Bag of Bones

Rating:
Summary: Don't get me started.
Review: Boring, long winded and about a 3 on the suspense scale (10 being the best). But he's still the King, only this time the King has written better books. Oh, how I long for another Needful Things!

Rating:
Summary: Not King's Best, But a Fun Read
Review: While Bag of Bones doesn't measure up to King's masterworks like The Stand, It, or The Dark Tower series, the novel is a well-written, interesting variation of a classic haunted house story. The main character, Mike Noonan, is well-defined, and his first-person narrative is personal and revealing. (King rarely writes in first-person, but when he does, it's a pleasure to read.) Especially fascinating is how Mike's wife Johanna, who is dead before the story begins, becomes such a three-dimensional character. Readers come to know her well without ever having met her, just through Mike's narrative.

One problem with Bag of Bones is that the antagonists, Max Devore and Rogette Whitmore, do not really seem that threatening. Far scarier is the haunted-house stuff: whispered messages, ghosts communicating cryptically through refrigerator magnets, strange, waking-life dreams. Mattie, the love interest, is too idealized: Mike's concern for her is really an infatuation that doesn't quite feel authentic. The child, Kyra, is one of King's more dull children characters. She's so perfectly cute she could have come from the NBC series sap-a-thon Full House.

King is my hero. I only wish he could know how much joy he has brought into my life by sharing his imagination with me (if you're looking at this, Mr. King, thank you for that). He lets me into other people's heads and different worlds (even if they are ostensibly our own world) more than any other author I read. Bag of Bones is no exception, it's another can't-put-it-down read.

I really liked the new pic of King on the jacket, it's the best one yet.

Rating:
Summary: A Kinder, Gentler Stephen King
Review: I don't how long time fans will react to this "kinder, gentler" Stephen King. I've read everything the man's ever written and aside from "Wizard and Glass" have been a bit disappointed in his last few efforts. Though "Bag of Bones" was somewhat of a departure from his usual style, it was quieter and more intimate, I felt a tremendous sense of relief when I finished it. "King is back!", I thought. The story was haunting and beautiful and very much a "love" story. King evokes love in all its incarnations from maternal to romantic. For the main character, Michael Noonan, love is both a curse and savior. In King's world, love can transcend death and even time which is fine if the love is pure, not so fine if it's twisted by grief and hate... I highly recommend "Bag of Bones"!

Rating:
Summary: Not bad, but no masterpiece
Review: I am bemused, and slightly amazed, to read some of the exultant reviews of this book. I've been reading Stephen King for 20 years (and I am only 31!) and Bag of Bones isn't bad, but it is nowhere near Mr. King's best work (The Stand, Different Seasons, The Dead Zone, The Green Mile). As always, the characters are incredibly well drawn and seamless but the plot is ill-conceived and overall the book isn't very tightly written. Mr. King tackles a very tired genre, the ghost story, and injects more life into it than ever could have been imagined. However, he should have stuck to more of this world (Mr. Noonan and his deceased wife, Mattie Devore, an ugly racial incident) and left the spooks and goblins to children's authors. Like most of Mr. King's ardent fans, I think he is one of the best living American authors, but he does his best work when crafting a story out of real, breathing characters.

Rating:
Summary: Must read
Review: A great book and a page turner. A must read for any King fans.

Rating:
Summary: I couldn't put it down!
Review: From the moment I read the first chapter here at Amazon.com I was hooked!! I read the entire book in three days and enjoyed every minute!! In the beginning the thought of his wife dying while carrying the baby they had wanted made me sad. Him not being able to write for the next four years made me sypathetic. But when he got involved with Ki and Mattie and things began happening at Sarah Laughs I couldn't put the book down because I was enthralled!!! Anyone who doesn't think this is a love story has never lost someone close to them!! The plot twist is one of Kings best yet!! I think this book will make a GREAT movie with little need to do any rewriting!

Rating:
Summary: Uneven and tired, but still a good read.
Review: Stephen King's latest novel begins as a half-hearted stab at being literate psychological realism, a page-turner in the distinctive King voice that "samples" REBECCA, Thomas Hardy and Somerset Maugham. After a slow start it becomes an engaging and sometimes riveting of a writer's deteriorating psyche, and then the novel itself deteriorates seriously in the last 150 pages as King seems to just give up on his story and revert back to narrative tricks and supernatural explainations familiar from his lesser novels. Given the premises he has set up, the final third of the novel becomes at times completely unbelievable: and this is a serious problem, as King's greatest work has the central strength of a seamless transition between the mundane and ordinary and the fantastic. Here the seams show: you can see the one-line revisions thrown in the edit to explain or cover up a loose end or a contradiction (although he and his editor by no means get them all) and one even gets the sense that the novel's ending was written at a different time altogether, so abrupt is the shift.

For an uneven novel that isn't sure what it wants to be or what its characters' motivations are, it does have its moments and its share of beautifully-written passages, interesting connections, and caustic humor. I doubt it will attract any new readers, but many steadfast King fans will like it, recognizing it as superior to much of his late 80's work, although they will recognize it to be drawn-out but its own confusion and about 100 pages too long--a slip of concentration from the author of "The Stand" and "It", both extra-long novels that worked. And whatever the NEW YORKER would have you believe, it's not a great work of literature: it's not "The Shining", nor is it even consistent with the best of King at his non-horror best ("The Dead Zone", "Different Seasons", "Dolores Claiborne".

The very end of the novel, its "epilogue", is the most self-conscious and self-referential slice of meta-fiction King has ever penned (and that's saying something). In the voice of the writer/narrator, the author more or less confesses to being dissatisfied with his work and its formulaic tricks, and suggests that he's about had it for now. This leaves Stephen King, the author, an out should he decide to keep at it--but it's essentially a tired announcement of retirement from someone who's been flirting with it for a while now. This isn't a "comeback" novel or a "career" novel--it's a farewell one, and that's perhaps as it should be. Reading the novel over in this light gives both it and its author a kind of dignity the book on its own doesn't have, and that's by no means a bad way to go.

Rating:
Summary: Not one of King's greatest, but still a good read.
Review: Bag Of Bones is a good read, but seems a little a little disjointed, and seems to lack King's usual humor and sense of spirituality. His comment that celebrities are paid well only so we can pick them apart is very cynical and seems to indicate that he is in a dark mood. His character loses almost everything (which is typical of King's characters) but seems to have no hope; he is manipulated by his family history and a bunch of dead people who are pissed off. I did get caught up in the last part of the book but there were really few surprises about the outcome.

Rating:
Summary: King does it again
Review: "Bag of Bones" is one of King's greatest. I became so involved in this book (as I do all of Mr.King's books) I forget everything around me. My husband hates when a new Stephen King comes out because I won't pay any attention to anything else till I finished it. In the book, Mike is like everyone of us, he has the goodness and the evil inside of him. He fights his demons as he trys to do what is best for Ki. I need a new King novel at least once a month.

Rating:
Summary: Worth Reading however I was somewhat disappointed at end.
Review: I didn't want to put "Bag of Bones" down once I had began. I felt that some of the dream sequences were a little hard to follow and the end could have been more satisfying but overall it was a great book.