Rating: 
Summary: Bag of Bones
Review: Set in the Maine territory King has made mythic, Bag of Bones recounts the plight of forty-year-old best-selling novelist Mike Noonan, who is unable to stop grieving four years after the sudden death of his wife, Jo. Mike returns back to Sara Laughs, the isolated & beloved summer home he shared with his wife. There he finds himself plagued by nightmares & visitations, but he forges a new life from the grief that has held his heart for four years & which has haunted Sara Laughs for nearly a century.
Rating: 
Summary: Superficially excellent
Review: I generally like to wait until after I feel like I've come to understand all of what an author is trying to say in a book. It's been quite a while since I finished this book. It's not that the book is overly complex or difficult to understand--in fact, it turned out to be quite the opposite. This book, on the surface, is a good story told by a great storyteller in fantastic fashion, but just underneath the surface is a great, vapid nothing that will probably confuse you into thinking that it's something more than it is.See, the thing is, nothing really happens in this book, at least not in the way that things are supposed to happen in books. So far as I can tell, living people were responsible for absolutely nothing here. The narrator is the primary offender in that regard, spending the entire book as an observer to events, rather than as a participant in them. The same holds true for almost every other character in the book--nobody really makes a difference until after they're dead. It's this small shortcoming and only this that stops me from giving the book five stars outright and an unconditional recommendation. The story itself is a well-told mystery that should keep the reader interested up to the very end, written better, I might add, than most books in the mystery genre. The characters are well-developed, and King's typical knack for weaving together slices of his characters' lives with the events of the story to create a living world is in full effect. Indeed, for most loyal King readers (the majority of whom could care less about the more existential concerns that are the only real downfall of this book) Bag of Bones should prove to be an enjoyable experience. As such, I'd recommend it to anybody looking for a superficial read (meaning something not in the same family as James [overrated] Joyce). If, however, subtler internal plot elements and story construction quirks tend to bother you, the obvious hand of deus ex machina in this story could very well ruin what would otherwise be a great book, as it threatened to do with me.
Rating:
Summary: Go get 'em King!
Review: Part mystery, part homage, part campfire story. This guy is relentless entertaining, and no one touches him. Bag of Bones is one of my favorites by King, and other than a couple of recent "pulp" horror novels (like Shannon's "night of the beast" and the new doug clegg) nothing has been this much fun in ages. Keep the lights on, folks.
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Summary: Dreamcatcher??
Review: This was a heavy hitter and not for the faint of heart readers. Don't get this for your preteen. On the flip side, this was a page turner! Definitely later SK style. Creepy even when you know whats coming!
Rating:
Summary: Excellent! Heart-wrenching tale
Review: This book, frankly when I saw the title, didn't really appeal to me. However, when I finished the book, I realised something: King had changed his style. It was a pleasant change and it tugged at my heart-strings several times. Lovely masterpiece! Absolute classic!
Rating:
Summary: Surprised!
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The strangest thing being, that I was frighten enough to call my son (17 yrs old) into the room to "read him the passage" that scared me (but mostly cause I NEEDED the company). HOWEVER, at the same time I was laughing so hard ... to the point of crying. How is it possible to be so frightened yet so tickled you can't stop laughing? I don't know ... But it happened ... to me at least.
Rating:
Summary: Awesome Ghost Story
Review: This is a great ghost story. Stephen King has been seeming to get away from his spooky type of stories in recent years and this book restored my faith in him. I like his other stories as well, but I was beginning to miss the really scary ones. This book is just that. There is just the right touch of the supernatural along with lots of realism. You feel like you are right there with the characters. I could barely put it down. I loved it!
Rating:
Summary: this is a great book
Review: King readers know what we like and this is one of his best!
Rating: 
Summary: Bag of Hammers
Review: Bag of Bones? More like a Bag of Hammers. After a strong beginning, the reader must wade through page after page of too much information and sloooowwwwww moving story. The only way I could get through it was to read some of it and listen to some on audio. Listening to King's baby-talk of the child character is especially grating. Think I will re-read his all-time best: The Stand.
Rating:
Summary: Will Become a Testament to King's Literary Ability
Review: Many longtime King readers consider his early Magnum Opus, The Stand, the author's best work. Until the publication of Bag of Bones, that charge may have been true. No more. In BOB, King leaves cliché (both genre and his own) behind and weaves a classic, sprawling, and wholly satisfying tale of good and evil, right and wrong, love and hate, and the living and the dead. Mike Noonan's life - and writing career - come to a crashing halt when his wife dies of an aneurysm while watching an automobile accident. For four years, he puts himself on neutral and glides through life, until he abandons his house for Sara Laughs, his summer retreat in Western Maine, on the shores of Dark Score Lake. There, he meets Mattie and Kyla, a single mother and her daughter who happened to get mixed up with the greedy, semi-psychotic computer magnate Max Devore, who wants Kyla, his granddaughter, as his own. Mike is inevitably drawn into the struggle, and at the same time finds that he, too, has a pulse and remnants of life. So too, he discovers, does Sara Laughs, a house that harbors spirits and secrets galore. Part romance, part meditation on love and life, part legal thriller, and part satire of the writing industry, Bag of Bones is King's only pure ghost story. HP Lovecraft opined that any real ghost story is about love, and it is this, the most basic (and complex) of human emotions, that King explores - love for wives, love for children, and love of place. He keeps his easygoing style and voice, but the subject matter in Bag of Bones is his most contemplative and mature, and while it has elements of horror (some of the ghost scenes are throat-closers), Bag of Bones manages to grow beyond that into a very serious novel. For a writer as maligned as King by the so-called literary-intellectual field, Bag of Bones could be a thumb-in-the-nose, look-what-I-can-do sort of book, but it escapes pretension and snobbery as well. Many of his books, written almost automatically in the 1980s and early 1990s, are downright formulaic, and there's a hint of that in Bag of Bones, but not much. It is also his best ghost story, as none of the main characters are psychics - just normal people who can experience ghostly phenomenon, making it all the more terrifying for the non-psychic reader. While The Shining pulled that off successfully, and Rose Red failed miserably, Bag of Bones keeps the hauntings grounded in something everyday people experience - that subtle, chill wind on a hot day, and noises in the night that may or may not be quite natural. It's disappointing that King's retirement looms so immediately on the horizon, but if one book should stand as a tribute to his literary works, that book should be Bag of Bones. It's a wholly different beast from The Stand, the other book for which King will undoubtedly be recognized for hundreds of years in the future, but Bag of Bones hums with a kind of tightness and literary prowess rare in any book, in any time. Final Grade: A
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