Rose Madder
by Stephen King

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Book Reviews of Rose Madder

Book Review: It would have been better if he'd wanted to write it
Summary: 4 Stars

The book itself shows some obvious high points. Now, I'm sure that anybody who's ever been battered (or a woman, for that matter) will find some errors in King's depiction of Rose, but overall, I think it comes out okay. The characters are all pretty well developed, and all are believable. Gretta (the Refrigerator Perry lookalike who teaches the women self-defense) may well be the most accurately written female character Stephen King has ever created. More importantly, King finally seems to have washed himself of most of the borderline misogynistic tendencies in his writing (quite apparent in It) and the queer, and utterly false, association between battered women and lesbianism that showed up in Insomnia. The good, then, is that Stephen King has managed to transcend some of the views and tendencies that held his previous work back, to create a much more realistic and accurate depiction of the issue he tries to deal with.

Unfortunately, this book has a rather substantial downside as well, and that downside is the Dark Tower. Stephen King is well known for leaving little literary Easter Eggs sitting in his books for the attentive reader, but this amounts to much more than simple egg dropping. If you haven't read the Dark Tower books, I can personally guarantee that you WILL be confused at some point, and the plot and character motivations will become exquisitely obtuse and difficult to understand. This'll happen right around the time that supernatural things start creeping in (the section entitled The Temple of the Bull). It WILL detract from the experience.

This problem is only compounded by King's rather ham-fisted handling of symbolism throughout this piece. In most of his writing, you won't find too much in the way of abstract symbolism. Steve tries to break that pattern here, and he doesn't do it very well. I was personally sick of reading the phrase "Rose Madder" (used to refer to an actual color) around the time I was two thirds of the way through, and some of the symbols he introduces (notably the fox and the tree) are too obscure for even me to understand. Indeed, this would have been a much better novel if the entire epilogue had simply been sheared off--I can find no discernible purpose behind its inclusion other than confusing the reader. The character change that he induces in Rosie near the end of the book seems arbitrary and disturbing--an attempt to say something about something, but just what either of those somethings are escapes me.

All the same, read superficially, this is still a good book. The plot is realistic where it should be, and fantastic where it should be, and the whole is spun together into a fairly coherent story. While the plot may leave those who aren't familiar with King's magnum opus a little confused at points, it's still a good way to pass a few hours, even if it does fail as a conveyer for any message.

Summary of Rose Madder

Horror Books

• Subjects > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Horror