Product Description

The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer gives us an unusual view of daily life among the aristocracy in the early 1900s, a window into one woman's hidden emotional torment, and a record of the events at Rose Red that scandalised society at the time.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #380433 in Books
• Published on: 2002-06-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 272 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer--My Life at Rose Red, a spin-off from the Stephen King miniseries Rose Red, provides the interested reader with some terrifying back stories to Rose Red's tales of doomed psychics and Dr Joyce Reardon's expedition into the dark rooms of a house that is another of King's great Bad Places. At the beginning of the 20th century, magnate Rimbauer builds Rose Red as a present and prison for his young wife, a place in which she is to be displayed as a trophy and have her will broken. He does not know his woman--Ellen fights back with all the means at her disposal, which progressively come to include the attributes of the house he ill-advisedly built on a cursed site; people disappear in Rose Red, vanishing between one room and another, and are never seen again except as blood-smeared wraiths. They are especially likely to disappear if they are the women with whom Rimbauer humiliates his wife. This is a powerful story of a woman developing power and learning little from that responsibility except that she likes the infliction of pain and terror; we come to empathise enough with Ellen that her slow corruption is as terrifying as the nightmares that occasionally surface in her narrative. --Roz Kaveney

About the Author
Joyce Reardon is a Professor of Psychology. She is editing Ellen Rimbauer's diaries as part of her research into the remarkable history of Rose Red.

Customer Reviews

the history of rose red, the perfect companion
This tells the early story of Rose Red the haunted house at the centre of the Stephen King TV mini series " ROSE RED". This isnt a screen play of the Mini series, it is a history of the house its self, played out through the diary entries of the houses's mistress Ellen Rimbauer. When you see the mini series ( as I have and it is King at his best) you are told stories about the house and the events that happened there, but not in great detail. This book gives you all the stories of the house in full glorius and gory detail, such as who died where and how. The diary is eloquently written , you actually find yourself believing that you are reading actual historic events not just fiction. A must for any Stephen King fan. Buy it and read it today

One of the best!
"The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Rose Red" is one of the best books I've ever read! I've seen the movie first (Rose Red by Stephen King) and as soon as I learned that there was a book describing the history of this haunted house, I searched for it. The book is about this woman, her problems with her disloyal husband and the house they live in, where strange things happen. I recommend you readers: read the book first, there are a lot of things in the movie you won't be able to understand. I wish Editor Joyce Reardon would have put more entries of the diary in the book.

Mansions of the Mind
It never hurts for a book dealing with the paranormal and horror to have a little mystery surrounding who actually wrote the book, along with all the media hype promoting the TV mini-series. For the record, this was written by Ridley Pearson, not Stephen King, though King was certainly aware of its gestation.

But who wrote it matters little versus the prime requisite: is it readable? Does it provoke the spine-tingling feeling that some of the best in this genre can?

It's certainly readable. The characterization of the main character Ellen Rimbauer is truly excellent. She starts as a woman who is a rather naive nineteen year old, and progressing through her thoughts and feelings about marrying a man twenty years her senior with a reputation as a 'ladies man'. How she manages her husband and his wayward ways forms one of the continuing lynch-pins of this tale. As she matures, she also starts to feel some attraction to those of her own sex, the depiction of which I felt was well done for a lady of Victorian sensibilities. But later, we are given a portrait of a woman who is slowly losing her grip on reality (or as an alternative explanation, the world she inhabits becomes truly strange). The house she lives in, and eventually becomes almost a prisoner of, Rose Red, is really the other main character, as it grows from the greatest mansion in Seattle to a house known for disappearances, murders, and suicides. On the basis of character alone, this is a worthwhile read.

But on the other aspect, the paranormal land of ghosts, inexplicable fears and visions, and houses with desires of their own, this book doesn't succeed as well. Perhaps I found the parallels with a real house of mystery, the Winchester Mystery House located in San Jose, CA, (and at which my son is a tour guide) to be just a little too strong. It too had a magnate husband and a lady mistress who, especially in her later years, believed that she would live forever if only she would keep building on the house, leading to some very strange architectural features of stairways leading directly into ceilings and doors that open to a three-story drop. Within this book, the appearance of ghostly visions, the voices at a seance, the concept of the house being possessed by the ghosts of Indians who were buried on the site of this house, never seemed to quite gel with me, never produced the frisson that I was hoping for. I think, perhaps, that I found these elements to be a little too standard, with little originality to them.

The literary device of enfolding this whole story within a supposed doctoral dissertation and university investigation was a nice touch, but added little to it as a story, and it would have read just as well without it.

Still, a quite entertaining read, with an excellent look inside the mind of someone who changes from a very normal woman to something very strange, and making her journey to this mindscape very believable in terms of her own thought-processes and beliefs.

--- Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)