Come Right Up Close - I Want To Talk To You (Rose Madder - Stephen King)

Member Name: shewhosmiles

Product:	Rose Madder - Stephen King
Date:	16/09/02 (126 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Interesting

Disadvantages: Mixing the supernatural with what could have been a good thriller didn't work well.

Throughout the eighties I was a massive Stephen King fan and loved his earlier novels. During the nineties his style seemed to change, his plots became harder to understand, his writing didn't flow as well and I found it harder to get into what I expected to be good reads.

Disappointed, I transferred my affection to Dean Koontz whose work reminded me of the earlier atmospheric, spine chilling and easy to read King novels. During the last few years I haven't had much time for reading, a pity because for many years I was in the habit of reading one or more book every week and it was one of my favourite ways to relax.

Lately I've freed up a bit more leisure time and a trip to the library led me to borrowing Stephen King's Rose Madder. The gap from reading novels has I think enabled me to look at King with fresh eyes and without my earlier disappointment.

King builds up feeling for the main characters in the short first chapter well. We have the husband Norman, a policeman and a total monster calling an ambulance for his downtrodden wife Rose who is cowering in the corner suffering a miscarriage after a brutal beating and not for the first time. All because he wasn't happy with her reading a light hearted novel. His callousness is apparent as he leaves her crumpled in pain to make a sandwich for himself while humming ‘When A Man Loves A Woman’ before bothering to call an ambulance.

While I was made to feel anger at Norman, Rose I felt desperately sorry for and wanted to see her fight back. You wonder why she has silently suffered brutal treatment from Norman for 14 years without even putting some ground up glass in his meals or on his toothbrush, but then you know from life and Kings words that frightened women like Rose become so undermined and demoralised that they just let it happen and brutality becomes an unpleasantly normal way of life.

Years l
ater, another beating and a drop of bloo
d on her bedding changes all that. Rose walks out of the house with only her husband’s credit card and starts a new life 550 miles away. I’m not sure how true to life that bit is. If that was me I would have bunged some clothes into a suitcase and any items that could be sold to help me to get as far away from the beast as possible, but then I haven’t lived the life of the Roses of this world.

Although only used once for a withdrawal of $350, the credit card is the means that King introduced for Norman to start to trace Rose. Throughout the book we are given more clues to Norman’s beastlike character, all helping to create a healthy disgust in the man. We find out that he is a murderer and that he likes biting his victims, he hates women and you know that if he asks anybody to come up close because he wants to talk to them he will do a lot more than that.

Three coincidences made the story less believable for me. A visit to a pawn shop finds Rose a fit man to fall in love with, a job recording talking books that pays mega bucks, and a weird picture of a woman with Rose Madder written on the back. Ok you can understand the introduction of a man who may or may not turn out to be a knight in shining armour. Rose needed a job to pay her way but it would have been more realistic for somebody who is trying to hide from a cop who has the resources to trace her to trawl cafes and restaurants looking for cash in hand and anonymity. The addition of the picture and trying to turn what could have been a damned good thriller into a horror story was unnecessary for me and I almost stopped reading at that point.

It’s hard writing this without giving too much of the story away but my favourite bit, Norman’s encounter with Gert had me cheering her on and feeling violent towards the man. During one of Norman’s attempts to find Rose he attacks a young woman behind some toilets i
n a park. Gert, a very large woman
who teaches self-defence has a go and woops him. She ends up sitting on him and leaving a message for Rose - whose kidneys he has punched many times and damaged - by peeing on his face. Norman escapes to carry on his search by wearing a rubber bull mask, trapping the smell of pee and reminding him of the message.

Norman quickly gets dottier and talks to the mask. He believes that the mask is talking back to him and helping him with the search that leaves a few more gruesomely treated victims behind. Those bits seemed a bit silly but I guess that they were included to show readers just how dangerously nutty Norman was becoming.

CONCLUSION

I enjoyed reading Rose Madder but I found Roses character a bit bland throughout most of the book. King doesn’t give much insight into her and I would have liked to see him enlarge on her feelings and thoughts more to help me to build up more of an empathy with the character apart from pity.

There was little of the suspense that I would have expected from Kings novels and I felt a little disappointed that more advantage hadn’t been taken of Normans ‘moments’. Most of those were blanked out or glossed over by Norman having blank spells.

As I thought half way through, the inclusion of the picture and a hint at the supernatural was unnecessary and didn’t do the book any favours. I felt like skipping those parts because they just added tosh to what would have been a very good read without them.

The book wasn’t frightening in the horror sense that I like, but it is frightening to think that men like Norman may exist in the real world. My favourite line from the book comes when Rose is trying to believe that she might have a chance for a new life …

if there could actually be a real life where real people walked out of their prisons, turned right … and walked into heaven.

I'm glad th
at I read Rose Madder and will
almost certainly read some of the Stephen King books that I've missed, maybe even re-read some of the ones that I enjoyed years ago.

Summary: