Rating: 
Summary: Bag of Poop
Review: Bag of Bones starts off strong at the beginning. Mike Noonan is a writer who suffers from one of the biggest fears a writer can face--writer's block. This results from the recent death of his wife Jo (he suffers through this for about four years). Mike decides to get away for awhile and goes to his summer home nicknamed Sara Laughs in a place with no name, only the letters and numbers TR-90.
When Mike gets there, he runs into a woman named Mattie who is beautiful, single also as a result of her mate's death, and fighting a huge custody battle with her father-in-law, multi-millionaire computer tycoon Max Devore.
Mike, in the midst of discovering his house is haunted and that something strange is happening or has happened in TR-90, decides to help Mattie fight her custody battle. Sounds interesting doesn't it? Well, it is for about 300 pages, then the reader realizes he or she will not be able to figure out much until the very end, as the book seems to end with a quick final explanation to all the problems, an explanation the reader had no way of knowing or figuring out.
This technique left me feeling cheated in this case. It was more successful in Poe's short story "Murders in the Rue Morgue".
If you want to read a story that is exciting two-thirds of the way through and then is disappointing, read this book...3 stars for pages 1-300/1 star for pages 301-529.
Rating: 
Summary: King's Best Work.
Review: This is Stephen King's best novel, a master-work that could only be writing after a lifetime of experience and understanding. I was amazed at the complex story King has created here, and the life that he has breathed into it. As we begin, Mike Noonan's young wife Jo falls over dead on a grocery store parking lot - not by murder or supernatural fowl-play, but simple senseless tragedy. For years Mike drifts through the wreckage of his old life, until he decides to move into his old summer home in the backhills of Maine. Once there he runs into a little girl and her lovely mother Mattie, and Mike's chivalrous generosity sweeps him into a custody battle, defending Mattie against her rich father-in-law, Max Devore, a kind of Bill Gates turned Adolf Hitler (which is how most of Silcon Valley feels about Gates). Through his monetary influence, Devore has turned the complex social structure against Mattie, and we see just how uncomfortable life can be in a small town where people don't like you. So many things unfold - Jo's death reveals a strange mystery, Mike & Mattie's friendship turns to romance, the confrontation with Devore explodes into chilling conflict, and all the while, Mike starts hearing things at his house. The magnets on the frig are creating patterns all by themselves, bells are ringing by themselves...King has painted so many things to perfection in these pages. Mike Noonan is a pulp fiction writer, so immediately this book opens with the authority of a Tom Clancy novel. The world of literary agents and debilitating writer's block is obviously personal experience for King. All the characters are beautiful, complete people, especially that strange mix of almost vicious gossip when these tiny communities eat at each other. Mike has known many of these people for 15 years, and yet he is still an outsider, still a city slicker. You even feel the presense of the people you never meet, those judging eyes that watch you as you drive down the streets of any small town. Max Devore as the resident Bad Guy is especially riveting, and his brief appearance is the best part of the book. King's writing style has always been a little slow, giving his characters time to live and think, and Stephen has created the perfect person to reflect this. Mike Noonan's post-tragedy life moves at that slow Am-I-Dreaming? pace, as does life in general, "on the TR." Having lost someone tragicly as Mike did, I appriciate that King allowed Mike to take his time in his grief, and feel that debilitating confusion of sadness, anger, suspision, and hopelessness. Entire months can slip right by you without so much as a whisper. And yet, there are maybe 6 huge sub-plots going working in such a beautiful web, you'll be amazed at the simple complexity of it all. Only someone working as long as King has can pull off something like Bag of Bones. Only a few things keep this book from being one of histories greatest. First, King is still a pulp writer at heart, and this novel has some structural problems to show for it, like hardly any transition between sub-plots. The hauntings especially seem to be happening in some story, and not to our main character (the book actually could have done without it, believe it or not). Also, King lapses into lengthy "moral arguments" or explainations of the various legal aspects of the plot. The entire epiloge explains away a huge pile of lose-ends that King couldn't be bothered to wrap up properly in the climax. A more careful revision would have made this book a giant masterpiece. As it is, Bag of Bones is still well worth your time and money.
Rating:
Summary: One Excellent Ghost Story
Review: This novel has a bit of everything in it: scaryness, romance, suspense, hate, revenge, greed, supernatural...the list goes on and on. Bag of Bones has just about everything you would want in a novel. It's not just a ghost story, but it has many strong literary aspects in it as well, including the romance between Mike and Mattie. For long-time Stephen King fans, they will love it. For new King readers, you will enjoy this book if you are up for the task of a long book. Great work, Mr. King.
Rating: 
Summary: Past The TI-90
Review: The highly-acclaimed author Stephen King comes back with another amazing novel! "Bag of Bones", at 529 pages long, is the story of an author, Michael Noonan, whose wife dies suddnely in the heat of a summer day. In the four years following, our protagonist tries to emotionally recover from her death, but cannot and almost puts his entire life on hold, until he meets a yound, single mother named Mattie and her 3-year-old daughter Kyra, or Ki.
As he continues to live in his summer house in Derry, Maine, his memories of his wife and recent dreams all connect into what his future will be, each signaled by a ringing bell in his living room. "To some extent," says Kind,"this novel deals with the legal aspects of child custody in the State of Maine". Ghosts and spirits walk in and out of his mere existence to help im continue his life and help the only people that he believes he cares about, which is completely aloof from normal.
What do these ghosts have to say to Michael Noonan? Why do they keep weaving into his life? What does the incidental meeting of him and Mattie mean? Why does Michael feel such an obligation to this young girl, Kyra, and her mother? You must read past the boundaries of the state of Maine to find out!
Rating:
Summary: King-Revisited....
Review: Bag of Bones was my first Stephen King read in a number of years. About halfway through The Tommyknockers, I felt like I had been there, done that time and again with him. I was fed up..... Jump forward, 11 years, to the publication of Bag of Bones. The dust jacket makes it look like typical King territory, but inside, there is a wonder to behold. Mike Noonan, author, widower, and grief-stricken man leaves his home for the cabin he and his wife shared, Sara Laughs. There he is not only haunted by her memory, but seemingly by her voice as well. He laments that there is nowhere to escape the loss he feels, even here, and finds it impossible to resume his writing career, with deadlines looming, and his stockpile of 'backup' stories dwindling fast. Mike is drawn into a local power-play courtesy of Max Devore, the town's resident wealthy control freak, against the mother of his three year-old granddaughter and the child herself. Mike instantly feels sympathetic and protective to them both, and finds himself biting off more than he thought in extending his friendship to them. Suddenly, his ability to write returns, but the voices do not cease to come. And the more time Mike spends at Sara Laughs, the further he is drawn into the realm of ghosts there that extend far beyond that of his deceased wife. Bag of Bones is not a horror novel. Do not read it expecting gremlins, ghouls, or gore...what made King famous in the first place. Do expect a tale of loss, despair, frustration, and chance to begin again after suffering a terrible loss. As I have stated in other King book reviews, the man writes best when he leaves behind the demons that lurk in shadows and under beds, and probes the demons that lie in peoples' minds instead. This has to be my favorite of all Stephen King novels I have read, and was sufficient enough to make me take a look at some of his more recent, pre-Bones works, such as Rose Madder, and the Long Walk. For anyone who felt as I did all those years ago, that you had read it all before, pick this book up and give King another shot to entertain you.
Rating:
Summary: no, King is not yet a great writer
Review: Well, SK has some great qualities : great caracterisation and a true knack for getting his reader inside the lives of ordinary people, which is a great way to help scare the reader when things stop being ordinary. To boot, his books are very skillfully crafted, and the whole is greater than the individual bits of story. Unfortunately, he has three major flaws : the first is lack of real originality. The next is that his horrors are often too far fetched and lurid to be really frightening. The last is that he really doesn't know how to handle endings, which is a must have skill for a good horror writer, because it takes a lot of spin doctoring to get a book to its end after the climax, without sinking to an anticlimax. So, going beyond the good old "haunted house" template, I spent the first 80% of the book telling myself, "oh, well done, this is great suspense, truly engrossing; maybe he's done it this time and written a truly GREAT book" and the rest being disappointed by the slipshod way he was wrapping it all up and the triteness of the supposed climaxes and final end. So, despite an excellent (if slow, but SK has gotten us used to that) start, some very nice passages, and a good build up in the first two thirds of the book, Bag of Bones is one more SK disappointment. which is too bad, because with Rose Madder, he had almost hit it, which had made me want to read is more recent work. Overall, I cannot recommend it, if you want to read King, try It, the Tommyknockers or Rose Madder instead.
Rating: 
Summary: My assessment of ¿bag of Bones¿
Review: I started reading "Bag of Bones" as a class assignment. I picked this book out of my many choices because it was one I had at my house but had not yet read before. It was about John Noonan a novelist and newly made widower. After mourning his wife for 4 years he decides to move back to his summer house in Main to get a change of scenery and try to get his writing back on track. He returns to, his town, the TR to find that the people have become hostile towards a young mother and her child. The town holds a secret curse that passes from generation to generation. On top of all this his house, Sara's Laughs, is haunted with the spirit of his wife, a turn of the century folksinger and her son.
Kings writing style was what first intrigued me. The way he explains a sunset or a wisp of hair or a smell. He said that "Thomas Hardy, who supposedly said that the most brilliantly drawn characters in a novel is but a bag of bones"(45) and that is how John refers to people, bags of bones. King throughout describes dreams and places and makes you feel as if you are actually visiting that place. You are John Noonan as he watches the sun go down at the end of a hot day " all orange and squished, as if an invisible hand is pushing down...and at any moment it just might pop like an overfilled mosquito and splatter all over the horizon" (16).
As I went on I was captured into the story and forgot I was reading as an assignment. I became a character of John Noonan's life. Trying to understand the mysteries as he tried and falling short. Jumping to conclusions on questions that would be answered until later in the book. My emotions mixed with Noonan's emotions as he discovered more of what his wife was doing the year before her death. Although, this book did not scar me, not even one sleepless night, I did stay up late a couple nights just because of the intrigue of the book.
If I had one complaint it is the last three chapters. They are filled with too much information. ...It took me forever to read though them, and in some spots I had to read twice. This put an brought the book down if I had to rate it. ...
What I like most about this book is Kings cleverness of voice, not only: the deep-seat sense of place, the round characters, and the story line, but the witty and obsessive voice of King's powerful imagination. All in all the "Bag of Bones" was a good book, that is except the last three chapters.
Rating:
Summary: Another Classic by King!
Review: If you've read Stephen King's book "On Writing," then you know his thoughts on the trade and literary style. This quasi-autobiographical/instructional book was indeed published after Bag of Bones, but reading them out of sequence as I have, one sees a very distinct contradiction between the two--and moreover, what On Writing decrees in the future, Bag of Bones displays and implements to greater success. On Writing makes a few rules, according to King: 1) Preparation for a novel is minimal, to keep the writing interesting; and, 2) writer's block doesn't exist, and for a reasonable author, it would never present itself. In Bag of Bones, the story unravels as more of a mystery with horror elements than full-out suspense; it's instead a complex series of clues and events that link a hundred years into the past. Such a structure could not have occurred without preparation. Also in Bag of Bones, the main character suffers a severe and seemingly eternal case of Writer's Block. Both of these issues--not to mention several others--run in conflict with King's rules of writing; oddly enough, then, is that Bag of Bones excels beyond some of his other works for this very reason. Bag of Bones moves at King's usual pace, with a series of incidents that will inevitably hold a greater bearing than was initially apparent. In this case, his characters lives and emotions are touched to an even greater extent in a challenging custody battle that probably does more to develop character than a lot of what his other works have attempted. It is because of this heightened emotional level that some characters--near Dickensian in eccentricity--and their situations come across as plausible. Narrated by the entertaining author Mike Noonan, the novel's greatest trait is probably the lack of attention it actually pays to the supernatural events. This isn't to confuse you into assuming that the paranormal is a rarity in this book. On the contrary, it perhaps is more abundant than some of King's other works, however it always seems like he glances over the experiences in passing. He never embellishes the supernatural, something a lesser author would have certainly done. By adopting a minimalist approach to the more unrealistic aspects of the plot, King tricks the audience into accepting them without thought. If nowhere else, that is King's true genius: making the audience believe what they naturally do not, and by doing it with no other convention than frugality. And ultimately, the story is deep, and more masterfully elaborate than King's norm, which runs contrary to one of his established rules, but which also makes for a welcome change in his literature as well as heightening the suspense of the story. And so, in conclusion, Bag of Bones represents one of King's finer works, in both plot construction, not to mention character depth and intensity. If there was any questioning to his enduring ability and status in pop culture, let it be quenched by this masterful work and the touching story that it holds. It is a very entertaining blend of mystery, horror, science-fiction, and romance; all to form a final product that is wholly entertaining to all facets of the human imagination.
Rating: 
Summary: Forgettable....like some bad tv movie
Review: The plot resembles some bad tv movie on the Lifetime channel. It's predictable, boring and overall, it makes me want to puke, considering I shelled out my hard earned cash to buy it. One of the most boring novels I have ever read, or maybe because it's my first Stephen King book, and he probably has his own bunch of hard-core fans who have grown familiar with his work.
Rating:
Summary: Bag of Bones
Review: This was my first Stephen King book in 10 years. I thought I would give him a shot again. Well to my dismay, it was not as good as I thought it would be. In S.K. Defense, he has a nice easy flowing writing style that is both funny and descriptive, however the story seems to meander. I felt as though S.K had a beginning and an end in mind, but OOOPPPS! the middle was not there. I was up to page 500 asking, "When is this going to end?" Well finally it did end, and not too shabby an ending at that. So I will recommend it to anyone interested.
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