My Long Walk Through Stephen King's Lot

Reflections on Rose Madder : Part One (pp. 1 – 192) In the early-to-mid 1990s, Stephen King wrote a small string of books—tenuously, but intriguingly related to one another—featuring abused female protagonists who come up against a different sort of evil than is customary in King’s horror fiction: the sort of evil perpetrated by vicious men.   I found the first of these novels, Gerald’s Game , to be vaguely exploitative, unnecessarily grim and too vulgar for its own good, but the second one, Dolores Claiborne , to be a terrific achievement.   Rose Madder , the third book, seems to be widely regarded as the worst of the batch—and not just that, but also as one of Stephen King’s “lesser” books overall.   This reputation preceded my reading of the novel, yet a mere few chapters in, I could already see what a great work of empathy it is. To begin with, I have not always been enamored with King’s ability to write from the perspective of women.   I am not qualified to