Bag of Bones

Bag of Bones
by Stephen King
p. 1998

Michael Noonan is haunted.

As the tragic lead protagonist in Stephen King’s 1998 novel, widower Mike Noonan finds him at the center of several dangerous and emotional plots when he retreats to his summer home in an attempt to move on with his life.

Bag of Bones is only my second King novel, and it leans closer to the genre he is best known for: horror and suspense. Indeed, the sprawling, multi-layered story is in turns mysterious, disturbing, tragic and dark. It wasn’t as long as my first King novel, but then few books are. It does, however, share some themes that may be King trademarks, not the least of which is having a widowed male protagonist who could be a stand-in for King himself. In this case, it is a little more transparent: Mike Noonan is a popular author who finds himself unable to write a single word since the unexpected death of his wife, Johanna, some years earlier.

In an attempt to make sense of the strange nightmares he keeps having, Mike decides to go to the location that keeps recurring in them: his vacation house on Dark Score Lake in small town Maine, nicknamed Sara Laughs for its notorious history with an old blues singer, Sara Tidwell. On his first day back, Mike’s life becomes intertwined with that of a young mother, Mattie Devore, and her 3-year-old daughter, Kyra. Reminded of his own childless marriage and attracted to the alluring Mattie—herself a young, tragic widow—Mike becomes embroiled in an ensuing custody battle for Kyra, led by the girl’s paternal grandfather, a multi-millionaire tycoon who is determined to always get what he wants.

Bag of Bones is a long book but it needs to be; there are plenty of plot threads, each with its own respective history, that are thoroughly explored before all coming together at the climax of the story. This is not a gory horror novel, as the suspense relies mainly on ghostly encounters and nightmarish secrets, but there are some starkly disturbing elements, especially that of the fate of Sara Tidwell and her kin and the ultimate fate of Mattie Devore, the latter of which took me especially by surprise. I did not expect King to kill his female lead so violently (after mercifully letting the main couple live in The Stand), but I guess I should have seen it coming. Mattie and Kyra were just so disgustingly precious that they couldn’t possibly be allowed to endure past novel’s end. I mean, where would the story be in that?

Though there were no female-to-female relationships in Bag of Bones (outside of the mother-daughter relationship), the novel is possessed and led by the actions of many interesting female characters: Mattie and Kyra, who provide the immediate action for the plot; Jo, who—though long deceased—haunts Sara Laughs and guides Mike on his spiritual journey to the truth; Sara Tidwell, whose fate began a curse culminating in the final showdown of the present, and Sara Laughs—the house who is herself like a living, breathing character. Even Max Devore’s spindly, prickly assistant, Rogette Whitmore, is a dynamic if villainous character who brings life to the novel, even if she is, at times, a bit over the top. I only wish that Mattie didn’t present as such a disposable character. Arguably the female lead, she should have presented as a stronger character, but she relied heavily on others to save her, and felt like more of a temptation and a complication for Mike than an individual. I have to admit I was a little grossed out by his fantasizing about this girl half his age, and it gets weirder when you realize that Mattie was really only a means of Mike getting what he always wanted (his own child), before being conveniently disposed of. Perhaps that last part is an oversimplification, perhaps not. The story is about the haunting of Mike Noonan, after all, everyone else is necessarily secondary to the story.

I didn’t enjoy this story as much as The Stand; even though it was somewhat shorter, I feel it dragged on at times, or took too long to get to the action, but these were minor points of contention for me. For the most part, I like slow-boiling plots and character-driven stories, as long as they are presented with a modicum of poetry and poise, and Stephen King is wonderful at demonstrating those. It mostly comes down to my genre preferences: The Stand is a post-apocalyptic story, one of my favorite genres, while Bag of Bones, a horror novel, is a genre I’m less likely to be invested in. The fact is, horror stories, to someone as pragmatic as I typically am, require much more suspension of disbelief. If Bag of Bones had culminated in a psychological and wholly realistic finale as opposed to a mystical one, I might have a different opinion altogether.