Rose Madder

Rose Madder is a horror and fantasy novel by American writer Stephen King, published in 1995. It deals with the effects of domestic violence, a subject King had touched on before in novels including It, Insomnia, Dolores Claiborne and Needful Things, and unusually for his work it relies for its fantastic element on Greek mythology.

The violence is established before the escape. In 1985, Norman Daniels beats his wife Rosie while she is four months pregnant, causing a miscarriage, and she considers leaving but decides against it, partly because he is a police officer who finds missing persons and partly because her family had died in a car accident years earlier and she has nowhere to go. Norman has also recently been accused of raping a woman named Wendy Yarrow, and the resulting legal and internal affairs investigation has made him more volatile.

Nine years later Rosie notices a drop of blood on their bedsheets and decides that staying means a life of continuing violence. She takes his bank card and takes a bus to a city she does not know, and the novel follows her efforts to establish a life, including the friendships she makes through a women's shelter. King has said in his memoir On Writing that Rose Madder and Insomnia are stiff, trying-too-hard novels, which is a rare case of an author commenting directly on his own dissatisfaction with a book.