Rating: 
Summary: One of King's best
Review: This is not the master of horror's most popular work, but I've always found it to be one of his best. In the late 90s he really started to find a balance between the spine-chillers like "It" and the quieter, more character-oriented pieces he does so remarkably well, like "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption." This book is a beautiful synthesis. This is the story of Mike Noonan, a wealthy writer whose world is shattered when his wife unexpectedly dies of a brain hemmorage. Mike retreats into a shell for a few years, unable to write, unable to connect with the world, until he finally returns to a lakefront summer home he shared with his wife. There he meets a young single mother and her daughter, and the three of them begin to reconnect with the world.That world is threatened again, however, when Mike begins to suspect his wife may not be completely gone... and furthermore, that she may not be the only spirit with him in the old house by the lake. Chilling as a ghost story, heartbreaking as a love story, this is one of King's best, and that's saying a lot.
Rating: 
Summary: Somewhere between Grisham and King
Review: The reviews for this King novel are mixed and I can see why. Personally I can see where readers are coming from, this is a little different and a departure from earlier stuff such as Cujo, which I read just after Bag of Bones (and liked a lot more). The scene is well set, but the story gets bogged down in the middle where it just becomes a legal battle for custody of Kyra, with flashes of supernatural occurances, its nothing special. This is the major flaw to me, its neither a legal thriller nor a classic King thriller - its somewhere in between. And this is not why I love to pick up Stephen King novels. I agree with reviewer Rodgers below that the scene on the lake between our 'hero' Mike and villian Max Devore is laughable and has little credibility. I suspect there may be a touch of Satan about Devore but King never makes this obvious, not to me anyway. Devore is another in the line of disgusting old men that frequent King novels (see 'The Sun Dog and 'Thinner'). Does he have a fear of growing old? The relationship between King and young single mum Mattie is also disappointing because Mike seems to only be able to think about how sexually desirous she is, theres not much else to her according to Mike - a shallow relationship is portrayed here. King also has an inability to write child dialogue. The dialogue for Kyra (a 3 year old) sounds more like a 2 year old, if any child at all talks in such irritating staccato. It wasn't all bad, some of the dream like sequences are vintage King, and I did finish this fairly quickly but in the end I didn't have great affinity with the characters. So it was a race to see what happened, rather than hoping the heroes make it through. If you're a fan of the supernatural King novels, don't expect a lot from this one.
Rating:
Summary: This bag of Bones has a hole in it.
Review: I'll say this right now: "Bag of Bones" had me completely until the last 150 pages of the book, and it would have gotten a five star rating---and then King just seemed to drop everything, poured on the gothic theatrics, and managed to destroy a creepy, creaky, meticulously created atmosphere with a few destructive taps of a word processor. That's a pity, too, because "Bag of Bones" had so much wicked potential. The book gets down to business quickly, and had me by the throat by the time King's haunted author, Mike Noonan, hears what he thinks is a little boy crying somewhere in his Maine summer home. It *can* be a ghoulish and genuinely unsettling book, and if you do decide to read it, you'll want to make sure all the doors are locked and you're tucked in a warm bed---with a good view of the closets. Whatever the critics say, Stephen King can write with a muse of fire when he wants to, and he writes best when he keeps things simple. I have always said that Stevie King is the William Faulkner of Horror Country: the man knows the way the four seasons dance with each other, knows about the secrets of thickets in Maine, is well-versed in the petty, powerfully interesting gossip spread from the corner store to the locally owned gas station, senses how old folks talk about those 'summer city people', is familiar with a town's seamy secrets, long forgotten in smoke-houses and woodsheds. These are his strengths, and when Stephen King is at his best---and he's often there---he plays to these strengths. Established writers are always telling younger ones to 'write what you know', and King does this, to telling, haunting, and often horrific effect. And at first, that's exactly what King does. "Bag of Bones" is all first person, and the reader gains an immediate, friendly, and easy intimacy with its writer-protagonist, still grieving over the freakish death of his wife and suffering from what must be the world's worst case of writer's block. Writing makes him literally physically ill, and with a publisher and editor breathing down his neck for the next breakthrough novel, Noonan decides to take a sabbatical up at Sarah Laughs, the Western Maine cabin on Dark Score Lake that he and his wife had loved and visited every summer---until last year. Noonan wants to be a recluse and deal with his demons privately, but he soon becomes drawn into a custody duel between young Mattie, her daughter Kyra, and the child's multi-millionaire computer tycoon Max Devore, who has returned to the land of his boyhood and vowed to take the child at all costs. There is some fine raw material here for a first-rate horror story: Noonan's growing suspicions of his dead wife's trips to Sarah Laughs the summer before, the increasingly violent conflicts with the malevolent and ruthless DeVore, Castle County's own dark and buried history, and a nastily haunted Sarah Laughs. And for a while, King serves up some of his best literary work in years, and manages to ratchet up the suspense and terror as Noonan is forced to confront both his demons and the increasingly restive computer magnate. There are a number of homages in "Bag of Bones", chiefly to the melancholy "Bartleby" of Dickens (only King could make that character horrific)and Daphne du Maurier's "Rebecca": the loyal and beloved wife with a dark secret, the recurring nightmares, the lake and its victims, even the villain's name. And there really are some first-class terrors here, particularly Noonan's hideous dreams of his wife and the lumbering, dark things that stalk him in his nocturnal walks to the cabin: until his confrontation with DeVore and a particularly wicked assistant, King had me, and I was riveted. The first half of "Bag of Bones" is vintage King: he opens up a creaky cellar door to his musty Subconscious and shoves us down the stairs, into the inky black of that basement---without a lantern. But the final fourth of the book is akin to King having switched on the cellar light, revealing an empty room with a bunch of faded horror movie posters. Without spoiling the plot, we're cheated of a classic villain, and the central motivation for Noonan's peculiar inward journey is removed and replaced with something far less plausible. It feels cheap, contrived, jerry-rigged, as if Noonan's merciless profit-minded publishers had come out of the book and forced King to get cracking and crank something out. It took me completely out of the story, and I read the final 150 pages just to see what happened. It wasn't enjoyable reading, and it wasn't scary; it was a complete letdown. That said, there are terrors here, and the first three-quarters of the book is so enjoyable, and so genuinely creepy and unnerving, and King had built up such a rich, mounting sense of unease and menace, that I was screaming at the book as I finished it. The book's title refers to the old aphorism that "compared to a living being, the most meticulously drawn fictional character is but a bag of bones"---but by the disappointing end to this promising story, King's characters aren't even that substantial.
Rating: 
Summary: Let the Buyer Beware
Review: The message in this review is never travel without sufficient reading matter. In a fit of absence of mind, I picked "Bag of Bones" up at an airport for the sake of something to read while passing the time waiting for my flight. I'd not read a Stephen King novel in years, and I thought "why not"? Big mistake. "Bag of Bones" served as a reminder of why I'd left King alone for so long. Indeed, I had trouble convincing myself that this was written by King and not some other author trying to satirise him. The story, such as it is, centres on an author who experiences writer's block brought on by the unexpected death of his wife, then gets involved in a legal tangle over the custody of a child, and finds curious things going bump in the night in his lakeside home in a small rural community in Maine - a community whose inhabitants become increasingly strange - and so on and so on. All regurgitated King themes. I couldn't help feeling that there was a large sense of guilt running through this novel - the sheer tedium of it perhaps getting King himself down (why give so much space to the writer's difficulty in finding new themes, new inspiration, the demands from publishers to keep churning out new fiction at regular intervals?). That still doesn't excuse just how dreadful "Bag of Bones" is. It's very flabby, almost interminable piece of writing - plot development is extremely slow. With King's market niche, that's a big flaw - I think slow plot development is OK if a novel engages your interest in different ways - if the author has something interesting he or she wishes to explore. King's stuff depends so heavily on the plot that when he fails to keep it marching along, nothing's left. The characters ranged from off-the-shelf King stand-bys such as the writer Mike Noonan, and the small town weirdo regulars to the comic-strip villains Max Devore (complete with high-tech wheelchair) and his side-kick Rogette Whitmore. The confrontation between Noonan and Devore/Whitmore provided the only bit of light relief for me - it was so bad I actually laughed out loud when reading it. But tops on the irritation league was the child, Kyra, to whom King devoted masses of attention and a nauseating baby-babble. Truly a dreadful piece of writing. Goodbye Stephen. G Rodgers
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: I loved Bag of Bones because I felt that the story had heart and it had a message. Mike Noonan is a best selling author who is still recovering from his wife's death. Mike Noonan resides in Derry, and decides to live in his summer resort Sara Laughs.
Then he meets a young black mother named Mattie with her daughter, and she is in a custody battle between the father who is the rich white man living in Sara Laugh's.
Now Mike helps out Mattie and her daughter, and Mike falls in love with Mattie. Now at his summer house, strange things start to happen, beginning with the magnets on his fridge, they start to say something.
I could go on with the story, but I dont want to spoil it for the reader reading this review. But this is good nonthelsss.
I have read almost all of the Stephen King novels out there, and I still got someways to go, but this is one of my favorite Stephen King novel, the first being The Stand of course.
Rating:
Summary: Transforming read
Review: I also had never read a Stephen King novel, however, I never thought I would. I don't care for the horror genre, and this does not qualify for it. I picked it up one day, started to read, and was caught up in it. It was wonderful. I was there, in Maine, transported. An amazing, engrossing, absorbing story full of humor, love, mystery, and charm. This was one I couldn't put down and it was very difficult waiting to get back to the world of Mike Noonan. After reading this book, I went back to other reviews and have found it said that this is atypical of King's work. I'm so thankful I picked up this book and will never forget it.
Rating:
Summary: King was robbed with only 4 stars
Review: I decided to write a review because I feel that King was robbed by those who only gave it four stars. I have read nearly everything he has ever written, but few of his books moved me quite like this one. I have read it at least twice and have listened to the audio book easily thirty times. The characters are very powerful and the book, despite its length, cannot be put down. I loved this book and feel that it deserves five stars, not four.
Rating:
Summary: Not what I expected from King
Review: I have never read a Stephen King book. I have seen many of his movies. This book was a completely satisfying surprise for me. It really WAS a "haunting lovestory" with so much intrigue. It wasn't what I expected from him. The main character is a successful author who, after a tragedy in his life, has more than writer's block. He becomes ill when he sits at his computer and has dreams and hallucinations that lead him down a path of danger, conspiracy, and love. I liked Michael Noonan's sense of humor in the midst of his writer's block, tragic loss, his relationship with his wife's family, and the way he deals with the spooky things that happen to him and the complicated people around him. He is a simple man who becomes entangled in the plight of a young single mother and becomes her knight in shinging armor. He also begins to uncover some history about himself, his wife, and this little town that folks there don't want uncovered. It's an intriguing maze of mystery. While this book does delve into the supernatural it's not the typical spooky stuff. It is subtle and has purpose which you find out as you eagerly turn the pages. Every emotion was tapped into:I giggled out loud, teared up, got mad, furrowed my brow and got heart palpitations, and ultimately I could not put this book down. And once I did I was completely satisfied.
Rating:
Summary: King's Best
Review: This gripping tale by Stephen King is his best offering. The 'blood and guts' horror are gone and replaced with a great story with a bit of the supernatural. The lead character, Mike Noonan, makes you feel his emotions and experience his pain. An incredible read that you can't put down and will want to start again as soon as you finish it.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Read
Review: I was very happy with this book. Very different I thought than alot of King's fiction. Not really a horror story more of a haunted drama. I loved the characters and the story.
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