A review by thebestmark
Rose Madder by Stephen King

dark sad medium-paced

Not to engage in Stephen King apologia for a book I didn't like all that much, but Rose Madder is such a prime example of Stephen King holding back Stephen King from doing something interesting with his increasingly bloated bibliography. The '90s saw King explore feminism as an infrequent topic of his works, beginning with Gerald's Game and Dolores Claiborne, both of which feature women protagonists who are forced to reckon with misogynist husbands, and both which stand up as some of King's best works in the '90s (particularly Dolores Claiborne). Part of the appeal of those novels is not only in the perspective of their protagonists, but in their restricted scope - there are supernatural elements that tie the stories together, but those supernatural elements exist largely for thematic purposes. Rose Madder is a completely different story. It's A-plot, which is unfortunately both too big and also too unfocused to work on its own, becomes swallowed by the B-plot, one of King's lazier sojourns into Dark Tower-adjacent metaphysics, as the protagonist and her abuser become combined with the superpowered beings who represent them in another universe and do battle with one another. I'm on board for anything, but the domestic abuse in this book is pretty extreme and difficult to get through - combining that with King's superficially interesting mythology cheapened whatever else was going on in the narrative for me. And I haven't even brought up the part where an abuse advocate heroically pisses on the protagonist's abuser as a show of dominance. Not King at his best.