SOURCE: "Horror of Horrors," in New York Review of Books, Vol. 42, No. 16, October 19, 1995, p. 54.

In the following review, Wood discusses the mythological allusions of King's Rose Madder and asserts, "The magical picture of Rose Madder … reminds us through fantasy how fantastic the unimagined everyday world can be."

Stephen King has become a household name in at least three senses. He is a writer pretty much everyone in the English-speaking world has heard of, if they have heard of writers at all. He is regularly read by many people who don't read many other writers. And, along with Danielle Steel and a few others, he is taken to represent everything that is wrong with contemporary publishing, that engine of junk pushing serious literature out of our minds and our bookstores. The English writer Clive Barker has said, "There are apparently two books in every American household—one of them...