Bag of Bones | |||||||||
Stephen King | |||||||||
Scribner Books, 560 pages | |||||||||
|
A review by Pat Caven
Bag of Bones is told in the first person. Mike Noonan, our hero, is a top-selling
author -- usually falling somewhere between 10 and 15 on the bestsellers list
(viz. Mary Higgins Clark). Haunted by the sudden death of his wife 4 years
earlier, Mike hasn't been able to write a word to save his life. Living off old
manuscripts put aside for just such an eventuality, he decides to break his literary
impasse and head to their old summer house in Maine. Called Saras Laugh,
after a previous owner (a black singer from the turn of the century who
disappeared without a trace), this house is where Mike finished his first novel. It is also
where he suffers a dream that haunts him as much as the loss of his wife. But hauntings are the least
of his worries, when hard on the heels of his arrival at the old lodge he becomes
involved in a horrendous custody battle -- between an attractive young widow, her
four-year-old daughter and the evil old software magnate who holds the county in
thrall.
Sounds like a good romantic thriller? It sure is. Sounds like Rebecca meets Bill
Gates meets Kramer vs Kramer. Well, it's a little of that too. What it has been for
me is an introduction into the famed Stephen King mystique. After a year of
reading Canadian literary writers, King is like being slapped in the face with a big
wet fish. This is a man who loves what he does and knows exactly why he's doing
it. No literary pretensions, no pompous navel gazing ad nauseam. Just good plain
story-telling. I felt like King and I were walking down those plot lines together. I
could almost feel his pleasure when scenes came together and he knew exactly how
you, the reader would feel too. This is one accessible, entertaining
make-it-look-bang-up-easy writer. Great dialogue, touching characters, heart-stopping action.
And you thought I was going to trash him.
What I will do is complain about the lack of any real plot surprises and the
suspense seems remarkably tame for the King of Horror. It was easy to see that he
was trying to break free of some kind of pattern (which may be due to my lack of experience here), but
failed. There were little glimmerings, though: a dream sequence here, a few other
scenes there, that showed a powerful subtlety that wasn't in evidence anywhere else
in the book.
Bag of Bones. I would have loved the title to be Ain't Misbehavin'. Throughout
the novel, King often refers to the quote that "a writer is a man who teaches his
mind to misbehave." Considering Noonan is suffering from serious writer's block
and a principal plot line is about black singers and their mistreatment at the hands
of the goodly white folk... OK, King is subtler than that. I just wish someone had
the guts to really edit this man. They owe it to him, to help him leap off the plateau
he's so obviously stranded on -- and they owe it to us, as readers because I don't
ever want to know this much mundane detail (nowhere more evident than in the
first person POV) about anything -- not even sex.
So what should I start with next? Maybe Insomnia...
Pat Caven was (and perhaps in some ways still is) a local bookseller. She has now wandered into the public domain. |
![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
If you find any errors, typos or anything else worth mentioning,
please send it to editor@sfsite.com.
Copyright © 1996-2014 SF Site All Rights Reserved Worldwide