I remember reading this when I was 16. My dad bought me the hardcover for my birthday, and I remember reading it on a plane. That's about all that I remember about it, though, other than a vague recollection of liking it, hence my pre-Goodreads rating of 3 stars. Now, 16 years later (Please don't do the math. It will hurt me in my soul.), and I'm reading it again. I've picked this book up a few times over the past... maybe two years, but each time I put it back down again. It just wasn't the right time. But I'm glad that I read this now, because I loved it. I didn't love EVERYTHING about it, but the main, overall story, is pretty effing fantastic. The quick and dirty summary, before we get started: Successful author Mike Noonan's wife, Jo, dies suddenly, and after Mike's suffered 4 years of lonely writer's block, he finds himself drawn to his summer home on Dark Score Lake, where things start to get weird. Alrighty, let's get the nitpicks out of the way, shall we? First: I get it. Mike Noonan is a successful author of romantic mystery/thrillers. That's quite clear enough from Noonan's own perspective, and from the conversations he has with his agent. So it's pretty annoying to have nearly every male character that encounters Mike to have to comment on Mike's Successful Author Status, usually in the form of The Husband Of The Fan relaying his hallowed Favorite Author Status on behalf of said wife. And often in a sort of apologetic way, as though she should really be more discerning, but he writes the stuff, and they ARE women, so it's probably OK. In 732 pages, ONE man is reported to have read one of Mike's books, and that man is his agent. Even his publishers are women, Debra and Phyllis. I don't really know why this bothered me quite so much. I understand that a romantic aspect being a main component of a book will make that one that appeals to more women than men. But it just seemed to be overkill. Everyone has to mention how much women love his books, even when said woman is not around. The subtext being, I guess, that these are good husbands who would catch hell if their wives poked a head out of the kitchen to ask how their days were and found out that hubby'd talked to THEIR FAVORITE AUTHOR and didn't mention that she was a huge fan. Possibly a rolling-pin to the noggin worthy offense. Second: The dialogue. There was really some awkward dialogue in this book. I think that's been present in just about all of King's books, but as I get older, I notice it more. It's just little things, things that bother me and feel... forced? Like a 21 year old girl, the daughter of two alcoholics, who practically raised herself, and who quit highschool when she got pregnant, and now reshelves books at the library for $100/week and can barely afford to keep her trailer saying, "I apologize about calling in the first place - it's a presumption." It's just awkward. Yes, she's smart. Yes, she's a reader of widely varying genres (described as "schizo" by our author/narrators). And yes, she's not the trailer-trash one would expect her to be. But STILL I don't think, in the late 90s, that a girl like her would talk like that. It sounds like it would be coming out of the mouth of a 45 year old WASP, calling on business. And let's not forget about the "Make it Mike/Mattie/Rommie/George/etc" instructions that everyone has to give anyone else they talk to so that they can feel free to get all personal and call them by their first name. This book was set in 1998, not 1958. Jeez. Finally: The repetition. This is something of a slow build of a book. Once it gets going, it goes, but... Mike is a bit slow on the uptake with some things, and so it has to kind of be knocked into his head, which takes repetition. Not only for him to get it, but I presume for the reader to get it and understand the importance as well. King often takes his time to make sure the scene is set and the symbolism and symmetry are in place before letting things get good and rockin'. I appreciate that, but I think Mike could have maybe picked up on a few things a bit faster. To me, they were pretty obvious... but then, I'm reading the book and he's living it. Those are all of the negatives I can think of right now. I'm tired, though, and it's past my bedtime, so I'll get to the good stuff quickly. I loved the way that this story unfolded. I love how all the little pieces of mystery eventually came together. The picture that they formed was horrible, and ugly, and hateful, and sad... but what it spawned is almost righteously beautiful in its anger and hurt. That seems like such a strange sentence to type, but I don't know how else to describe it. The things that happened should not have and I cannot help but understand the rage and the pain and the sense of betrayal... and the need for vengeance. In a way, I was rooting for her to win. I just couldn't bring myself to call her evil... not after what she'd been put through. My heart broke for her. One thing that King does exceptionally well is build a community, and in Bag of Bones, I think this is one of his best. Very close-knit, very proud and quiet and... Maine. The way that this community exists is just as creepy and scary for their everydayness as the things that draws Mike to Sara Laughs and keeps him there. The characters were great, and I loved the way that Mike kept his wife alive in his mind and heart. She died on the first page of the book, and yet she had such an active place in his life, and I loved her character. I loved so much about this book. I enjoyed even the sections of nothing-much-happening, because even when nothing is happening at the moment, the reader is getting to know the characters or the community, or just taking a little walk down memory lane and getting a feel for the relationship that was so recently lost. This book was such an emotional roller-coaster, and I loved it. It had me in tears right off the bat, because one thing that King does amazingly well is writing characters that I can understand and relate to (even if sometimes they talk funny). And Jo's death right at the start of the book, and Mike's reaction to it, just got me in the feels. I understood his need to know why she had been keeping secrets, and I willingly went along with him to find out. I felt like, by the end, I'd been a silent observer of their lives. I loved this book, and despite my criticisms, I think it's right up there among King's best. There are a lot of similarities in this book to 2006's Lisey's Story, only told from the other side of the page, if you will. In this, the writer's wife is the one to die, and in Lisey's Story, the writer himself dies. But both stories pick up from there with the coping and grieving, and the quest to understand WHY their loved one died... and what secrets they may have been keeping. There are also several tie-ins to other novels that King's written - Insomnia, for one, and Needful Things. It's kind of a bridge between the Derry novels and the Castle Rock novels. It's not really set in either one, truly, though it passes through both. Anyway, it's now after 1:30am and if I don't stop typing, I might just ramble on until dawn. So I'll stop now and just say that I loved this book despite it's occasional awkwardness. It's heartbreaking and beautiful and ruthless and eerie all at the same time. Good stuff. Definitely worth the read.
I didn't read all of King's stuff as a teenager, mostly just the most famous books, and I think I have to thank King for how much I genuinely care about fiction, and for how much I love reading now. It's not just that his books were my introduction to both the grown-up novel (whatever you think of the quality of King's work, his stuff is more fundamentally literary than genre-oriented; you can take the vampires out of Salem's Lot and have a pretty good novel of small town Americana), but also that throughout junior high and high school, King was one of the few writers I could talk to a lot of people about. In high school the divisions started showing up. Among those who read, two groups formed: one group read pop fiction to pass time, and the other discovered stuff like Palahniuk, Ellis, Bukowski, the Beats, and so on, and took it probably too seriously. Stephen King was the only crossover I could detect. And I still see that now. If people whose tastes lean toward the literary are going to read ultra-popular fiction at all, it will tend to be King they're drawn to. I fell in more with the latter group, and kind of forgot about King to some extent, thinking of him as a good popular author but too mainstream for my eclectic self. I no longer hold those prejudices, really, but King's not really an author in my literary consciousness. He's more of a fuzzy memory of the best kind of terror and thrill, a junior Adam curled up in bed up at 3 AM loving the stuff.A couple days ago I noticed my untouched copy of Bag of Bones sitting on my bookshelf, and thought I'd check it out. Reading this thing was a weird experience. The prose was sometimes just woeful, but sometimes pretty damn good. The narrative was odd, the sort of thing a writer more prone to cutting and revising would have narrowed down into a tight structure. The story exploded out of the plot would be one way of putting it, I guess. There was a lot of stuff about middle-aged boners and young breasts. The book starts out eerie and mysterious; the impact of the book's primary intertextual reference, DuMaurier's Rebecca, is really strong in the first 100 pages or so. Then it's primarily a psychological story for a while, feeling more like a popular treatment of an Updike male character than anything. Then King goes all out on the ghosts and shit. Although many of King's trademarks are present here, there's something missing. And it's not the turns the book takes in tone and subject matter that grate. King's killer epics like The Stand and It meander like crazy, and that's a big part of their charm. Bag of Bones just has a weird vibe. The horror elements feel tacked on, and not integrated. King sets up characters carefully, but doesn't end up taking them anywhere. So I never got the immersion into the world of the characters (both inner and outer) that is crucial, in my experience, to enjoying a Stephen King book. Pet Sematary has a lot of goofy shit in it, but the characters and settings are so well-drawn that the book ends up being pretty fucking creepy. Bag of Bones was frequently just uncomfortable reading, stuck between fine popular storytelling and a hackneyed attempt at literary characterization and psychology. I think I remember reading that when King signed the deal with Simon and Schuster that this book was the first part of, he'd wanted to get out of the genre label a bit and be a bit more 'literary' in his writing. The bummer is that, like Duma Key, the only other more recent King book I've read, the work actually suffers a loss in that aspect and also loses a step as genre fiction. King's best books, stuff like The Stand and It and Salem's Lot, maybe Christine (a favourite at 14, but that was a long time ago. I'll have to read it again, soon), benefited from an approach to genre fiction that lent them the ability to render a world and characters well enough to make me care about the people on the pages, as well as then integrating the horror and fantasy elements as deeply uncanny, weird, but totally believable. The results are masterful genre works that truly "capture the imagination," to use a hackneyed phrase, and provide both the pleasures of the traditional novel and the more perverse pleasures of freaky, pretty out-there horror. Bag of Bones, takes an approach that seemingly starts not with the larger concept, but with a fundamentally literary story of a middle-aged writer losing his wife, grieving, then lusting after a young woman, and so on. King's charm was in taking the high concept and fleshing it out far better and far more comprehensively than other popular authors. In Bag of Bones it feels more like he starts without a hook, and gets lost fast. The Stand is postapocalyptic, survival mode, community-based, good vs. evil stuff. It has a fundamentally scary-ass concept, and childhood's fountain to draw from. Christine has the car and teenage lust. Bag of Bones is a bag of literary cliches, with some terror thrown in towards the end. But hey, I read this thing in two days and didn't hate much about it. So there's that. I hate to sound like a snob, but other than a handful of horror writers, none really current, a few SF paperbacks, and a whole lot of hardboiled/noir fiction, I find pop fiction to be ridiculously boring. I've actually tried to read some thrillers, like Tom Clancy or whatever, and just not been able to get past a 100 pages. I think King, even when he's not very good, is in a different class entirely. I kind of want to read some other Stephen King books now, probably his earlier stuff. The idea of revisiting The Stand or It scares me, because I'd rather have my memories of them than risk disliking them given my current readerly dispositions. But I've forgotten enough about Christine to check it out again.
What do You think about Bag Of Bones (1999)?
Man, when this guy is good, he is really good. Bag of Bones exemplifies what I love about Stephen King. Characters you care about, and marvelously poignant observances, be they on human nature or a simple description or simile.This isn't much of a horror novel. Although there is one particular passage that caused me a little lost sleep, this is a story of grief, love, and revenge. It's a ghost story (this is the horror and revenge part) that concerns a writer facing writer's block following the sudden death of his wife.I loved reading this, King made me laugh, almost made me cry, and several times had me nodding in agreement whenever he hit upon one of those poignant observances.This book also made me regret any bad things I've written about his other works. This was like coming home again, and it's been a while since I've read a book that I couldn't wait to pick up again.
—Bill
In the later half of his career, Stephen King is romantic. I remember finding Lisey's Story lovely in its depiction of marriage, and this one I felt even more deeply. If it were possible for a book to turn you white hot with longing for intimacy with another person, that's what Bag of Bones did to me. I was possessed with the spirit of Michael and Mattie's extra-sensory regard for each other; I heard Jo's loving sighs for Michael as I tried to sleep. I fantasized and daydreamed about at least three of the men I work with, that wispy feeling tiding me over in the endless wave of routine paperwork until I could read Bag of Bones at night and keep that romantic headspace. See? I told you: possessed. This is an excellent example of gothic storytelling, with its horrors motivated by very human tragedy. I hope we're not all still thinking of Stephen King as a simple genre writer (and I don't think we are, but it's been a while since I've considered the issue). That label sure does him a disservice.
—rachel
This was a weird novel for me. For the first 450 pages or so I kept thinking that it was by leaps and bounds the best Stephen King book ever. But then things got strange in a way that only King's novels can and I was left feeling like maybe I'd been in a car accident but had blacked out and couldn't really remember the whole thing properly. I think that you either like Stephen King's stuff or you don't. I'm a fan of sci-fi/fantasy/borderline horror and I am a King fan. I have been reading him since the seventh grade and I'm never bored with his stuff and always end up thinking that even if I don't connect with every story, he is a genius. Seriously. Can you imagine what it would be like to have him for a friend? I thought the beginning of Bag of Bones was a bit of a departure for King. The whole set up was very subtle and the story was quite poignant. Of course there was something bizarre developing in the background--it's a Stephen King book! But, what pressed upon me during the first part of the novel was that it was light on the weird stuff and I still loved the story. That just proves what a great writer he is and maybe my point is that he can lay off of his signature crazy shit sometimes. In this case, the weirdness really snuck up on me and last forty pages or so just seemed sort of bizarre and out of place with the rest of the book, almost like he got to the end and was like, "whoa! I need to spice this up!" My only other complaint is that I didn't feel like the story was finished although the book ended. I had some questions. What was the big dream about "low sperm count" supposed to mean? Was that a line of thought that was never completed or were we just being diverted? Also, Micheal Noonan obviously stayed on the TR after the storm. What was his relationship with the townies after the way he had been treated? I thought that was a major part of the book and it was dropped.Overall, I liked this book but it had some problems mainly towards the end. But, really, who am I to judge?
—Autumn Doughton
