SOURCE: Coe, Jonathan. “Killers on the Loose.” London Observer (1 October 1995): 15.

In the following review, Coe compares Stephen King's Rose Madder to Cornwell's From Potter's Field.

‘Terror,’ wrote Stephen King in 1981, ‘often arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment; that things are in the unmaking.’ Since this is also a sense that seems to dominate the best ‘literary’ novels of the late twentieth century, it's not hard to see why the horror novel is in the ascendant, and is being treated more and more seriously by the academic and critical establishments. With graphic images of warfare and terrorism reaching us every night on the national news, followed by the local bulletin with its familiar repertoire of rape and unmotivated murder, a genre which addresses itself specifically to the randomness of evil—with a solid emphasis on bodily (especially female) mutilation—suddenly looks less like a disreputable literary underclass and...