8. "How does 'Rose Madder' fit into all of this?" (Added in 1.5)

        Rose Madder is the story of Rosie Daniels and how she came to leave her abusive husband, but there are parts of the book that are much more than that. After she leaves, Rosie moves hundreds of miles away and attempts to begin a new life. She takes back her maiden name, McClendon, she checks into a halfway house for battered women and she gets a job recording books on tape. But there is something else too...

        Along the way she buys a painting, a painting of a woman on a hill that seems to call out to her. After a while strange things start happening, it seems that the view of the painting is widening, more detail begins to appear around the edges and then things start to appear in her apartment, crickets and bits of clover that could only have come from the painting.

        One night Rosie is awakened by the sound of thunder. It has begun raining, inside the painting, and the thunder from that storm awakened her. Curious Rosie draws closer and is actually drawn through the painting into another world. Here she meets a black woman named Dorcas (who just might carry a knife strapped to her thigh like, Rosie thinks, "a heroine in one of those sweet-savage Paul Sheldon novels..." {Paul Sheldon being the name of the main character in Misery}) and the woman she was able to see before, a woman who could have been her own twin, dressed in a red robe so dark it could almost be purple but not quite (this color is called rose madder.) Both Dorcas and Rose Madder are inflicted with a disease, something that causes dark blotches to appear on the skin and a form of insanity as well (although Rose Madder has it much worse than Dorcas.) This disease also has made them both infertile so that raises the question of just whose baby this is anyway.

        Rose Madder tells Rosie that whatever Rosie does for her she will repay. What one does for the other shall be returned, that, says Rose Madder, is their "ka". What Rose Madder wants done is for her baby to be returned. The baby has been placed in a maze on the other side of the temple in the painting and Rose must first safely cross a stream of forgetfulness (this represents one of the rivers of hell BTW, see Dante for details) and pass through a dead garden to reach it. In the garden she stops at a tainted pomegranate tree, the only living plant in the garden, and collects seeds to mark her way through the maze.

        The maze nearby is guarded by a one eyed bull named Erinyes who, although blind, can smell real well. Should Dorcas or Rose Madder attempt to enter the temple (or the maze beyond) he would smell their disease and kill them. He can also smell blood and Rose uses this to defeat the bull and rescue the child. Dorcas seeks to give Rosie advice and lists her qualifications to do so by saying (in part) "She's (Rose Madder) drunk the waters of youth, and she make me drink, too... I've buried my children, and their children, and their children's children into the fifth generation... I've seen bodies on fire and heads by the hundreds poked onto poles along the streets of the City of Lud, I've seen wise leaders assassinated and fools put up in their places, and still I live."

        Rosie is repaid in the end when she lures her husband into this other world and he encounters Rose Madder. He mistakes Madder for his vanished wife and Madder transforms into a tentacled beast and kills him. As Norman screams Rosie thinks to herself "Her face did that... it was the face of a supernally beautiful goddess seen in an illustration hidden within some old and dusty book like a rare flower in a weedy vacant lot..."

        So what does this all mean? There are several points of note:

        #1) Rose comes from the same world as the book Misery. (She is aware of Paul Sheldon novels.)

        #2) The world of the painting is the same as Roland's world. (Dorcas mentions being a witness to the assault of Lud and the disease she and Rose Madder both have is very similar in many respects to the disease that the old folks Roland and Co. encounter have, namely sterility and almost a sort of radiation sickness.)

        #3) The painting that Rosie bought works in the same way as the doors that Roland used in book two. The only difference is that the frame rate (so to speak) of the painting is much slower than the doors.

        #4) Both Dorcas and Rose Madder aren't quite human. Besides the disease that afflicts them the have lived a lot longer than anyone has a right to thanks to some form of a fountain of youth. Rose Madder herself is also nearer to the demons that Roland & Co. encounter than anything else.

        #5) Near the end of the book Rosie is struck by the same sort of time-split illness that strikes Roland and Jake in book three (although she doesn't know what causes it at the time.) My theory for the cause is that the tree she gets the pomegranate seeds from is not only in her future, but that it grew from the seed she planted at the end of the book. Until she plants the seed she would have two memories, one where the tree was there for her and one where it was not, both memory trails would be equally valid, but by planting the seed she was able to drive one away and close the time paradox.

        #6) Looking back at Rose Madder after finishing books 5-7 of the Dark Tower I see also what King was trying to do with the plot regarding Rose/Rosie and the baby. Susannah is also split into two, Susannah/Mia and the reason for this is to bring a child into the world. It's obvious that King was trying to work through some of the same plot ideas in Rose Madder, perhaps trying to figure out a way to make it work.