(Spanish has rosado, German has rosa, and ditto for Italian.) These are also all words for a flower, and when capitalized, proper names for a gendered babe. In French, the word for pink is rose, and other languages have similarly easy to translate terms. Her name is also a synonym for is the color most closely associated with femininity. An everywoman, womb-empty and ever-wounded. From the moment we meet her, Rose is a bloody heroine, leaking red and seeing black. But I’m a sucker for stories about artworks and performed femininity, and this clunky novel is about both. This weird novel was published in 1995, at the “end of King’s fourth major arc: one that focuses on gender and violence,” according to James Smythe at The Guardian, who calls the book “sloppy and ill-thought-out.” He’s not wrong it really isn’t King’s best work, and he damn well knows it. Rose will come to call her doppelgänger Rose Madder after the textile dye used to color her dress (made from the roots of the Rubia tinctorum-common madder-plant) and her imagined personality-she’s so much like Rose, but madder. The woman is angry, while Rose is cowering. The woman in the picture is strong, while Rose is meek. The mystical artwork shows a blonde with a braid, standing on a grassy knoll, facing away from the viewer, her arm adorned with a gold torc and her body wrapped in the loose folds of a vivid pink-purple (rose madder) chiton. She buys the painting and becomes obsessed with its female subject. Later, after Rose has escaped her abuser (or so she thinks), she’ll find a magic painting leaning against a dusty shelf on the floor of a pawnshop. He’s a villain built of “empty eyes” and hard fists, a man so aggressively racist, homophobic, and violent that to a 2018 reader he feels like an overindulgent parody of toxic masculinity. A woman named Rose sits on the floor bleeding from her womb as a man (her crooked cop husband) menaces somewhere in the shadowy background. Stephen King’s 30 th novel, Rose Madder, starts with a miscarriage.

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