I loved this entire book, start to finish, spider and gangbang and all. After reading it the second time, I was fascinated by how that scene, a scene in which seven eleven-year-olds have sex, actually works. I find it tasteful, touching, strangely appropriate and non-offensive.
Later, I found that I’m in a minority. Them’s the breaks.
The spider who fell to Earth.
Well it’s a library book so I really don’t think they’ll appreciate me wallpapering my bathroom with it!
Are you serious? Do you mean I should just return it (gasp) unread? I’ve only done that very rarely. It might be difficult. 
I’m absolutely serious.
You know that scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Indy has to go into the heart of Berlin, and there’s a big pile of burning books? I fantasize sometimes that that bonfire is nothing but a huge pile of Rose Madder.
I have the book on my shelf, and it tortures me. On one hand, I desperately want to throw it away. On the other hand, I can’t bear to throw a book away. On my freakishly mutated third hand, I keep the book around solely so I can tell guests when they ask me, “Oh, Rose Madder. I’ve never read that one - is it any good?” that no, in fact it sucks horrendous alien spider ass.
Munch do you know my boyfriend’s nickname for me is Munch? (Well of course you don’t). I can’t believe I’m admitting this. It’s not sexual though, everybody get your minds out of the gutter. But I can’t share the real reason, it’s too embarrassing!
I did not. But that’s fantastic! And all the more reason to return Rose Madder on the way to work tomorrow morning.
C’mon, you can tell us the reason. We’re all complete strangers here.
Some stranger than others. 
Don’t make us use our imaginations…we’re really good at it! 
I dont know about it lacking coherency, boy meets girl, boy slams girl around for many years, she ‘wakes up’ one day and runs like hell, then plot line splits. Boy follows her, he is a cop and uses cop techniques to track her down. Evil starts working on his brain. Girl finds a womens shelter that gets her back on her feet. She meets boy2, who is a sweetheart. She gets a painting named rose madder, and some mystical stuff goes on using images from the picture. Boy finds girl, he is ‘possessed’ by mystical evil crap in picture [in a manner of speaking] and a conclusion is done. I dont think i have really ruined things, as in every other king book, nasty mystical crap happens, and some people die, some people live, and the protagonist gets an emotional change.
I found it incredibly disquieting as it is spot on with the abuse descriptions, enough so that I had mrAru remove it from the house and had flashbacks for several months. The writing was just fine, better than the piece of crap ‘geralds game’ where it just got tedious, and went on for about 100 pages too long. If he had chopped it a lot shorter, it would have been better. I think he wrote that one with the story for a novella and the contract for a novel!
That’s a spot-on description. And honestly, after having read the Dark Tower books (fantastic, fantastic, fantastic), it makes more sense looking back on it. But holy crikey was that such an unnecessarily long book for such a short story.
The pomegranit seeds came out of the painting with her. The painting was done as greek mythology, and pomegranite seeds were eaten by persephone, so the deal worked out was half the year in the live world, and half the year in the dead world because she ate 6 pommegranite seeds. She sees the vixen as this worlds representation of the goddess she met near the labrynth.
Ok, ok, I’ll tell, but next week. I have tomorrow off! and am just leaving so don’t have much time. See you guys Monday!
Priceguy, I did love IT…until the spider. After that everything just annoyed me. It is very well written though, with the before/now juxtaposition.
I’ve read every single one. All of 'em. Even the ones I hated.
For example, I liked It until the spider. And I still can’t figure out how 11-year-old boys are physically capable of having sex. Can anyone address this? Isn’t that sort of a stretch?
Delores Claiborne – one of my favorites because, now clean and sober, King experiments with suspense, giving us the punchline on page three but taking the entire exposition to get us to they whys and wherefores. And, completely told from a middle-aged woman’s point of view. Very well done from a character development stand point.
Cujo, Christine, Rose Madder, Desperation, Eyes of the Dragon, Insomnia – hell, I’ve read 'em all but most are so forgettable I can’t even comment on the end.
The Stand – One of his finer works, but I agree, lame ending. He’s a better writer than to just employ deux ex machina all the damn time. Or at least he should be a better writer than that.
Misery, The Dark Half – I love these because the stories are told from the standpoint of a writer, and I can relate to that.
I tend to love the short stories the most. One of my favorites is The Raft – wherein a bunch of teenagers swim out to a diving platform in the middle of a lake late in the season when nobody’s around and a spot of grease sludge or something eats them all. Maybe one lives, I can’t remember. I think of that whenever I swim out to a raft.
I also loved all the Bachman books, but I think Thinner is the best. I liked how each chapter starts with his weight – King is clearly a guy who has struggled with his weight. He curses the gypsy back at the end so that story has a nice sense of coming full circle. (Apologies to any Roma out there offended by the word I used in the previous sentence. I only used it because the character was described that way in that story.)
Gerald’s Game was another fun one, but I can’t remember the ending.
This thread could go on all day; there’s 637 listings under “King, Stephen” at Amazon.com. Egad.
They’re certainly capable of having an erection.
*It * definitely takes the prize for the biggest disconnect between a good story and a bad (and offensive, and skeezy) ending.
*Dreamcatcher * also qualifies, if you define “ending” as the last 3/4 of the book. I thought the story that takes place in the cabin is unbelievably creepy, grotesque, and terrifying. Then everything just gets stupid. Extra stupid points for the tacked-on idea that Mr. Gray was never real, just a figment of Jonesy’s imagination.
I kind of liked Rose Madder, though I agree the very end was odd and felt out of place. Am I the only one who thought that the world of the painting was Roland’s world?
It was. One of the characters in the painting makes a reference to the city of Lud. Also, in the two most recent Dark Tower books, in the beginning where it lists all of his previous books, all of the Dark Tower-related books are in bold print and Rose Madder is one of them.
I mentioned the book earlier, but those who love Stephen King books should read The Stephen King Universe by Stanley Wiater, Christopher Golden, and Hank Wagner. It’s a sumary of all the books and short stories, but the main thesis of the entire book is that every single work by King is linked together somehow, and eventually it all goes back to the Dark Tower. The Dark Tower is THE center of everything King has written. It’s pretty fascinating.
I’d like to take this opportunity to say, “Duh.”
And I just read DTVI, and looked over that list, too. :smack:
King doesn’t know where his writing is going to go until it gets there and way too often it doesn’t end up getting anywhere under its own steam and he has to manufacture a half-assed way for the book to be over.
It’s a particularly bad letdown when his book was working successfully on two levels at the same time – like in The Stand when it was Boulder versus Vegas but also Good versus Evil in a larger sense; or in It even more so when it was the kids versus The Thing in the Sewer Pipes but in a larger sense was the kids versus The Evil that Often Manifests Itself as Our Parents & Other Adults & Exists Below the Small-town Surface.
He pulled it off in The Shining, which continues to work on literal and metaphorical levels the whole way through – one of the reasons it’s his best work ever – but in The Stand and in It the metaphorical level falls apart and it flattens out to comic-book inanities.
I always thought that Rose Madder would have worked better as a regular novel.Cut out the fantasy world plot. When Norman catches up with Rose, she turns things around and beats the living snot out of him, he dies, she marries Bill and lives happily ever after.
But then, it wouldn’t have been Stephen King.