Review: "Bag of Bones" by Stephen King

All it took were few months off from visiting the fictional land of Uncle Stevie for me to come back and read Bag of Bones, which is a book that I consider to be a late masterpiece of his much like Dream Catcher and Under the Dome. The last two books of his I read, which were Christine and Insomnia were very much lesser books, with Christine being too dark and Insomnia being to weird for even King’s most hardcore fans. I’ve probably expressed my love for him so much, it almost makes me sick to write and review something that is so blatantly obvious. Reading a book by Stephen King when he is in top form is simultaneously like comforting bedtime story from a loved one and a wild campfire tale that make the noises you hear while listing to it the work of some horrific beast. Not many writers can do that, whether they are popular or not. Some argue that he has lost some of his steam heading into the new millennium, and the case could be made that that is true, but I think he may have got his smile back (to use a wrestling term) over the past couple of years, churning out a book like Under the Dome, which ranks right up there with The Stand, or his most recent book 11/22/63, which I have not read, but seems to be getting him the best reviews in quite awhile. This particular book, which also got a lot of good reviews, is no less supernatural than what has come to be expected of him, but really grounds the story in a very real world where pain and loss and fear of the future are the white sheeted ghosts that haunt people, and that take a little more than an exorcism to get rid of. Mike Noonan, a famous novelist, loses his wife to a freak aneurism in a Derry parking lot (no clowns or balloon strings here). He mourns like any other widower would, but when he tries to write again, he gets physically ill. And he is dreaming about his summer home in an unnamed Maine town called Sara Laughs. Thinking these two things are connected, he goes there in order to be cured from his writing woes, only to fall in love with Mattie Devore, a girl much younger than him and being threatened by terrifying millionaire Max Devore, her father-in-law and discovering a long ago murder that seems to connect everyone in town back to the place where Sara Laughs sits. There are some points in the novel where the characters enter a dreamlike world, and King has never been good at that in my eyes, and it takes some of the venom out of the story, but it is made up for in spades by everything else, from the plot, to the weird characters we only seem to find in Maine, and an unexpected death near the end. A semi-non-genre novel even the harshest critics cannot balk at, this is a good example of what a master can do as he grows in age and wisdom.

Rating: 5/5