Rating: 
Summary: Bad cop, very bad cop!
Review: This is a great book. If you like being scared, read this! Although the language and situations aren't for everyone, I can almost assure you it will be hard to put down. The setting is brillant. Stephen King really knows how to keep his reader's attention! In this story a lady named Rosie leaves her abusive husband, who just happens to be a police officer. All her actions are contributed to a small dot of blood she finds on her bed. This book goes along with Rosie's fight to a new life without her husband. She meets many new friends who help a lot in her fight. Rose Madder has many flips, turns, and awfully weird situations that will keep you reading for hours. Overall, I enjoyed this book a lot and would love to read it again. It is a great horror.
Rating: 
Summary: King does it again!
Review: Okay, people who have read my reviews of other King books are probably getting tired of reading my praises of his character building. I'm getting a bit bored writing them, even if they are spectacular, so I will attempt to write about something else regarding this book.The events in this book are so startlingly realistic and Rose's reactions to her situation are so vivid that it makes me wonder if King personally knows a woman who was abused. The rage that I felt reading about what had happened to this woman was something that I have rarely felt before (the rape and attempted murder of the girl in Grisham's A TIME TO KILL is probably on par). This realistic type of horror that King writes is probably scarier than his supernatural stuff because it could actually happen. About 150 to 200 pages into the book, King does introduce it's one supernatural element. To be honest, I would have preferred the book without it. It just seemed incongruent with what I had read up to that point. Before this, the story was steeped in the real world and grounded in things that could actually happen. As the story progressed, the supernatural elements seemed to blend a little better, but I still would have liked to see the story resolved without incorporating this particular environment. As it is, however, the surreal events that happened added a certain creepy tone to the book that only King can impart to a story. While it wasn't entirely what I was expecting, I still enjoyed this story. King's (sorry, I can't resist) characters are always so interesting to read that they make whatever story he is telling a page turner. This type of story (without the fantastical elements) shows that King's storytelling ability ranges across all types of fiction. We have Western elements in the Dark Tower series, fantasy elements in The Talisman, mystery elements in his Sherlock Holmes short story in (I think) NIGHTMARES AND DREAMSCAPES, and now a story of a woman's escape from spousal abuse. I wouldn't be suprised if, in the future, high school students have one of his books assigned in a literature class.
Rating:
Summary: A twisted psychological thriller
Review: Steven King is the undesputed god of intense thrillers... This book only adds credence to that fact. This book will enrapture you from the start. The dark, mysterous setting of the haunted world in which this takes place sents the precedent for the rest of the book. The thrilling roller-coaster ride pauses for the kaboom and then moves on to the next terror. This book is simply engrossing. The characters fueled by King's own unhinged is borderline disturbed. The utter fear and insanity that surrounds all characters and the world that they interact with is simply shocking. But perhaps the most amazing thing about this book is that King does not make the world any darker than it already is, he just takes the worst aspects of it and turns it into a brillantly orchestrated work of dread.
Rating:
Summary: Rose Triumphant!
Review: The opening of "Rose Madder" is SK at his finest. I have never read a more harrowing inside-the-mind of a totally subjugated woman. Rose Daniels is at the complete mercy of her abusive husband, Norman who is a highly regarded police officer. Rose is convinced (probably rightly) that she has no possibilities of escape. Norman is an expert tracker and can count on the cooperation of his fellow police officers. The reader agonizes with Rose to just get the nerve to go out the front door. When Rose finally winds up her courage, she escapes with just what she is standing up in and the "family" bankcard. She leaves as if the hounds of hell were pursuing her (again, she's right), and takes a bus to a large city that sounds like Chicago. I was amazed SK let us out of Maine! The book is a hefty one and takes us through Rose's happy readjustment, fantasy segments involving a mysterious picture she purchased, and then the horror of Norman closing the distance between them. No one can get more mileage than SK in using a popular song, saying, or nursery rhyme to scare us to death. (Remember "Heeere's Johnny!" in "The Shining.") In "Rose Madder," it's "The Name Game." The last third of the book Norman metamorphizes from an understandable, if despicable human being into a full-fledged monster, part Cyclopean bull. I know Stephen King has a wonderful time with his monsters, but I found Norman more chilling when he was human and Rose was an intelligent woman trying to survive, rather than an Amazon-like goddess. Highly entertaining; however, I would have preferred less fantasy. "Dark Tower" fans will love it.
Rating:
Summary: On the edge of my seat
Review: In the beginning, this book is more of an adventure, I guess you would say...not typical Stephen King writing. However, as the story proceeds, so does the excitement and uniqueness that is King. This book kept me on the edge of my seat, I just couldn't put it down. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: I want to talk to you up close
Review: One of Kings finest books, Rose Madder tells the story of an abused housewife who dares to leaves her husband. Regrettably, Norm, her husband, is a cop. Worse, he's a possessive bully, and he sees no reason why his wife should have the liberty to leave him. He begins a hunt for her so he can 'talk to her up close'. Rose, meanwhile, has found a halfway house and discovers she has a natural talent for reading aloud, which gets her a job making audio books. She becomes friendly with a man and, at times, it seems that her life is getting back on the rails after 14 years abuse from Norm. But Norm is not to be fobbed off so easily... Stephen King is the acknowledged master of the supernatural. He's not so bad at suspense either! His characterization of Rose is artfully achieved through his descriptions of her subconscious, plunging deep into her fears and bringing each one of them to light at the relevant moments in the plot. The reader is right in there with Rose, experiencing every doubt, every fear. The reader also gets to understand (though not to empathize with) Norm, the bad guy cop who's tracking down his disappeared wife. Norm is a deranged psychopath, getting crazier and crazier as the story progresses, and King writes his part with a skill way beyond the ordinary writer. Rose Madder is a departure from King's many supernatural novels. But it's one at which he succeeds beyond imagination. If you still haven't got Rose Madder on your bookshelf, your library's not complete.
Rating:
Summary: Rose Madder
Review: This book was touching, violent, but had a sense of serenity to it...Truly, it was the best novel that Stephen King has ever written and one of my all-time favorites. I don't want to spoil it for you...check it out for yourselves and I assure that you will never think about battered women in the same way.
Rating:
Summary: To Those Who Don't Like This Book:
Review: .... All in all this is a good book, although the thing with Norman's rubber bull's mask was a little stupid, appeared to be to me at least, but the story about Rose, who her character unfolds during the development of the novel, who she enters the mystical world of Rose Madder - that's great, really great. In my eyes this is a very classic Stephen King, very classic writing, very classic elements of story, but on the other hand it is not. It is a wonderful story of love, lost, and pain, a story that has its own mythology, its own pace and most of all a character made out of flesh and blood, not of ink and paper. Rose is a woman you can see, hear, feel, touch ... she is as true, as this story is - because it is true to the most important thing about a book: the story itself.
Rating: 
Summary: Bombed half-way through!
Review: Why incorporate supernatural events into a book without explaining them adequately? Rose Madder has a supernatural sequence weaved into the plot which leaves the reader astounded. The character development is terrific, and up until a picture comes to life, the book has a lot of potential, but bombs completely thereafter.
Rating: 
Summary: The worst
Review: I have read most of King's books, and this one was one of the worst. It started out good but then it just got cataclysmically stupid. I do not recommend.
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