Stephen King 2025 read-along discussion
This topic is about
The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer
February 2022 Discussions
>
February's Pick!! <3
date
newest »
newest »
Mod
So I wasn't a fan of the February pick . I DNF it around chapter 3.... but I'm excited for March. I've had Joyland on my shelf for a while now . Hope everyone is doing good :)
Mod
It is very slow going, I don't blame you. You can definitely tell it's not King's writing. Joyland is so fun, I'm excited for March too!
Going along with Kayla over at BooksandLala's buzzword readathon, her theme for the month of February is pronouns. After scouring we realized that it's a lot harder than it looks for Stephen King books (surprisingly), which is why our February book is a bit of a stretch. We're going with The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Rose Red by Joyce Reardon (actually Ridley Pearson). And no...that's not one of King's pen names.
The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Rose Red is a fictionalized novel following the life of John and Ellen Rimbauer and the construction of their mansion, Rose Red, in the early 20th century. Built on an ancient Indian burial ground, the building is considering haunted and mysterious tragedies occur throughout the mansion's history. It's written in the form of a diary kept by Ellen throughout her life at Rose Red and is annotated by a fictional professor of paranormal activity, Joyce Reardon.
What does any of this have to do with Stephen King?
The novel's genesis came as part of a $200,000 promotional marketing campaign for Stephen King's Rose Red television miniseries that premiered in 2002 starring Nancy Travis, Melanie Lynskey, Kimberly J. Brown, Emily Deschanel, as well as many others. 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 foreword 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.
When I tell you I was OBSESSED with the Rose Red miniseries when I was a kid...I was OBSESSED. Anytime I had a friend stay the night with me we watched it, lol. And I still love it to this day, so I'm beyond excited that we were able to squeeze it onto this list somehow.
Have you read this before? Were you just as weirdly obsessed with the mini series as I was? Are you excited to see how well this follows the events that are talked about in the miniseries? Chime off below!