Rose Madder

Okay, okay, here's the last Stephen King book I'll post for a while. Apparently looking back at all of his books, King described Rose Madder and Insomnia, a book I didn't like, as "trying too hard." I was worried that Rose Madder would suck like Insomnia did since the author so casually lumped them together, but thankfully I actually found it a bit better. At the very least, it wasn't nearly as boring. It's the story of Rose, a woman trapped in an abusive marriage to a crooked policeman, finally up and leaving but with little understanding of how to get by on her own. Of course since her husband is a policeman he is hot on her trail and out for revenge on the woman who would dare walk out on him. Most of the criticism of Rose Madder unsurprisingly came from the surreal way the plot would often shift to an ancient Greek setting; King has come up with plenty of great nightmarish settings on his own but fans were less enthused with him drawing from a more established mythological setting with goddesses and minotaurs. Personally I had no problem with this and thought it worked fine for the story. What bugged me was the inconsistencies with the villain, Rose's husband. Overall his arc takes him from your average abusive manipulator to complete and literal monster, but along the way he at times seems like the luckiest and smartest person in the world, or a complete idiot doofus who never would have made it in the police force. I know stories need conflict but it was already pretty entertaining just reading about Rose struggling to re-integrate herself with the outside world and build her life back up again from the lowest low; the sections where we see her husband work to find her just always felt kind of silly. I think it would have been more effective to just have him show up towards the end of the book without any other explanation aside from "he's good at tracking people down". Oh well. Fun fact, this has small ties to the last King book I read, Misery. It turns out Rose is a huge fan of the Misery series of books too!