Book Review: Bag of Bones by Stephen King
Rating: 4.5 stars
Review: Novelist Mike Noonan is still in recovery mode after the sudden death of his wife, an experience that has not only impacted his daily life but also his ability to write. Disturbing dreams and mysterious tidbits about his wife's activities in the last months of her life help drive Mike to stay at their summer home, a property called Sarah Laughs in a remote part of Maine. He hopes that the relocation will help both his mind and soul recover from the loss, and that perhaps his writing skill will return without the stomach-wrenching illness that has been accompanying his attempts in the years since his wife's death.
What he doesn't expect is to have his heart captured by a tiny imp of a girl who literally marches down the "crossmock" into his life, and then again by her very young mother. He also doesn't expect the dark and violent reaction of the small town to his new relationships and it seems even the house itself is determined to chase him back out of their lives. Mike has to decide if he's going to exit before things get worse or if he's going to stand his ground and keep digging for answers, no matter what is uncovered.
This is a classic ghost story with a little something extra, a good versus evil battle in which one of the combatants tells his story after everything has already happened. Because of this, we know he's a survivor and yet the journey he takes the reader on is so tense, it's hard to imagine how he did it, or what exactly is left.
There's something so very relatable in Mike Noonan, something so normal and casual and neighborly that I couldn't help but root for him even when I wanted to shake his occasional stubborn stance. It's this every-man character that makes the story so engrossing, and the horror more horrifying. It's just enough on the far side of fantastic to be brushed off as fiction and yet the genius of Stephen King is that he embeds enough doubt in the reader's mind to wonder what does go on beyond the edges of human perception. What would happen if that veil came down?
What I also liked about Mike Noonan (and Stephen King by association) is his grounded awareness of his own world, and by that I mean his references to what would be literary contemporaries and their quirks and habits and placements in the writing hierarchy. It's clear that Mike (and Stephen by association) is a reader as well as a writer and isn't so wrapped into his own world that he's unaware of others in it. It may seem like an insignificant matter, but having read other contemporary fiction in which pop culture references are dropped incorrectly, these small details do impress me. They draw me into a character's life and make their story more believable. Even when it's a ghost story by Stephen King.
Not quite enough to knock The Shining and The Talisman from their top spots in my King hierarchy, but it was enough to land Bag of Bones comfortably in spot number three.