Pike Place Market in Seattle is a wonderful place. Up top, you've got the flying fish, singing salesmen and musicians on every corner, but go to the lower levels and you'll find two of the best little bookstores you could hope to discover. In one of them, I found Stephen King's Rose Madder.

Rose Daniels wakes up one morning to find a drop of blood on her sheets. For most women, it might be menstrual blood; for Rose Daniels, it's the result of a nosebleed after her husband punched her in the face. Norman Daniels, decorated police detective, systematically (and carefully) abused his wife of fourteen years in every way possible, and the drop of blood is a sign that if she doesn't leave him with what determination she has left, it'll be fourteen more years of violence. On impulse, she boards a train to a new city to start a new life as Rosie McClendon. She finds a job, a romance blooms, and to celebrate moving into her new apartment,  she buys a mysterious, captivating painting she finds at a pawn shop. But Norman, employing every policeman's tactic in the book, comes looking for his beloved wife. "Till death do us part" was the vow, and Norman has every intention of seeing it through.

In his memoir On Writing, King called Rose Madder a "stiff, trying-too-hard" novel, and it shows. Norman Daniels the predator is fascinating; how effectively and precisely he tracks his wife down,  despite her leaving no clues as to her whereabouts. Norman Daniels the bad guy is a mess; he's racist, homophobic, misogynistic, anti-Semitic, anti-everyone-and-everything-but-him, abused in inconceivable ways by his father as a child. There are people like that, and people who would beat their pregnant wives to the point of miscarriage are vicious, vile human beings. I don't doubt that. Thing is, they don't necessarily make for good literary characters. Norman Daniels is simply a bucket into which King dumped every abhorrent, despicable characteristic he could think of. Norman's eyes are described as "absent" and empty, and I'm thinkin', Come on, Steve, you can do much better than that. Empty-eyed bad guys are a dime a dozen. Give me a killer with bright, friendly eyes, and I'm hooked. When we read how Norman infiltrates Rose's social circle, that's good. When Norman refers to every woman he sees by a slur, it gets dull very quickly.

The rest of the novel works better, fortunately. The transformation from Rose Daniels to Rosie McClendon is believable and intriguing, even if her new love is a bit of a Mary Sue. King captures many subtleties and intricacies writing from a woman's perspective, whether it's a battered woman paralyzed by fear and fourteen years of submission, or the same woman gradually coming to love and trust the new man in her life.

The supernatural element of Rose Madder came as a surprise - one does not normally expect a domestic abuse horror story to be resolved in a land beyond the looking glass (or in this case, an unsigned painting). I'm sure there's some symbolism at work, from the rose madder gown of the titular character, Norman becoming a minotaur (clumsily, it must be said), the Greek mythology, or speaking to some subconscious, psychological fear men have of the "fairer sex". King weaves them together well, but I'm not sure what picture he was trying to paint. The coda is quite good, a reminder that even happy endings come to an end, and the fury of a woman scorned is a poison that doesn't die easily.

4.0/5.0: Very entertaining and will appeal to Stephen King fans, but slightly unsteady and forced in places.