the King family. This is the final, and perhaps the most heavy handed, of what fans now refer to as the “Battered Woman Trilogy” – Gerald’s Game, Dolores Claiborne, and Rose Madder.

The book opens on a scene of violence. Rose Daniels is crouched, and suffering a miscarriage, after being punched in the stomach repeatedly by her husband Norman. Norman is a police officer, and a psychopath. We then jump ahead in time to the day Rose decides to leave her nightmare marriage of 14 years. She does this suddenly, basically walking out the door with nothing but her purse (she has no money of her own, or car) and Norman’s bank card. She takes $350 out of an ATM and boards a bus, throwing the card in the trash before she leaves town. She travels 800 miles away to a large city and finds her way to a woman’s shelter, and within 2 months of landing she finds a painting, a dream job reading audio books, and new boyfriend, at a local pawn shop. But Norman, her deranged and truly terrifying husband, has tracked her to this new city, and is closing in. Rose gets a small apartment and hangs her new painting on the wall. The painting, oil, is of a woman in a rose colored tunic, looking down on a temple, back-to so you cannot see her face. Here’s where things get…interesting.

One night Rose wakes and hears thunder and crickets. She goes into the other room and sees that her painting has changed dramatically, and with little ado, she steps into the painting. I very vividly remember reading this part of the book for the first time, back in the aughts, because it was very similar to a storyline that I loved on Guiding Light. Reva Shayne (fan favorite played by Kim Zimmer) steps into an oil painting of Olivia (Josh’s new wife) dressed as a Southern belle, and time travels to different time periods (civil war era New Orleans, Edwardian England, and WWII era Paris), and falls in love with her lost love Josh in each itteration! But, back to our main story here, Rose meets two women in the painting (and a pony), and is tasked with going into the temple and saving Rose Madder’s baby who is being held at the center of a maze by a blind one-eyed bull named Erinyes. It’s harrowing, but she does it, nude to boot, and when she gives the baby to Rose Madder (who is deranged and who you can not look at directly without going mad) Rose Madder tells her that she owes her, that she repays. Rose jumps back into her little room.

Rose goes on a motorcycle date with pawn shop owner Bill Steiner. Norman goes to a picnic held by the woman’s shelter trying to find Rose’s new apartment address. Norman, by the way, is a straight up serial killer. He has killed sex workers back in their home town, and he is killing people left and right (often biting them to death, he is a biter, and a sexual saddist) on the bloody path to Rose. Norman tracks Rose to the apartment, now wearing a rubber bull mask he stole from a child, tries to kill Billy, but Rose lures all of them into the painting, and then lures Norman (ze bool) into the maze, where Rose Madder (who is a poisonous spider beneath her human visage) kills him. Then they head back and Rose gives Billy some forget about it drops. They marry, have a daughter, and Rose deals with some residual rage by planting a tree.

The thing that works best, for me, is Norman. He is a terrifying person, and I think he is written with a nuance that captures the true ugliness and danger of a damaged person, who harbors misogynistic and racist rage, and is in a position of power, as a white man and a cop. He looses his mind as the story progresses, and his awareness of that impending insanity, and his eager surrender to it, is particularly chilling. He is framing this as a suicide mission in the later half of the book, and he seems eager to give himself over to the darkness, once Rose has suffered for her betrayal. His abusive father guides him as he hunts for Rose, and the bull mask also becomes a character, guiding him (without him knowing it) to the painting. I can also say that this is a very readable book. Coming off of Insomnia, I found this to be a walk in the park at 420 pages, and the plot cooks along the whole time. It reads very much like a lifetime movie, melodramatic, with building suspense that keeps you turning the pages.

Some things that don’t work: P lace. The book does not have a sense of place at all. The names and locations of both the hometown Norman and Rose live in, and the big city Rose flees to, are not revealed. She travels 800 miles on a bus. I guess they lived in upstate NY or maybe Mass. or Conn. and then she goes to Chicago, but for some reason it never says and I felt deeply adrift. Steve is normally so deeply rooted in place that this really stood out to me and distracted me. And it added to the Lifetime movie of it all. The city seemed like a poorly wrought stage set. Another huge thorn for me was Rose’s “good luck”. Her getting the audio book job actually enraged me. I guess this reveals a little ugliness in me, but it was like, wow, five weeks of being a maid in a hotel and now you have a cushy, well paying job that I’d kill for. No college, no job experience at all (as Norman kept her locked in the house) but apparently Rose has the voice of Elizabeth Taylor. MUST BE NICE. And on this second read through I was also annoyed by Bill. Again, she is single for less than two months, and she immediately starts dating Bill and then marries him, this after a deeply traumatic marriage. Can’t be single for a bit? Can’t figure out who you are without hanging off the neck of some guy (or clinging to the back of his motorcycle, as it were)? Three group therapy sessions at the shelter and you’re ready to love wholeheartedly again? MUST BE NICE.

And then there’s the light (or heavy but fictional?) greek mythology of it all. Clearly heavily influenced by the Minotaur story: Minos’s wife falls in love with a bull, and has a child, the Minotaur (half bull, half man) but this is pretty embarrassing for King Minos, so he hides/locks the Minotaur in a maze, but they have to send some people down there every seven years to be devoured to appease the dangerous beast. Eventually though Theseus volunteers to go in the maze, and he kills the Minotaur and uses a ball of thread to find his way back out, and he marries King Minos’s daughter. Erinyes are furies in Roman mythology. So Steve is mixing the paint with great abandon here. Erinyes in Rose Madder is a one eyed blind bull guarding a baby. And Norman becomes a Minatuar of sorts, with the bull mask welding to his face at the end. Rose uses seeds to mark her turns in the maze. There’s shades of all of it, and it works, but would probably annoy the hell out of a classics major.

If you handed me this book without context I would read it quickly and easily and shrug my shoulders, and I would not think Stephen King wrote it. I loved both of my rereads of Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne, those are strong novels with nuanced and powerful female protagonists. This is a melodramatic, suspenseful and entertaining book, but it is flat and a bit frivolous, especially in the context of what we’ve read so far. I should also mention that we meet Cynthia Smith at the woman’s shelter, who will appear in Desperation, and the Bachman book The Regulators (my favorite of those books). But she does nothing here but get beat up by Norman.

Our next reread is The Green Mile, and I’m nervous about this one, folks, but we’ll get into why in the next blog. And of course, to all you constant readers, Happy Halloween! Hope ya’ll are watching some good King adaptations. My friend and I just returned from a trip to Bangor, Maine where we took a wonderful SK Bus Tour. I highly recommend this to anyone lucky enough to get up to Bangor. I’ll clip some pics in here, I’m sure you’ll recognize these sites from many of the novels we’ve covered. My favorite stop was Mount Hope Cemetery, one of the most beautiful bone yards I’ve ever been to. You can find all of my King Reread Project: here.