I’ve read it several times but not for many years. From what sounds like a great distance she can hear a thin whoop-whoop sound, and she knows this is air going down her throat and then sliding back out again in a series of feverish little gasps, but that doesn’t change the feeling that she’s drowning here in the corner of her living room, looking at the shredded remains of the paperback novel she was reading when her husband came home.

She sits in the corner, trying to draw air out of a room which seemed to have plenty just a few minutes ago and now seems to have none. For Rosie to survive, for her to have a chance in her brave new world, she must enter her own myth–a world that lies beyond the surface of a work of art-and become a woman she never knew she could be: Rose Madder… Rose-maddened and on the rampage, Norman Daniels becomes a force of relentless terror and savageness, a man almost mythic in his monstrosity. The fact that he’s losing his mind might even be an advantage. Her husband is a cop, with the instincts of a predator. Still, it’s hard for Rosie not to keep looking over her shoulder, and with good reason. It may be bad art but it’s perfect for her new apartment-and somehow, it seems to want her as much as she wants it. Meeting Bill Steiner is one and finding a junk-shop painting is another. She’ll worry about all the rest later.Īlone in a strange city, she begins to make a new life, and good things start to happen. She uses her husband’s ATM card to buy a bus ticket, determined to lose herself in a place where Norman won’t find her. Roused by a single drop of blood on the bedsheet, Rosie Daniels wakes from fourteen years of a nightmare marriage and suddenly takes flight.

Rose madder by stephen king