Rose Madder (novel)

In 1985, Rosie[1] Daniels' husband, Norman, beats her while she is four months pregnant, causing her to miscarry. Rosie considers leaving Norman but dismisses the idea: Norman is a policeman, and is excellent at finding people. He also has a violent temper and has been recently accused of assaulting and raping a black woman named Wendy Yarrow. The subsequent lawsuit and internal affairs investigation has made him even more volatile.

Nine years later, Rosie is making the bed. She sees a drop of blood on the sheet that dripped from her nose the night before, when Norman had punched her in the face for spilling iced tea on him. Rosie realizes that she has passively suffered through Norman's abuse for fourteen years and that if she continues to put up with it, he will eventually kill her. Rosie departs on a bus with their bank card. Once Norman realizes that Rose is gone, he resolves to hunt her down and kill her.

Rosie arrives in a Midwestern city, disoriented and afraid. At the bus station, she meets a man named Peter Slowik, who guides her to a local women's shelter. She quickly makes several friends and, with the help of shelter director Anna Stevenson, gets an apartment and a job as a hotel housekeeper. When Rosie tries to pawn her engagement ring, she takes a liking to a painting of a woman in a rose madder gown. She trades her ring for the painting, which has no signature. Bill Steiner, the owner of the pawnshop, asks her for a date. Rosie falls in love with him, but she is afraid to begin a new relationship.

Rosie discovers that the painting seems to change from time to time. Eventually she is able to travel through it. On the other side, she encounters a woman called Dorcas, who resembles Wendy Yarrow. She also sees the woman in the painting, whom she calls "Rose Madder" because of her gown and her evident madness. Rose Madder asks Rosie to rescue her baby from an underground labyrinth inhabited by a blind, one-eyed bull called Erinyes who orients by his sense of smell.

Dorcas leads Rosie to the edge of the temple grounds. Dorcas cannot enter the labyrinth, as she is afflicted by the same mysterious illness as her mistress, and Erinyes would be able to smell her. Before Rosie parts from Dorcas, she is made to strip naked and rip her nightgown into several strips. One is soaked in Dorcas' blood and tied around a rock. Rosie enters the temple, where she manages to save the child, escape Erinyes, and return the baby girl to Rose Madder, who promises to repay her. Rose returns to her world and puts the strange incident at the back of her mind.

Norman arrives in the city, attacks some of Rosie's friends from the shelter, and then goes to Rosie's apartment. He kills a policemen assigned to protect her, poses as one of them in the patrol car, and sees Rosie and Bill returning from the police station. He attacks them, almost strangling Bill, but Rosie is able to fight him off because she believes she is wearing the golden arm circlet Rose Madder had given her. After injuring Norman, Rosie carries Bill to the apartment, where she sees the circlet on her table and realizes she has been fighting Norman alone the whole time.

Rosie tricks Norman into following her into the painting, then leads him to Rose Madder, who kills him. Rosie returns to her world with instructions from Rose Madder to "remember the tree", and a magic potion that causes memory loss. She considers taking it, but decides to keep memories because while they are unpleasant they are still part of her, and help shape who she is. In the long run her experiences might even make her stronger, and she doesn't want to give that up. She then decides to drug Bill with the potion, without his knowledge or consent. She hesitates for a moment, worried that it might poison him by overdose, but then goes through with it anyway, fearing the possibility that his bad memories might hamper their relationship or even cause him to leave her. She slips a drop into his drink, and the past events slip from his mind. She then sleeps with him. The two eventually marry and have a daughter together, and Rosie keeps drugging Bill periodically whenever he seems to regain his memories of the magic world in the painting. Finally the bottle runs out, but the effects seem to have become permanent at that point, so Rosie stops worrying about it.

All is well for Rosie for a while after that, but after she burns the painting in an attempt to cut ties with the past she finds that the violent rages that characterized both Norman and Rose Madder have begun to spring up within her. She remembers that Rose Madder allowed her to take some seeds home with her, and to make amends for the painting she plants the seeds along with Norman's police ring in a secret grove by her favorite lake. The seed grows into a beautiful but deadly tree. She revisits the tree periodically as it grows, and is able to release her rage and go on with her life.

A film adaptation of Rose Madder was in development in 2011, but the project fell apart.[2][3]

There was an audiobook made narrated by Blair Brown.

• The character of Cynthia Smith appeared in Desperation.
• In the prologue, Rose is reading Misery's Journey, an entry in the fictional series of books written by the main character in King's novel, Misery.
• The city of Lud from The Dark Tower appears in this novel.