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Bag of Bones (Paperback)
by Stephen King
| Category:
Horror fiction, Bestsellers, Original books |
| Market price: ¥ 108.00
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¥ 98.00
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| MSL Pointer Review:
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 - love, death, reality, fiction, history. |
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Author: Stephen King
Publisher: Pocket
Pub. in: June, 1999
ISBN: 067102423X
Pages: 752
Measurements: 6.9 x 4.2 x 1.6 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00930
Other information: ISBN-13: 9780671024239
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- Awards & Credential -
#1 New York Times Bestseller |
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- MSL Picks -
Released in 1998, Bag of Bones is Stephen King's 28th novel. As usual, Bag of Bones shot to #1 on the New York Times Book charts, and it was met with great reviews, and bad reviews, but none of the fans took notice of the bad ones.
After Johanna Noonan dies in the middle of a Parking Lot of a brain tumor, Mike Noonan's wife, popular author Mike Noonan is thrusted into a world where loneliness is his only friend and he is unable to write without breaking down. Soon the realization that his career was quickly dwindling because of his inability to write dawned on him, so he sought solace and peace for a new place to write, his fabled summerhouse Sara Laughs, named after the 1920's musicians Sara and the Redtops. Upon getting to Sara Laughs, Mike begins to hear weeping and crying noises during the night, and most horrifying, he begins to hear people scream. As he learns more and more of what's happened since he was gone, he learns that his wife Jo was down here without him knowing, and that she was planning to write a story about the TR's (Where Sara Laughs is located) illustrious history, and Mike begins trying to piece together what she found out and why she didn't tell him. Then, as if to answer Mike's loneliness, he stumbles on a girl walking down the middle of the street named Kyra. He then meets her beautiful mother Mattie after picking up Kyra of the Street; Mike Noonan is unknowingly thrusted into a world of hell that he wanted no part of. Soon after that incident, Mike is questioned by local billionaire and elder Max Devore about the incident, and Mike immediately feels apprehensive at the situation and angrily hangs up on him. He then learns that Max Devore has been trying to get custody of Kyra from her perfectly capable mother Mattie just because he wants her. Mike begins to feel a bond between Mattie and Kyra, and he devotes himself to helping her and letting her keep custody of Kyra. After hiring a lawyer and personally helping her with his own money, many people in town think that he's just buying out Mattie Devore, and they begin to be cold and heartless towards him. All the while, as Mike begins to dig up more information about the TR's past, he also uncovers more Ghosts of the past on his way. What ensues is a bitter battle between Mike Noonan and Max Devore for custody of Kyra, and it even cascades into a legal battle that may be deadly. As Mike ventures further into the TR's past, he's plagued by ghosts that are trying to keep him from the truth and will even kill to do so. 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...
The death itself plays out in a quiet sort of tragedy in the opening pages. Soon after, Noonan begins to suffer from writer's block, crushing grief, and a series of terrifying nightmares that he can't remember upon waking. These dreams center on his summer home on Dark Score Lake (a site familiar to King readers), the place where he and his wife Jo had always been happiest. The small cabin is known as Sara Laughs, named after a popular black singer who dies on Dark Score roughly two decades into the twentieth century. In the wake of all this misery, Noonan decides to revisit Sara Laughs, symbolically confronting all his fears at once. What he doesn't imagine is that symbolic fears will soon be the least of his worries. Because Sara Laughs is haunted and the spirits are restless.
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 presence 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. The title Bag of Bones has multiple meanings; at first, the phrase is metaphorical, later divulging its literal and shocking meaning. The final scenes may surprise some readers; they are unusually tight for a King novel, at once scary, supernatural, and quite moving. This is one of Stephen King's best novels, a master-work that could only be writing after a lifetime of experience and understanding.
Target readers:
General readers
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Stephen Edwin King was born in Portland, Maine in 1947. After his parents separated when Stephen was a toddler, he and his older brother, David, were raised by his mother. Parts of his childhood were spent in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where his father's family was at the time, and in Stratford, Connecticut. When Stephen was eleven, his mother brought her children back to Durham, Maine, for good. Her parents, Guy and Nellie Pillsbury, had become incapacitated with old age, and Ruth King was persuaded by her sisters to take over the physical care of the elderly couple. Other family members provided a small house in Durham and financial support. After Stephen's grandparents passed away, Mrs. King found work in the kitchens of Pineland, a nearby residential facility for the mentally challenged.
Stephen attended the grammar school in Durham and then Lisbon Falls High School, graduating in 1966. From his sophomore year at the University of Maine at Orono, he wrote a weekly column for the school newspaper, The Maine Campus. He was also active in student politics, serving as a member of the Student Senate. He came to support the anti-war movement on the Orono campus, arriving at his stance from a conservative view that the war in Vietnam was unconstitutional. He graduated from the University of Maine at Orono in 1970, with a B.A. in English and qualified to teach on the high school level. A draft board examination immediately post-graduation found him 4-F on grounds of high blood pressure, limited vision, flat feet, and punctured eardrums.
Stephen made his first professional short story sale ("The Glass Floor") to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967. Throughout the early years of his marriage, he continued to sell stories to men's magazines. Many of these were later gathered into the Night Shift collection or appeared in other anthologies.
In the fall of 1971, Stephen began teaching high school English classes at Hampden Academy, the public high school in Hampden, Maine. Writing in the evenings and on the weekends, he continued to produce short stories and to work on novels.
In the spring of 1973, Doubleday & Co. accepted the novel Carrie for publication. On Mother's Day of that year, Stephen learned from his new editor at Doubleday, Bill Thompson, that a major paperback sale would provide him with the means to leave teaching and write full-time.
At the end of the summer of 1973, the Kings moved their growing family to southern Maine because of Stephen's mother's failing health. Renting a summer home on Sebago Lake in North Windham for the winter, Stephen wrote his next-published novel, originally titled Second Coming and then Jerusalem's Lot, before it became 'Salem's Lot, in a small room in the garage. During this period, Stephen's mother died of cancer, at the age of 59.
Carrie was published in the spring of 1974. That same fall, the Kings left Maine for Boulder, Colorado. They lived there for a little less than a year, during which Stephen wrote The Shining, set in Colorado. Returning to Maine in the summer of 1975, the Kings purchased a home in the Lakes Region of western Maine. At that house, Stephen finished writing The Stand, much of which also is set in Boulder. The Dead Zone was also written in Bridgton.
In 1977, the Kings spent three months of a projected year- long stay in England, cut the sojourn short and returned home in mid-December, purchasing a new home in Center Lovell, Maine. After living there one summer, the Kings moved north to Orrington, near Bangor, so that Stephen could teach creative writing at the University of Maine at Orono. The Kings returned to Center Lovell in the spring of 1979. In 1980, the Kings purchased a second home in Bangor, retaining the Center Lovell house as a summer home.
Because their children have become adults, Stephen and Tabitha now spend winters in Florida and the remainder of the year at their Bangor and Center Lovell homes.
He has put some of his college dramatic society experience to use doing cameos in several of the film adaptations of his works as well as a bit part in a George Romero picture, Knightriders. Joe Hill King also appeared in Creepshow, which was released in 1982. Stephen made his directorial debut, as well as writing the screenplay, for the movie Maximum Overdrive (an adaptation of his short story "Trucks") in 1985.
Stephen is the 2003 recipient of The National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
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Stephen King's most gripping and unforgettable novel, Bag of Bones, is a story of grief and a lost love's enduring bonds, of a new love haunted by the secrets of the past, of an innocent child caught in a terrible crossfire. Set in the Maine territory King has made mythic, Bag of Bones recounts the plight of 40-year-old bestselling novelist Mike Noonan, who is unable to stop grieving even four years after the sudden death of his wife, Jo, and who can no longer bear to face the blank screen of his word processor. Now his nights are plagued by vivid nightmares of the house by the lake. Despite these dreams, or perhaps because of them, Mike finally returns to Sara Laughs, the Noonans' isolated summer home. He finds his beloved Yankee town familiar on its surface, but much changed underneath - held in the grip of a powerful millionaire, Max Devore, who twists the very fabric of the community to his purpose: to take his three-year-old granddaughter away from her widowed young mother. As Mike is drawn into their struggle, as he falls in love with both of them, he is also drawn into the mystery of Sara Laughs, now the site of ghostly visitations, ever-escalating nightmares, and the sudden recovery of his writing ability. What are the forces that have been unleashed here - and what do they want of Mike Noonan?
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Chapter 1
On a very hot day in August of 1994, my wife told me she was going down to the Derry Rite Aid to pick up a refill on her sinus medicine prescription -- this is stuff you can buy over the counter these days, I believe. I'd finished my writing for the day and offered to pick it up for her. She said thanks, but she wanted to get a piece of fish at the supermarket next door anyway; two birds with one stone and all of that. She blew a kiss at me off the palm of her hand and went out. The next time I saw her, she was on TV. That's how you identify the dead here in Derry -- no walking down a subterranean corridor with green tiles on the walls and long fluorescent bars overhead, no naked body rolling out of a chilly drawer on casters; you just go into an office marked PRIVATE and look at a TV screen and say yep or nope.
The Rite Aid and the Shopwell are less than a mile from our house, in a little neighborhood strip mall which also supports a video store, a used-book store named Spread It Around (they do a very brisk business in my old paperbacks), a Radio Shack, and a Fast Foto. It's on Up-Mile Hill, at the intersection of Witcham and Jackson.
She parked in front of Blockbuster Video, went into the drugstore, and did business with Mr. Joe Wyzer, who was the druggist in those days; he has since moved on to the Rite Aid in Bangor. At the checkout she picked up one of those little chocolates with marshmallow inside, this one in the shape of a mouse. I found it later, in her purse. I unwrapped it and ate it myself, sitting at the kitchen table with the contents of her red handbag spread out in front of me, and it was like taking Communion. When it was gone except for the taste of chocolate on my tongue and in my throat, I burst into tears. I sat there in the litter of her Kleenex and makeup and keys and half-finished rolls of Certs and cried with my hands over my eyes, the way a kid cries.
The sinus inhaler was in a Rite Aid bag. It had cost twelve dollars and eighteen cents. There was something else in the bag, too - an item which had cost twenty-two-fifty. I looked at this other item for a long time, seeing it but not understanding it. I was surprised, maybe even stunned, but the idea that Johanna Arlen Noonan might have been leading another life, one I knew nothing about, never crossed my mind. Not then.
Jo left the register, walked out into the bright, hammering sun again, swapping her regular glasses for her prescription sunglasses as she did, and just as she stepped from beneath the drugstore's slight overhang (I am imagining a little here, I suppose, crossing over into the country of the novelist a little, but not by much; only by inches, and you can trust me on that), there was that shrewish howl of locked tires on pavement that means there's going to be either an accident or a very close call.
This time it happened - the sort of accident which happened at that stupid X-shaped intersection at least once a week, it seemed. A 1989 Toyota was pulling out of the shopping-center parking lot and turning left onto Jackson Street. Behind the wheel was Mrs. Esther Easterling of Barrett's Orchards. She was accompanied by her friend Mrs. Irene Deorsey, also of Barrett's Orchards, who had shopped the video store without finding anything she wanted to rent. Too much violence, Irene said. Both women were cigarette widows.
Esther could hardly have missed the orange Public Works dump truck coming down the hill; although she denied this to the police, to the newspaper, and to me when I talked to her some two months later, I think it likely that she just forgot to look. As my own mother (another cigarette widow) used to say, "The two most common ailments of the elderly are arthritis and forgetfulness. They can be held responsible for neither."
Driving the Public Works truck was William Fraker, of Old Cape. Mr. Fraker was thirty-eight years old on the day of my wife's death, driving with his shirt off and thinking how badly he wanted a cool shower and a cold beer, not necessarily in that order. He and three other men had spent eight hours putting down asphalt patch out on the Harris Avenue Extension near the airport, a hot job on a hot day, and Bill Fraker said yeah, he might have been going a little too fast - maybe forty in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone. He was eager to get back to the garage, sign off on the truck, and get behind the wheel of his own F-150, which had air conditioning. Also, the dump truck's brakes, while good enough to pass inspection, were a long way from tip-top condition. Fraker hit them as soon as he saw the Toyota pull out in front of him (he hit his horn, as well), but it was too late. He heard screaming tires - his own, and Esther's as she belatedly realized her danger - and saw her face for just a moment.
"That was the worst part, somehow," he told me as we sat on his porch, drinking beers - it was October by then, and although the sun was warm on our faces, we were both wearing sweaters. "You know how high up you sit in one of those dump trucks?"
I nodded.
"Well, she was looking up to see me - craning up, you'd say - and the sun was full in her face. I could see how old she was. I remember thinking, 'Holy shit, she's gonna break like glass if I can't stop.' But old people are tough, more often than not. They can surprise you. I mean, look at how it turned out, both those old biddies still alive, and your wife..."
He stopped then, bright red color dashing into his cheeks, making him look like a boy who has been laughed at in the schoolyard by girls who have noticed his fly is unzipped. It was comical, but if I'd smiled, it only would have confused him.
"Mr. Noonan, I'm sorry. My mouth just sort of ran away with me."
"It's all right," I told him. "I'm over the worst of it, anyway." That was a lie, but it put us back on track.
"Anyway," he said, "we hit. There was a loud bang, and a crumping sound when the driver's side of the car caved in. Breaking glass, too. I was thrown against the wheel hard enough so I couldn't draw a breath without it hurting for a week or more, and I had a big bruise right here." He drew an arc on his chest just below the collarbones. "I banged my head on the windshield hard enough to crack the glass, but all I got up there was a little purple knob... no bleeding, not even a headache. My wife says I've just got a naturally thick skull. I saw the woman driving the Toyota, Mrs. Easterling, thrown across the console between the front bucket seats. Then we were finally stopped, all tangled together in the middle of the street, and I got out to see how bad they were. I tell you, I expected to find them both dead."
Neither of them was dead, neither of them was even unconscious, although Mrs. Easterling had three broken ribs and a dislocated hip. Mrs. Deorsey, who had been a seat away from the impact, suffered a concussion when she rapped her head on her window. That was all; she was "treated and released at Home Hospital," as the Derry News always puts it in such cases.
My wife, the former Johanna Arlen of Malden, Massachusetts, saw it all from where she stood outside the drugstore, with her purse slung over her shoulder and her prescription bag in one hand. Like Bill Fraker, she must have thought the occupants of the Toyota were either dead or seriously hurt. The sound of the collision had been a hollow, authoritative bang which rolled through the hot afternoon air like a bowling ball down an alley. The sound of breaking glass edged it like jagged lace. The two vehicles were tangled violently together in the middle of Jackson Street, the dirty orange truck looming over the pale-blue import like a bullying parent over a cowering child.
Johanna began to sprint across the parking lot toward the street. Others were doing the same all around her. One of them, Miss Jill Dunbarry, had been window-shopping at Radio Shack when the accident occurred. She said she thought she remembered running past Johanna - at least she was pretty sure she remembered someone in yellow slacks - but she couldn't be sure. By then, Mrs. Easterling was screaming that she was hurt, they were both hurt, wouldn't somebody help her and her friend Irene.
Halfway across the parking lot, near a little cluster of newspaper dispensers, my wife fell down. Her purse-strap stayed over her shoulder, but her prescription bag slipped from her hand, and the sinus inhaler slid halfway out. The other item stayed put.
No one noticed her lying there by the newspaper dispensers; everyone was focused on the tangled vehicles, the screaming women, the spreading puddle of water and antifreeze from the Public Works truck's ruptured radiator. ("That's gas!" the clerk from Fast Foto shouted to anyone who would listen. "That's gas, watch out she don't blow, fellas!") I suppose one or two of the would-be rescuers might have jumped right over her, perhaps thinking she had fainted. To assume such a thing on a day when the temperature was pushing ninety-five degrees would not have been unreasonable.
Roughly two dozen people from the shopping center clustered around the accident; another four dozen or so came running over from Strawford Park, where a baseball game had been going on. I imagine that all the things you would expect to hear in such situations were said, many of them more than once. Milling around. Someone reaching through the misshapen hole which had been the driver's-side window to pat Esther's trembling old hand. People immediately giving way for Joe Wyzer; at such moments anyone in a white coat automatically becomes the belle of the ball. In the distance, the warble of an ambulance siren rising like shaky air over an incinerator.
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| View all 15 comments |
Ryan Costantino (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-01 00:00>
I really liked this book, a whole damn lot. King puts an ocean of imagery in his books and this one is no exception. The characters (alive and dead) are colorful, believable, likeable, and each fills his or her own niche quite well. It was impossible not to compare the protagonist, Mike Noonan, to King himself. In light of King's recent accident the book is eerie in how prophetic it seems to be (writer's block, fear of being hit on a Maine road, with a dangerous curve, in summer). The ghosts are actual spirits of the dead, not psychic emanations, and I liked that aspect a whole lot. The malicious happenings a result of spectral rage and revenge.
The "real world" violence is believable and tragic. The ending wasn't overly happy and I was thankful for that. Horror novels shouldn't end happily in my opinion. The pacing was fast and I hadn't read the story before. For some reason, King's use of the small Maine town with devious inhabitants hasn't grown old. His semi-return to Castle Rock and the various mentioning of its denizens was actually quite a treat. Of course you'd have to be a King fan to appreciate them. The blending of the supernatural with the "real world" was deftly accomplished with a master's skill. King fans read it and enjoy. If you haven't read King before start at the beginning and work your way up.
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Matthew Greer (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-01 00:00>
Bag of Bones - A fitting title after you get to the end, no doubt. I didn't think anything King did would ever really come close to The Stand. Bag of Bones reached The Stand's upper rim in an attempt to leapfrog, but alas, fell just short of it's goal.
Nonetheless, what a fantastic story! I had a hard time with the ending, but more for the reasons I did with The Stand - I just didn't want it to end. I guess there never really is a great ending to an SK novel and that's how it should be.
Bag of Bones had a Tommyknockers sort of feel to it, but the first-person perspective allowed this story to go to a place that the Tommyknockers simply couldn't go. I think Stephen King would do well to attempt more first-person novels.
Once again, Stephen King takes a great story and makes it come alive with beautiful prose the way no other author can. He is truley a magician of the english language and I once again stood in awe, wondering just how in the hell he does that.
Another fine job, even though the last few chapters really broke my heart. That's his job though... and a job well done.
Buy this book - Enjoy this book... and make sure you don't have to be anywhere when you get to the final quarter - you won't be able to put it down!
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A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-01 00:00>
Stephen King is like a breathe of fresh air to modern literature, and yes I said literature. I truly believe that he will still be read a hundred years from now in classrooms as a kind of Dickens of our time, popular and written off by most critics, but endearing. His characterizations by themselves make him better than most writers today, and his imagery makes him one of the best. All through his career he has given us great things, but in this book it's different.
In Bag of Bones he gives us his best work so far, a great story, wonderful characters, and a surreal small town atmosphere that he can create better than any other writer alive today. Take the three parts at once dream sequence for example. This is not the work of a hack writing only for money, this is a riveting and extremely well-written section of a book filled with such parts. The rock- throwing scene by the lake was also especially good, showing the reader pure evil in mind movie realism.
People who have dismissed King should immediatly pick up Bag of Bones, they will find out what they have been missing by skipping him. It was wonderfully written, beautifully plotted, and actually quite creepy as well (the refridgerator magnets, the knocking on the basement wall). But then, who really cares if the critics like him or not, as long as people who know can recieve enjoyment from King's work. Read this book, and you'll be happy that you did.
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Adam Shah (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-02 00:00>
In Bag of Bones, Stephen King writes a classic haunted house story with several twists. First, like several of his other stories, the whole town surrounding the house is also haunted. Second, the haunted house story is also intertwined with romance.
In the book, main character Michael Noonan's wife dies within the first two pages of the book. Like many of King's characters, Noonan is a writer. However, he experiences complete writer's block and loneliness after his wife's death. Noonan starts having dreams of his country house, Sarah Laughs in Western Maine and eventually decides to go back to his beloved house even though the dreams are spooky and bespeak of danger.
As soon as he returns to his country house, Noonan realizes that the house is haunted. There are sounds of crying, a presence of something else there, words being formed by the magnetic alphabet on the fridge and other matters. Noonan also gets caught up in a custody battle between a rich man and his poor daughter-in-law/widow.
King tells a remarkably good haunted house tale even for a master of horror like him. If you have ever felt a ghost in an old house, you will recognize the reactions his characters have. King is also getting better as a writer of romance. You can really feel for the female characters, both Noonan's dead wife and the woman in the custody battle.
Sadly, King is no Scott Turow or John Grisham. His views of the legal system and custody laws are bizarre. The ways the lawyers act are just laughable. But this is just a small annoyance. The legal maneuvers do make up a large of the book, but they are really just a device to move the process along and give some suspense other than what the ghosts are up to.
Overall, I recommend this book. If you want a haunted house story, you will immensely enjoy this book.
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