Bad taste? I wonder how many battered women escape into fantasy to block out the horror of real life. I guess we are all entitled to our view of a particular book but to me the supernatural did not take away the message that battered women suffer a great deal and need to escape their partners.
I just found it to be, at best, flippant, and at worst, outright condescending and dismissive, toward a very real, tangible horror. I don't believe that was King's intention for a second (GERALD'S GAME and, most assuredly, DOLORES CLAIBORNE ring with too much truth for that to be the case); nevertheless, King's prowess with language and command of character notwithstanding, conceptually, I've never seen his arrow fly so far from the target. To me, this was like someone writing a book positing that Hitler's evil was caused by Nazi surgeons implanting microchips in his brain and controlling him with the world's first supercomputer, or one where we discover the American slave owners of the 18th and 19th Centuries were under the mind-control of extraterrestrial aliens. It's just a very indelicate novel, if you ask me.