It’s stupid to try and analyse an author’s writing process. That’s a closed door to us readers, and we can only study the results. Nevertheless, I think Stephen King went quite a way wrong while writing Rose Madder. It’s like he started writing a thriller, and then decided halfway through that he’d like it to become a fantasy novel.

It’s nice and readable. The pace doesn’t drag (except for one overtly fantasy-oriented section in the middle which took forever to get through). But it’s not one of King’s best. The shift in plot structure and tone is so abrupt it feels like someone hacked and spliced together two different books with sticky tape.

It’s about a married women who has endured 14 years of beatings and degradations at the hands of an insane cop, and eventually decides to run away, taking nothing but his credit card. She finds a new home at a woman’s shelter called Daughters and Sisters, and it seems her nightmare is finally over. But her murderous husband is out looking for her, and will stop at nothing to get her back.

Then we get to the introduction of some weird fantasy elements, and this is where the book becomes a bit disjointed. She buys a painting that seems to change every time she turns her back, and eventually she is drawn into a strange world within the painting. To be honest, all of this stuff seems rather disconnected and out of place. Maybe it was an idea King had that he didn’t think was strong enough to carry a whole novel.

I’m not so happy with the idea, but there are still plenty of moments that remind us of why King is THE horror writer. The deranged, loopy ramblings inside the husband’s head as he tries to track her down are very disturbing and effective. Rosie McClendon is a very likeable main character, and she displays King’s talent at putting the reader in the shoes of someone a million miles removed from themselves and feeling like they’ve always lived there.

Still, the annoyingly obscure fantasy scenes drag the book down. There are seriously twenty or thirty books by this author I enjoyed more than Rose Madder. It won’t kill you if you read it, just save reading it until after you’ve read Carrie, Misery, The Stand, Gerald’s Game, the second Dark Tower book, et cetera, et cetera. You’ll have more perspective that way.