The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Rose Red
Encyclopedia
The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Rose Red is a 2001 novel by Ridley Pearson
focusing on the life of the fictional John and Ellen Rimbauer and the construction of their mansion, Rose Red, in the early 20th century. Built on an old Indian burial ground, Rose Red is considered haunted
and mysterious tragedies occur throughout the mansion's history. The novel is written in the form of a diary
by Ellen Rimbauer, and annotated by the fictional professor of paranormal activity, Joyce Reardon. The novel also presents a fictional afterword
by Ellen Rimbauer's grandson, Steven.
miniseries
. Marketing of the film presented the movie as based on actual events.
In 2000, two years before the Rose Red miniseries aired, the producers contracted with author Ridley Pearson to write a tie-in
novel
, to be titled The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Rose Red, under the pseudonym "Dr. Joyce Reardon" (one of the main characters of the miniseries). The novel presented itself as nonfiction, and claimed to be the actual diary of Ellen Rimbauer (wife of the builder of Rose Red). The work was originally intended to be an architectural book featuring photos and drawings of the fictional Rose Red house with the supernatural elements subtly woven into the text and photos, but Pearson (building on several references to a diary in King's script for the miniseries) wrote it as Ellen Rimbauer's diary instead. Inspired by the 1999 film The Blair Witch Project
, King came up with the idea of presenting the novel as a real one by having "Dr. Joyce Reardon" edit the "diary." King also inserted a reference into the book's forward that a "best-selling author had found the journal in Maine", so that fans would be misled into concluding that King had written the work. The ruse worked. Fans and the press speculated for some time that Stephen King or his wife Tabitha King
had written the book until Pearson was revealed to be the novel's author.
To help promote the miniseries and further blur the line between reality and fiction, the book contained a link to a fictional "Beaumont University" Web site where "Dr. Joyce Reardon" was alleged to have taught. The site contains in-universe promotional material as well as an easter egg
page with diary entries that were "censored" from the main book.
Intended to be a promotional item rather than a stand-alone work, its popularity spawned a 2003 prequel television miniseries to Rose Red, titled The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer
. The novel tie-in idea was repeated on Stephen King's next project, the miniseries Kingdom Hospital
. Richard Dooling
, King's collaborator on Kingdom Hospital and writer of several episodes in the miniseries, published a fictional diary, The Journals of Eleanor Druse, in 2004.
, and used much of his wealth to build the mansion, which was in the Tudor
-Gothic
style and situated on 40 acres (161,874.4 m²) of woodland in the heart of Seattle, Washington, in the United States
. The site was a Native American
burial ground (a common motif in early works by author Stephen King). The house appeared cursed even as it was being constructed: Three construction workers were killed on the site, and a construction foreman
was murdered by a co-worker.
Various entries in the fictional diary also describe Ellen Rimbauer's naiveté regarding sexual matters. In sometimes graphic language, the novel's "diary entries" discuss Ellen's sexual relationships with her physically, sexually, and emotionally abusive husband; her growing awareness of her lesbian
ism (or possible bisexuality
; the novel is unclear); her friendship and sexual relationship with Sukeena; the birth of her children; and her growing dislike (even hatred) of her husband. The novel portrays Ellen Rimbauer as a victim of sexual repression
and Victorian morality
.
The novel tells how, while vacationing in Africa during the construction of her home, Ellen Rimbauer made the acquaintance of Sukeena, a local tribeswoman. Ellen and Sukeena became very close, and Sukeena accompanied the Rimbauers back to the United States. The Rimbauers had two children, April (born with a withered left arm) and Adam. Deaths and mysterious disappearances continued at the house. One of John Rimbauer's friends died of an allergic reaction to a bee sting in the solarium
, and John Rimbauer's business partner (whom Rimbauer had cheated out of his part of their oil fortune) hanged himself in the solarium in front of Rimbauer's children. Eight-year-old April also disappeared in the house, and Sukeena was tortured by the local police after being suspected of April's murder. John Rimbauer (whom his wife suspected of adultery
) committed suicide by throwing himself from one of the mansion's towers shortly thereafter (an event which the reader learns later was actually John's murder at the hands of Ellen Rimbauer and Sukeena).
As the novel's plot progresses, Ellen Rimbauer and Sukeena continue to live in the house. Ellen believed that if she never stopped building the house, she would never die. Rimbauer used nearly all of her dead husband's fortune to continually add to the home over the next several decades, enlarging it significantly (in a plot element reminiscent of the real-life construction of the Winchester Mystery House
). Mysterious disappearances continued: Deanna Petrie, an actress friend of Ellen Rimbauer's, and Sukeena both disappeared over the next few years.
In the fictional afterword, Ellen Rimbauer's grandson, Steven Rimbauer, notes that Ellen Rimbauer herself disappeared in the house in 1950 (which is where the fictional diary entries which comprise the novel's body end). The "afterword" also relates that, for several years after Ellen Rimbauer's disappearance, only servants occupied Rose Red. Adam Rimbauer inherited the house and lived there for a short time with his wife, but left after witnessing several paranormal
events and allowed the house to be abandoned. After Adam Rimbauer's death, his wife sold off many of the home's antique furnishings. She generated some income by permitting the fictional "Seattle Historical Society" to give tours of the house; these ceased in 1972 after a participant disappeared while on a tour of the mansion. Investigations of the grounds and structure were conducted in the 1960s and 1970s to seek an explanation for the strange sounds, lights, and other phenomena alleged to have occurred there. But these ended, and the house began to fall into disrepair. In all 26 people disappeared or died at Rose Red.
The novel's "afterword" concludes by relating that a paranormal investigation into Rose Red by Dr. Joyce Reardon led to the deaths of several participants, and the home was demolished to make way for condominiums.
's best-selling fiction list in January 2002, and in the #15 slot on The New York Times
best-selling fiction list. It rose to #1 on the Publishers Weekly
best-selling fiction list for the week ending February 16, 2002.
The book was not widely reviewed. USA Today called the book "clever, beautifully detailed fiction." The Daily Evergreen
qualified its review, but declared: "Considering everything, this book was quite entertaining. It's one of those books that is difficult to stop reading. The scare element wasn't too terribly high, but the fact Pearson and King marketed the book as an authentic diary makes it all the more enjoyable to read." But the Christian Science Monitor gave it an "Unfavorable Review" rating, unhappy with the book's violence and explicit depictions of sexuality.
Ridley Pearson
Ridley Pearson, born on March 13, 1953 in Glen Cove, New York, is an American writer. Pearson has historically written suspense and thriller novels for an adult audience, but has also begun branching out by writing adventure books for children....
focusing on the life of the fictional John and Ellen Rimbauer and the construction of their mansion, Rose Red, in the early 20th century. Built on an old Indian burial ground, Rose Red is considered haunted
Haunted house
A haunted house is a house or other building often perceived as being inhabited by disembodied spirits of the deceased who may have been former residents or were familiar with the property...
and mysterious tragedies occur throughout the mansion's history. The novel is written in the form of a diary
Diary
A diary is a record with discrete entries arranged by date reporting on what has happened over the course of a day or other period. A personal diary may include a person's experiences, and/or thoughts or feelings, including comment on current events outside the writer's direct experience. Someone...
by Ellen Rimbauer, and annotated by the fictional professor of paranormal activity, Joyce Reardon. The novel also presents a fictional afterword
Afterword
An afterword is a literary device that is often found at the end of a piece of literature. It generally covers the story of how the book came into being, or of how the idea for the book was developed....
by Ellen Rimbauer's grandson, Steven.
Genesis of the novel
The novel's genesis came as part of a $200,000 promotional marketing campaign for Stephen King's Rose Red televisionTelevision
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
miniseries
Miniseries
A miniseries , in a serial storytelling medium, is a television show production which tells a story in a limited number of episodes. The exact number is open to interpretation; however, they are usually limited to fewer than a whole season. The term "miniseries" is generally a North American term...
. Marketing of the film presented the movie as based on actual events.
In 2000, two years before the Rose Red miniseries aired, the producers contracted with author Ridley Pearson to write a tie-in
Tie-in
A tie-in is an authorized product based on a media property a company is releasing, such as a movie or video/DVD, computer game, video game, television program/television series, board game, web site, role-playing game or literary property...
novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
, to be titled The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Rose Red, under the pseudonym "Dr. Joyce Reardon" (one of the main characters of the miniseries). The novel presented itself as nonfiction, and claimed to be the actual diary of Ellen Rimbauer (wife of the builder of Rose Red). The work was originally intended to be an architectural book featuring photos and drawings of the fictional Rose Red house with the supernatural elements subtly woven into the text and photos, but Pearson (building on several references to a diary in King's script for the miniseries) wrote it as Ellen Rimbauer's diary instead. Inspired by the 1999 film The Blair Witch Project
The Blair Witch Project
The Blair Witch Project is a 1999 American horror film pieced together from amateur footage. The film was produced by the Haxan Films production company. The film relates the story of three student filmmakers The Blair Witch Project is a 1999 American horror film pieced together from amateur...
, King came up with the idea of presenting the novel as a real one by having "Dr. Joyce Reardon" edit the "diary." King also inserted a reference into the book's forward that a "best-selling author had found the journal in Maine", so that fans would be misled into concluding that King had written the work. The ruse worked. Fans and the press speculated for some time that Stephen King or his wife Tabitha King
Tabitha King
Tabitha King is an American author and activist. She is married to writer Stephen King.-Family:King met her husband, author Stephen King, in college through her work-study job in the Fogler Library. Their daughter Naomi Rachel was born in 1970. They married on January 2, 1971...
had written the book until Pearson was revealed to be the novel's author.
To help promote the miniseries and further blur the line between reality and fiction, the book contained a link to a fictional "Beaumont University" Web site where "Dr. Joyce Reardon" was alleged to have taught. The site contains in-universe promotional material as well as an easter egg
Easter egg (media)
Image:Carl Oswald Rostosky - Zwei Kaninchen und ein Igel 1861.jpg|250px|thumb|right|Example of Easter egg hidden within imagerect 467 383 539 434 desc none...
page with diary entries that were "censored" from the main book.
Intended to be a promotional item rather than a stand-alone work, its popularity spawned a 2003 prequel television miniseries to Rose Red, titled The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer
The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer (film)
The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer is a 2003 television miniseries prequel to the film Rose Red . Directed by Craig R. Baxley, the film stars Lisa Brenner as Ellen Rimbauer, Steven Brand as John Rimbauer, and Tsidii Le Loka as Sukeena.-Synopsis:...
. The novel tie-in idea was repeated on Stephen King's next project, the miniseries Kingdom Hospital
Kingdom Hospital
Kingdom Hospital is a thirteen-episode television miniseries based on Lars von Trier's The Kingdom , which was developed by horror writer Stephen King in 2004 for American television...
. Richard Dooling
Richard Dooling
Richard Patrick Dooling is an American novelist and screenwriter. He is best known for his novel White Man's Grave, a finalist for the 1994 National Book Award for Fiction, and for co-producing and co-writing the 2004 ABC miniseries Stephen King's Kingdom Hospital.Dooling's first novel, Critical...
, King's collaborator on Kingdom Hospital and writer of several episodes in the miniseries, published a fictional diary, The Journals of Eleanor Druse, in 2004.
Plot synopsis
The novel relates the building of the Rimbauer house (which is eventually named "Rose Red") in 1906 by John Rimbauer for his wife, Ellen. John Rimbauer owned an oil companyPetroleum industry
The petroleum industry includes the global processes of exploration, extraction, refining, transporting , and marketing petroleum products. The largest volume products of the industry are fuel oil and gasoline...
, and used much of his wealth to build the mansion, which was in the Tudor
Tudor style architecture
The Tudor architectural style is the final development of medieval architecture during the Tudor period and even beyond, for conservative college patrons...
-Gothic
Gothic Revival architecture
The Gothic Revival is an architectural movement that began in the 1740s in England...
style and situated on 40 acres (161,874.4 m²) of woodland in the heart of Seattle, Washington, in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
. The site was a Native American
Native Americans in the United States
Native Americans in the United States are the indigenous peoples in North America within the boundaries of the present-day continental United States, parts of Alaska, and the island state of Hawaii. They are composed of numerous, distinct tribes, states, and ethnic groups, many of which survive as...
burial ground (a common motif in early works by author Stephen King). The house appeared cursed even as it was being constructed: Three construction workers were killed on the site, and a construction foreman
Construction foreman
A construction foreman is the worker or tradesman who is in charge of a construction crew. While traditionally this role has been assumed by a senior male worker, the title in the modern sense is gender non-specific in intent...
was murdered by a co-worker.
Various entries in the fictional diary also describe Ellen Rimbauer's naiveté regarding sexual matters. In sometimes graphic language, the novel's "diary entries" discuss Ellen's sexual relationships with her physically, sexually, and emotionally abusive husband; her growing awareness of her lesbian
Lesbian
Lesbian is a term most widely used in the English language to describe sexual and romantic desire between females. The word may be used as a noun, to refer to women who identify themselves or who are characterized by others as having the primary attribute of female homosexuality, or as an...
ism (or possible bisexuality
Bisexuality
Bisexuality is sexual behavior or an orientation involving physical or romantic attraction to both males and females, especially with regard to men and women. It is one of the three main classifications of sexual orientation, along with a heterosexual and a homosexual orientation, all a part of the...
; the novel is unclear); her friendship and sexual relationship with Sukeena; the birth of her children; and her growing dislike (even hatred) of her husband. The novel portrays Ellen Rimbauer as a victim of sexual repression
Sexual repression
Sexual repression, also known as sexual ethics, is a state in which a person is prevented from expressing their sexuality. Sexual repression is often associated with feelings of guilt or shame being associated with sexual impulses...
and Victorian morality
Victorian morality
Victorian morality is a distillation of the moral views of people living at the time of Queen Victoria's reign and of the moral climate of the United Kingdom throughout the 19th century in general, which contrasted greatly with the morality of the previous Georgian period...
.
The novel tells how, while vacationing in Africa during the construction of her home, Ellen Rimbauer made the acquaintance of Sukeena, a local tribeswoman. Ellen and Sukeena became very close, and Sukeena accompanied the Rimbauers back to the United States. The Rimbauers had two children, April (born with a withered left arm) and Adam. Deaths and mysterious disappearances continued at the house. One of John Rimbauer's friends died of an allergic reaction to a bee sting in the solarium
Solarium
Solarium may refer to:* Similar to a Sunroom, a room built largely of glass to afford exposure to the sun. Solariums have glass roofs , unlike sunrooms...
, and John Rimbauer's business partner (whom Rimbauer had cheated out of his part of their oil fortune) hanged himself in the solarium in front of Rimbauer's children. Eight-year-old April also disappeared in the house, and Sukeena was tortured by the local police after being suspected of April's murder. John Rimbauer (whom his wife suspected of adultery
Adultery
Adultery is sexual infidelity to one's spouse, and is a form of extramarital sex. It originally referred only to sex between a woman who was married and a person other than her spouse. Even in cases of separation from one's spouse, an extramarital affair is still considered adultery.Adultery is...
) committed suicide by throwing himself from one of the mansion's towers shortly thereafter (an event which the reader learns later was actually John's murder at the hands of Ellen Rimbauer and Sukeena).
As the novel's plot progresses, Ellen Rimbauer and Sukeena continue to live in the house. Ellen believed that if she never stopped building the house, she would never die. Rimbauer used nearly all of her dead husband's fortune to continually add to the home over the next several decades, enlarging it significantly (in a plot element reminiscent of the real-life construction of the Winchester Mystery House
Winchester Mystery House
The Winchester Mystery House is a well-known mansion in California. It once was the personal residence of Sarah Winchester, the widow of gun magnate William Wirt Winchester. It was continuously under construction for 38 years and is reported to be haunted. It now serves as a tourist attraction...
). Mysterious disappearances continued: Deanna Petrie, an actress friend of Ellen Rimbauer's, and Sukeena both disappeared over the next few years.
In the fictional afterword, Ellen Rimbauer's grandson, Steven Rimbauer, notes that Ellen Rimbauer herself disappeared in the house in 1950 (which is where the fictional diary entries which comprise the novel's body end). The "afterword" also relates that, for several years after Ellen Rimbauer's disappearance, only servants occupied Rose Red. Adam Rimbauer inherited the house and lived there for a short time with his wife, but left after witnessing several paranormal
Paranormal
Paranormal is a general term that designates experiences that lie outside "the range of normal experience or scientific explanation" or that indicates phenomena understood to be outside of science's current ability to explain or measure...
events and allowed the house to be abandoned. After Adam Rimbauer's death, his wife sold off many of the home's antique furnishings. She generated some income by permitting the fictional "Seattle Historical Society" to give tours of the house; these ceased in 1972 after a participant disappeared while on a tour of the mansion. Investigations of the grounds and structure were conducted in the 1960s and 1970s to seek an explanation for the strange sounds, lights, and other phenomena alleged to have occurred there. But these ended, and the house began to fall into disrepair. In all 26 people disappeared or died at Rose Red.
The novel's "afterword" concludes by relating that a paranormal investigation into Rose Red by Dr. Joyce Reardon led to the deaths of several participants, and the home was demolished to make way for condominiums.
Reception
The companion novel was a hit, rising high on several bestseller lists. For example, it debuted in the #4 slot on USA TodayUSA Today
USA Today is a national American daily newspaper published by the Gannett Company. It was founded by Al Neuharth. The newspaper vies with The Wall Street Journal for the position of having the widest circulation of any newspaper in the United States, something it previously held since 2003...
's best-selling fiction list in January 2002, and in the #15 slot on The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
best-selling fiction list. It rose to #1 on the Publishers Weekly
Publishers Weekly
Publishers Weekly, aka PW, is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers and literary agents...
best-selling fiction list for the week ending February 16, 2002.
The book was not widely reviewed. USA Today called the book "clever, beautifully detailed fiction." The Daily Evergreen
The Daily Evergreen
The Daily Evergreen is the student newspaper for Washington State University.The 12,000-circulation newspaper is distributed weekdays throughout the academic year, and twice-weekly in the summer. The Daily Evergreen is read by more than 83 percent of students, more than half the faculty, and also...
qualified its review, but declared: "Considering everything, this book was quite entertaining. It's one of those books that is difficult to stop reading. The scare element wasn't too terribly high, but the fact Pearson and King marketed the book as an authentic diary makes it all the more enjoyable to read." But the Christian Science Monitor gave it an "Unfavorable Review" rating, unhappy with the book's violence and explicit depictions of sexuality.
External links
- The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Rose Red at Ridley PearsonRidley PearsonRidley Pearson, born on March 13, 1953 in Glen Cove, New York, is an American writer. Pearson has historically written suspense and thriller novels for an adult audience, but has also begun branching out by writing adventure books for children....
's Web site.