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Bag of Bones

By Stephen King

(124)

| Paperback | 9780340718209

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Critics

If you go down to the woods tonight

Connoisseurs of horror films may recall 'the fright break', a novelty gimmick which enjoyed a brief popularity during the Sixties. The plot hurled us, through traditional processes, towards a climax set up by something as simple, maybe, as a trail of ... (read full critics)

guardian.co.uk published on Sun, 26 Sep 2010

Bag of Bones By Stephen King

Early on in Stephen King's new novel, Bag of Bones, the narrator—a suspense novelist living in New England—compares himself to his contemporaries and comes up wanting. While Mike Noonan was never a Grisham, Clancy, or Ludlum, he's done all right, jus ... (read full critics)

bookpage published on Fri, 17 Sep 2010

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2 Reviews

1 person find this helpful

*** This comment contains spoilers! ***

Slow moving, but generally worth the read. I quit halfway through, switched to an action novel which cleared my head and allowed me to continue the slow trudge.
The best thing about this novel, aside from reaching the end (660 pages… it could have been pared back to 450 and I would have been h ... (continue)

Slow moving, but generally worth the read. I quit halfway through, switched to an action novel which cleared my head and allowed me to continue the slow trudge.
The best thing about this novel, aside from reaching the end (660 pages… it could have been pared back to 450 and I would have been happy), was its intricacy. Almost everything tied in to the end. Of course, for a novelist like Stephen King, I would expect nothing less. However, I found the protag’s involvement left me feeling uneasy. Could Mike have figured everything out sooner and prevented much of the bloodshed? I found Mike to be too blasé about some of the things that happened to him, around him. Yes, they all turned out to have significance, but for a long while he ignored things that he really should have worked much harder to understand. Clues that he tried to find answers to, but then gave up.
In fact, he accepts (with little regret) that the answers were so close at hand but he was distracted from searching for them. Admittedly, the distractions were significant, but there were still large gaps where Mike could have picked up the puzzle pieces and figured things out. Another factor that detracted from my enjoyment was the (almost) apology that SK makes (through Mike) in the epilogue. I won’t ruin it for anyone who wishes to read, but Mike (who was a novelist) mused on the convenience of another character’s death. It neatened things up, removed him from a moral dilemma, and it did feel staged, as though SK couldn’t bring himself to allow this scenario to continue. It is said that a story tells something of the author, I wonder if this tells something of SK?
Mike was an enjoyable guy to get to know. He was real, human, and his reactions were, on the most part, believable. His pace and speed of reaction was slow, however it could be argued that the supernatural influences that bore down on him were smothering his natural inquisitiveness, his natural instincts.
I did enjoy the book, and I did care for Mike, but nowhere near as much as I care for most of DK’s characters. Mike was put upon, troubled by his wife’s death – maligned by it actually, however aside from this single event he had no other emotional depth. Mike’s only psychological hitch was his inability to ask for help, or to express his emotions to others. This was never explored, never explained – even to those whom were in grave danger and *should* have been informed of the potential threat. I expected Mike to journey through this, to be forced to ask for help at the end… but no, he continued to keep much of what was happening to himself and consequently tragedy befell those around him because of this selfishness. Was this a flaw on SK’s part? Did he put that in as a way to illustrate the type of man Mike was? I thought this would be Mike’s journey (growing up and learning to ask for help -- to let other people in to the struggles he endured), but no. Not at all. In fact Mike had no personal journey, he didn’t grow, he didn’t change, he just was.

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Caroline said on Mar 26, 2008 | Add your feedback

One of my favourite Stephen King books. While reading it, I felt like I knew the characters personally, and missed them after I finished it.
Maybe not the very best story King wrote, but some of the best characters. And the story is still really really good.

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Marco Piva said on Jan 28, 2010 | Add your feedback