My Long Walk Through Stephen King's Lot

It took me longer to get through the second half of Rose Madder than I anticipated.   This is not so much a criticism of the book as it is a reflection of my busy life at the current time.   Lately, I’ve had to put reading on the back burner more than I like to.   My hope is that once my internship is finished in May, I’ll be able to dive back into reading to the extent that I really enjoy.     That said, while my schedule was the primary hindrance, I confess that I did lose a bit of interest in the book as it progressed.   The funny thing is, at least in its broad strokes, the story actually evolved the way I hoped it would.   The supernatural elements of the novel don’t play (quite) as big a part as I suspected they might, and the suspense/thriller aspects essentially drive most of the latter part of the book.   I very much liked the grounded nature of the early sections of the novel, and I was pleased that a lot of that is r...

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 ...