Bag of Bones

Rating:
Summary: Good Info for Writers
Review: I did not expect this book to give me a lesson on book publishing, and was pleasantly surprised when it did. As for the story line, it was slightly dull, and the heroine and her daughter were a little too perfect for me.

At the end, Stephen King uses the narrator to tie together the loose strings, and it all seems so contrived.

Still, I enjoyed the book. Stephen King hasn't let me down yet. It's a great book for reading on the plane. And as usual, SCARY!

Rating:
Summary: Couldn't Finish It
Review: I have read almost all of King's work. In the early days I was a rabid fan, eating up the classic King books - Carrie, The Shining, The Stand, Pet Sematary, Skeleton Crew - then he hit his first rough patch - Misery, Gerald's Game, Dolores Claiborne - all increasingly claustrophobic and dull. Only when he broke loose again with Desparation and The Regulators did I pick him up again. Then he started revving up The Dark Tower series and he was in the groove again. Bag of Bones reminded me of the dark ages after his initial classics. It is longwinded, static, cluttered and above all - boooooring! He sets up some interesting ideas - the RedTop Boys, Sara Laughs, the mystery of his wife's death, and then the book devolves into the cloying and uninteresting Maddie Devore custody battle. The evil old man, his witchy henchwoman, the sainted young mother and perfect cute girl were just too much. I kept trying to skip ahead but this annoying plot, with its wholly unbelievable legal battle (money can buy a lot in this country, but it won't buy you a judge willing to take a baby from a perfectly normal mother). And why does Maddie stay in the TR - other than masochism??? I wanted to find out what happened in the other story lines, but the cloud of the moronic custody plot eventually ruined the entire book and after 300 pages, I bailed out. This book would have been severely helped by either an editor or Mr. King himself realizing that he did not need the excess plot and get to the good stuff. What a disappointment.

Rating:
Summary: Ghosts of the past
Review: Sean Stewart, in his excellent novel "Perfect Circle," says that "Ghosts don't do things to you. Ghosts make you do unspeakable things to yourself." This is the essence of King's "Bag of Bones," one of the finest novels in King's recent career.

Right off the bat, King sets the reader up for a rough ride, as Mike Noonan's wife Jo dies in an accident. King writes about Noonan's grief with unparalleled honesty and frankness which touched me throughout, and as the story progresses we learn about their marriage and the secrets which lie behind even the best relationships.

The story itself is quite gripping, peopled with King's usually strong characters, and moved along at a consistently brisk pace. Mike Noonan, a relatively popular writer (King does love to write about writers, doesn't he?), begins by struggling with his own grief and a strong case of writers block, but before long he is contending with the pettiness of small-town politics and with a growing sense of a presence, perhaps presences, in his vacation house in Maine. The house, known locally as Sara Laughs, is almost a character in itself, one which reappears later in a different context in King's Dark Tower series. The tale crescendos in a satisfying and chilling conclusion which manages to tie together all of the plot strands King has woven and incorporates all of the complex thematic elements at the same time.

King's role as a horror novelist has evolved over the years, and while there are scares a-plenty to be had in "Bag of Bones," they are not the sort of scares we found in "It" or in "'Salem's Lot." These are not easy-to-digest monsters or vampires, but subtle fears which get under the skin and stay there to crawl around for a while. These are the shapeless fears that we hear in the dark, the worst conjurations of our imagination. Make no mistake, this is not a happy or comfortable story, but its chilling effects resonate in a way that others stories will not do.

"Bag of Bones" is a story about grief, about loneliness, about secrets, and about the way that tragedy can echo through the years and affect lives far beyond expectations. It is about facing the past, even when the past seems to be beyond suffering. King has truly woven one of his finest and most complex tales here, a story of a haunting past which will not be denied, a ghost story in the best sense of the term. The ghosts which haunt this story are those which knock on the walls of darkened rooms, which move things while we're not looking, which whisper secret words on a breath of air... but more than that, the spirits in this book are those which haunt the very depths of the human heart.

Rating:
Summary: Bag of Bones
Review: With the Dark Tower fury writhing in my brain, I have been reading all the books loosely involved in that series. "Bag of Bones" was one that was recommended to me as significant, and I greedily began to read.

It didn't take long for King to weave his magic. After Mike Noonan's wife's death, you are taken on a ride; the book is very involved emotionally, while also having some very frightening scenes (tap once for yes...). I actually really enjoyed the way King didn't define the lines between Mike's dreams and reality. Here was a man who was very realistic about what happened in the read world, and as he dreams his prophetic visions, and then sees those visions brought to life, we are able to sense his own confusion. What world are we in?

It was a very enjoyable book, overall. I didn't give it five stars because of the mass of information put into the story; I believe it could have been a lot shorter and still been as terrifying and moving. Whatever you think of King, however, it is hard to deny that he is very in touch with what goes on inside a person's heart: you could feel Noonan's sorrow in losing and missing his wife, the little things that served as reminders to his loss. Of course, where King is most in touch is that dark little corner in all of our minds that we fear, but cannot help but approaching. I lost some sleep and questioned my sanity: both signs of a great scary story.