Stephen King finds the real horror of modern society in … Rose Madder

Forget about rabid dogs and reincarnated cats. Ditch those little extraterrestrials and kooky clowns.

It took him 35 books, but with his newest, “Rose Madder,” Stephen King has found the real horror of modern society: the wife beater. And not just any old wife beater, but Detective Inspector Norman (as in Bates) Daniels, a wife beater who is also a cop.

He knows how to hurt. He knows how to cover his tracks, disguise himself and get what he wants. Worst of all, he’s a biter, which is what his young bride, Rose, finds out on their wedding night.

Fourteen atrocious years later — after beatings, a miscarriage, broken ribs and blackened eyes — Rose sees a spot of blood on her pillow. It awakens a voice that tells her simply and heroically to leave. She takes $350 out of the bank, buys a bus ticket, and ends up 800 miles away in a battered women’s shelter called Daughters and Sisters.

While Rose rebuilds her own life in a new town, Norman plots an attack and a bit of retribution, too. When he catches her, Norman will want to talk to Rosie … up close, just like his daddy used to talk to him.

Here’s the first tip for reading “Rose Madder”: Don’t read it while you’re eating. It’s sickeningly gruesome. And if Stephen King weren’t Stephen King, then he probably would get slapped on the hand for such disappointingly gratuitous graphics.

And here’s the second tip: If you can get through all the gory muck (King leaves little to the imagination), then you’ll find some really lovely writing in this book. For instance, when Rose wanders into a pawnshop to hock her engagement ring, she is drawn to a mystical painting sitting in a dusty aisle. It turns out that the painting is her ticket to self-awareness and female empowerment. The passage is finely written:

In both subject and execution it was not much different from pictures moldering away in pawnshops, curio shops and roadside bargain barns all over the country (all over the world for that matter), but it filled her eyes and her mind with the sort of clean, revelatory excitement that belongs only to the works of art that deeply move us — the song that made us cry, the story that made us see the world clearly from another’s perspective, at least for a while, the poem that made us glad to be alive, the dance that made us forget for a few minutes that someday we will not be.

This is not the only example of King at his lyrical best. When Rose takes a motorcycle day trip to a remote lakeside picnic area with her new boyfriend, the scene is truly romantic, with some of King’s most tender writing ever.

But tenderness is surely not the focus of this novel. The longest passages are filled with rage, gore, and a sicko cop who puts a rubber bull’s mask on his hand and makes it talk — a la Shari Lewis and Lamp Chop.

For a while, it’s fascinating to be inside a mind as sharp as Norman Daniels’, to see how he contains his anger to make it work for him, to trace the path of his own desperately violent and abusive childhood. By the middle of the tale, however, the intrigue wears off, especially when King moves the action inside the supermythological world of the painting. In that askew wonderland of bad-ass goddesses and harrowing bulls, a battle takes place like Circe meets the Terminator.

Men take a pretty hard rap in this story. With very few exceptions, they’re beasts. Figuratively and, in Norman’s case, literally, they bite into their victims, chew them up, and spit them out. King is relentless on that point. And women are tossed to the side like banana peels.

In a triumphant moment, however, one of the characters — a 280-pound martial arts expert who teaches self-defense to battered women and is every bit as strong as Norman — nails her enemy by roughing him up and then sitting on him. But rare is the woman who can nail a man physically, and the overall message of the book — after many woman and several men have met messy deaths — is that you basically have to have a goddess on your side to go up against a wife beater.