Stephen King's Rose Madder

As a 10-year-old, I saw TV ads for this book, Rose Madder. This was in 1995, back when the rare writer could get their own commercial. Stephen King was one of those rare writers.

One year passed and the commercials faded. But the advertising campaign wasn't over.

I must have been in Walmart. Or else Waldenbooks. On its own cardboard book rack were Signet paperback copies of Rose Madder. I bought it then. Or else I only saw it and my mother later bought it for herself. I don't remember. All I remember is that I remember my mother wanting to read it, too. She put it on her dresser counter in her bedroom, where it sat and sat and sat, and then one day I picked it up.

The mass market Signet paperback cover is, admittedly, a lot more intriguing than the hardcover Doubleday cover. The Doubleday cover is a brown paper wrapping, crinkled and partially ripped, revealing the backside of a canvas painting and its wooden frame. The Signet paperback cover is pink and bears a man with the face of a bull. Had the book never appeared in the latter format, I probably never would have picked it up. At 10 and 11, you see, I still judged a book by its cover.

Rose Madder involves heavy topics for a kid. In the story, Rosie Clendon, after 14 years of abuse, escapes her police officer husband Norman, taking a Greyhound to another city to start a new life. There, she receives help from an organization that deals with women who have suffered from domestic violence and takes a job cleaning hotels. Mentally, she begins to feel more and more safe.

One day, while visiting a pawn shop, she gets an ever better job opportunity. A man who runs a recording studio asks her if she would be interested in cutting audiobooks. Through him, she lands a salaried job. And in that same pawn shop, she meets a man named Bill—they have an immediate rapport—and agree to go on a date. Everything seems to be going swimmingly.

But trouble comes on two fronts. One, husband Norman starts a search for her and gets ever closer. And two, an old painting that Rosie has bought at the pawn shop called Rose Madder begins to come to life when she takes it home.

A coincidence. On one of those days, age 11, when I was reading about Rosie and Bill and the pawn shop and the painting, my own father took me into the local pawn shop called Vernon's. In the same way Rosie was enamored with the knicknacky oddities at the pawn shop she visits, so was I, this first time I was looking around Vernon's, walking among the rows of mostly junk with my Signet copy of Rose Madder tucked in my armpit.

I was not, like Rosie, interested in the painting portion of the store but rather the area for games and gaming consoles, encased in glass like they were jewels. I prized, I believe, a Sega Genesis, but the price was too steep, pawn shop or no. But there was a Super Nintendo console in the case, which is almost just as good.

On sight of the Super Nintendo, I backtracked to my father and insisted I needed to have it. If memory serves, my father paid eighty dollars for it. (Does that sound right? Too cheap?) Whatever the price, the markup must have been too much, and what was worse, I wasn't even going to receive a game with the console until my father pushed me to give up the silver dollar I carried in my pocket. It hurt to part with my Lady Liberty. But I wanted Mortal Kombat II.

Rose Madder takes a peculiar turn when Rosie is able to enter the painting. At the point, the book becomes about the Greek myth of the minotaur and the maze and also the story of Persephone, goddess to Hades, who swallows the pomegranate seeds, and enters the underworld... King, in interviews, says he sort of hates this book because of this myth stuff, himself regarding it all as a bit too heavy-handed. At age 11, though, I thought it was all pretty cool. And something good came of it. It pressed me to read Edith Hamilton's Mythology, a great little book I would not have read were it not for King.

Now, reading the book these many years later, I do regard the allusions to mythology as a bit overbearing, but worse than that, I hate how much time King makes us spend inside the sociopathic head of Rosie's husband Norman. Still, all told, Rose Madder is a good book, and Rosie Clendon a well-drawn character. She suffers through difficult circumstances and struggles to overcome the anger that she has had to feel toward Norman for all the times he made her suffer. Though we see that that anger still burns inside her at the book's end, we also see that she survives she survives and makes a mostly normal life for herself.