Rose Madder: A Novel

This book does an excellent job of showing how equally horrifying real-life abuse and supernatural horror can be. (And for those of you who don't think the depictions of abuse in this book are 100% realistic, you're living a blessed, naive life.) As a King fan, it took me a while to get around to this novel since it's not one of his more popular ones. However, it's a total page-turner, and his characteristic visceral style will have you in a fit of anxiety waiting to see what happens next. My one critique is that the ending ran a little long, but it was pretty intriguing nonetheless.

I really enjoyed this book about 10 years ago and I recently went looking for a good Stephen King book ( everyone of his books are great!) I found Rose Madder and remembered that I had greatly enjoyed this book long ago. It is very suspenseful all of the way through. I am currently re-reading Rose Madder with great pleasure and looking forward to the same fear and suspense all over again.

When I read this the first time, I seriously thought Mr. King's wife had to have wrote this. How in the world could any man know how a woman feels when subjected to domestic violence. Due to amount of detail that went into Rose's character and the feelings she had, Mr. King has definitly impressed me with this story. I could not put it down and have read it several times. Each time I discover more.

tl;dr -- Great King story. Poor ebook.

Throughout his career, King has always explored the ugly side of humanity, and the abuse of women often plays no small part in his works. Rose Madder, however, takes this theme and pushes it to the forefront. To anyone who has ever known an abuse victim, this book will resonate with many of your experiences, possibly to the point of bringing tears to your eyes. I assume that this novel would warrant a hearty "trigger warning" directed at those who have been the actual targets of abuse. Without diluting the seriousness of these real-life issues, by using domestic abuse as the bedrock for the emotional context of this story, King allows us, his "faithful readers," to fully share the main character's anxiety throughout the tale, her ultimate triumph, as well as revel in the antagonist's final fate.

I will now address the ebook format itself. It is obvious that a hard copy of this text was scanned, OCR'ed, and then poorly proofed, likely by someone without full command of the English language or the standards of American typesetting and print publishing. I doubt that whoever proofed this edition even had a hard copy on-hand to reference, making me suspect this was a distributed (possibly outsourced) job, farmed out via the likes of Mechanical Turk. This was obviously a financial win for whoever commissioned the conversion, but it makes it all the more harder to swallow the fact that the price of this ebook is (at the time of this writing) no cheaper than the mass-market paperback being currently sold. Errors, both subtle and glaring, pepper this rendition, often interrupting the flow and jarring me out of the immersion I desire in a good story. From slipshod ellipses and em/en-dashes, to obvious OCR errors ("comer" instead of "corner" is a real example), there are many wince-inducing moments throughout the novel.

In summary, my 2-star rating is not a slam on the story itself, but rather the poor workmanship of the ebook rendition. While I still enjoyed this story immensely (this being my 2nd reading), the errors of the format diluted much of the reading experience.

This is my favorite Stephen King book of all time. It's about a woman who steps through a picture into a fantasy world to escape the horrific abuse from a "cop" husband. I read this once a year, have the hard copy & though I would download it to my kindle.

Stephen King has written better books than Rose Madder. His villains, even if twisted, are usually more interesting than the psychotic killer in this book, who likes to bite and chew on his victims, among other nasty things. (Seriously, this guy is a downer.) The supernatural side of the story is way too long and tedious. The book itself is too long. I gave it one star because the beginning is good, if you have a stomach for spousal abuse, with Rosie's flight and Norman's tracking of her. But once the bloodbath begins there is little enjoyment in reading on. Read Dolores Claiborne instead. Read anything instead.