Rose also finds new worlds as a Liz Taylor-sound-alike reader for audiobooks, and in her painting, which magically allows her to enter its dense detail. She also falls for softspoken Bill Steiner, the shop's young pawn-dealer, who courts her on his motorcycle and opens her to new worlds. In a far-away hockshop, Rose trades her engagement ring for a mystery-ridden painting of a woman in a crimson (rose-madder) chiton with her back to the viewer (one thinks of Wyeth's Christina's World), which she hangs in a new apartment found for her by the Daughters and Sisters, a battered women's group.

But Daniels's job is finding people, and as a biter he's even more bent than the wife-beating police-chief in Nelson DeMille's Spencerville like his, Daniels's verbal rage allows no range to monolithic villainy. After 14 years of marriage to biter and wife-beater Detective Norman Daniels, Rose McLendon Daniels steals her husband's ATM card and runs off to another city. Still, this one may find King hitting the ball not just out of the park but around the globe.

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.King's 30th novel (Insomnia, 1994, etc.) gets off to a careful, grand start but quickly turns to a half-pound of story to five pounds of stuffing, or tedium triumphant. 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. Alone 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 - FIRST EDITION BOOK See all titles by Stephen King.

Rose madder book review