Bag of Bones
by Stephen King
Summary
Mike Noonan is a bestselling novelist whose wife Jo drops dead of an aneurysm in a drugstore parking lot, four years before the book begins, carrying a secret pregnancy and, Mike slowly learns, other secrets besides. The widower's grief takes a professional form: total writer's block, disguised for years by a drawer full of stockpiled manuscripts, until the dreams start, all of them set at Sara Laughs, their summer house on Dark Score Lake in western Maine. He goes.
What waits is King's fullest ghost story. The house is inhabited, by something that moves the refrigerator magnets into messages, by Jo, perhaps, and by something older and angrier; and the town is inhabited too, by a rich old man named Max Devore, who is waging a custody war to take his granddaughter Kyra from her young widowed mother Mattie, and who owns enough of the local law to win. Mike, falling half in love with Mattie and wholly in love with the child, stands in, and the two hauntings converge: the custody fight and the house's dead both lead back to Sara Tidwell, a blues singer who came to the lake with her family a century ago, and to the thing the town's founding men did one summer afternoon and paid forward, generation by generation, in drowned children.
The gothic machinery is immaculate, but the book's core is grief and the marriages inside marriages, what spouses know and never say.
Around five hundred and thirty pages.
Best for readers who want King's Rebecca, the haunted house novel folded into a portrait of mourning, his most Du Maurier book by his own design.
Historical Context & Significance
Bag of Bones won the Bram Stoker Award for 1998, along with the British Fantasy and Locus horror awards, sweeping the genre's honours in the year King's career itself made news: the novel was his first for Scribner after leaving Viking, a move conducted with an unusual profit sharing deal and an explicit campaign, embraced by reviewers, to have King read as an American novelist entire rather than a category. The book led with its literary signals: du Maurier's Rebecca is directly referenced in the novel's opening pages.
The reception obliged: it drew some of the most respectful mainstream reviewing of his career to that point, the widower's grief singled out ahead of the ghosts.
Sara Tidwell's story planted the racial crime at the buried center of the town, a structure King would keep reworking; a 2011 television adaptation with Pierce Brosnan followed. The Stoker itself confirmed what the campaign risked obscuring: the genre still claimed him.