Rose Madder (novel)

Rose Madder

First edition cover
Author	Stephen King
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Horror/Fantasy
Publisher	Viking
Publication date	June 1995
Media type	Print (Hardcover)
Pages	420
ISBN	978-0-670-85869-9

Rose Madder is a horror/fantasy novel by American writer Stephen King, published in 1995. It deals with the effects of domestic violence (which King had touched upon before in the novels It, Insomnia, Dolores Claiborne, Needful Things, and many others) and, unusually for a King novel, relies for its fantastic element on Greek mythology. In his memoir, On Writing, King states that Rose Madder and Insomnia are "stiff, trying-too-hard novels."

Plot[]

In 1985, Rosie^[1] Daniels' husband, Norman, beats her while she is four months pregnant, causing her to miscarry. Rosie considers leaving Norman but dismisses the idea: Norman is a police officer, and is excellent at finding people. He also has a violent temper and has been recently accused of assaulting and raping a black woman named Wendy Yarrow. The subsequent lawsuit and internal affairs investigation has made him even more volatile.

Nine years later, Rosie is making the bed. She sees a drop of blood on the sheet that dripped from her nose the night before, when Norman had punched her in the face for spilling iced tea on him. Rosie realizes that she has passively suffered through Norman's abuse for fourteen years and that if she continues to put up with it, he will eventually kill her. Rosie departs on a bus with their bank card. Once Norman realizes that Rosie is gone, he resolves to hunt her down and kill her.

Rosie arrives in a Midwestern city, disoriented and afraid. At the bus station, she meets a man named Peter Slowik, who guides her to a local women's shelter. She quickly makes several friends and, with the help of shelter director Anna Stevenson, gets an apartment and a job as a hotel housekeeper. When Rosie tries to pawn her engagement ring, only to find out it's essentially worthless, she takes a liking to a painting of a woman in a rose madder gown. She trades her ring for the painting, which has no signature. Bill Steiner, the nice gentleman who owns the pawnshop, asks her for a date. Rosie is afraid to begin a new relationship but in spite of herself, falls in love with Bill.

Rosie discovers that the painting seems to change from time to time. Eventually she is able to travel through it. On the other side, she encounters a woman called Dorcas, who resembles Wendy Yarrow. She also sees the lady in the painting, whom she calls "Rose Madder" because of her dress and her evident madness. Rose Madder asks Rosie to rescue her baby from an underground labyrinth inhabited by a blind, one-eyed bull called Erinyes who orients by his sense of smell.

Dorcas leads Rosie to the edge of the temple grounds. Dorcas cannot enter the labyrinth, as she is afflicted by the same mysterious illness as her mistress, and Erinyes would be able to smell her. Before Rosie parts from Dorcas, she is made to strip naked and rip her nightgown into several strips. One is soaked in Dorcas' blood and tied around a rock. Rosie enters the temple, where she manages to save the child, escape Erinyes, and return the baby girl to Rose Madder, who promises to repay her. Rose returns to her world and puts the strange incident at the back of her mind.

Norman arrives in the city, attacks some of Rosie's friends from the shelter, and then goes to Rosie's apartment. He kills a policeman assigned to protect her, poses as one of them in the patrol car, and sees Rosie and Bill returning from the police station. He attacks them, almost strangling Bill, but Rosie is able to fight him off because she believes she is wearing the golden arm circlet Rose Madder had given her. After injuring Norman, Rosie carries Bill to the apartment, where she sees the circlet on her table and realizes she has been fighting Norman alone the whole time.

Rosie tricks Norman into following her and Bill into the painting, then leads him to Rose Madder, who kills him. Rosie returns to her world with instructions from Rose Madder to "remember the tree", and a magic potion that causes memory loss. She considers taking it, but finally decides to keep her memories. She reasons that while they are unpleasant, they are still part of her, and help shape who she is. In the long run her experiences might even make her stronger, and she doesn't want to give that up. She then decides to drug her boyfriend with the potion without his knowledge. She hesitates for a moment, worried that it might poison him by overdose since she has no idea how strong it is, but then decides it's worth the risk, since his bad memories might hamper their relationship or even cause him to part with her. She slips a drop into his drink, and the past events slip from his mind. She then sleeps with him. The two eventually marry and have a daughter together, and Rosie keeps drugging Bill periodically whenever he seems to regain his memories of the magic world in the painting. Finally the bottle runs out, but the effects seem to have become permanent at that point, so Rosie stops worrying about it.

All is well for Rosie for a while after that, but after she burns the painting in an attempt to cut ties with the past she finds that the violent rages that characterized both Norman and Rose Madder have begun to spring up within her. She remembers that Rose Madder allowed her to take some seeds home with her, and to make amends for the painting she plants the seeds along with Norman's police ring in a secret grove by her favorite lake. The seed grows into a beautiful but deadly tree. She revisits the tree periodically as it grows, and is able to release her rage and go on with her life.

Adaptations[]

A film adaptation of Rose Madder was in development in 2011, but the project fell apart.^[2][3]

There was an audiobook made narrated by Blair Brown.

Connections to other King works[]

• The character of Cynthia Smith appeared in Desperation.
• In the prologue, Rose is reading Misery's Journey, an entry in the fictional series of books written by the main character in King's novel, Misery.
• The city of Lud from The Dark Tower appears in this novel.

References[]