The Bookworm Project

One can be deceived by this book reading its cover and letter from this Joyce Reardon, Ph. D. which tells that this is a genuine diary of an aristocratic woman named Ellen Rimabauer, wife of a business tycoon on early 1900s John Rimbauer. The book presents itself as a nonfiction, horrific and filled with paranormal phenomena based on true events and I had no idea it is all hoax. Very much interested, I read its first few pages at midnight and realized it is a terrible mistake reading it alone on your bed, sun is out, darkness is overwhelming, silence is dreadful. The problem with me is spooky stories can't get easily be dislodged from my mind like a sticky, clinging, vicious gum.

Indeed I was fooled by this misleading book. Dr. Joyce Reardon isn't actually a doctor and his real name is Ripley Pearson, a writer who wrote the fake diary. Rose Red doesn't exist. [The novel's genesis came as part of a $200,000 promotional marketing campaign for Stephen King's Rose Red television miniseries. Marketing of the film presented the movie as based on actual events. -Wikipedia.org] My fascination for the book declined after knowing that everything is fraud but I still didn't read it during the night just the same.

Frustrated after discovering the truth, I obligingly flipped the remaining pages. Ellen Rimbauer is a kind of person I would not like to be a friend, neither just a seatmate for an hour. Odd, eccentric woman with lesbian tendencies. Her diary implies that her relationship with her African female maid Sukeena is beyond friendship but disturbingly sickeningly involves lust and sex. Her diary is horrendous, eerie and likely to haunt you when you're done with it. I did enjoy the book despite that the kind of its narration is not my preference and my frustration after I figured out that I was deceived that the diary is unfeigned. I also checked out the link the author gives as Joyce Reardon states that some parts of Ellen Rimbauer's diary are omitted to protect the integrity of Mrs. Rimbauer but the complete diary entries could be seen on that website. Of course, there is nothing of significance could be checked there but broken links that would lead you to no where.

Still I did like that Rose Red is after all a fictional mansion and everything didn't exist altogether because it is exceedingly disturbing and alarming to imagine it happened. And nobody will ever want to expose her personal diary in public for exploitation and sheer entertainment. Ellen Rimbauer and her husband John Rimbauer are all fictional characters with wild and evil rumination and if her diary was happened to be a genuine one it would really can cause shame and disgrace on herself and on her family and thus who would allow it? It is a fun read though.