Bag of Bones is set in
Stephen King’s home state of rural Maine. 
It also features a novelist as its main character, one who manages to
get into the list of top fifteen best-selling books, although hardly ever into
the top ten, so the resemblance between real author and fictional author can’t
be perfect.  However, King writes with
such assurance and familiarity that it is easy to lapse into the supposition
that Noonan is a thinly veiled version of King, or at least that, in describing
Noonan’s writing and thought habits, he is revealing something of himself.  It is a temptation that makes the book more
interesting and slightly self-conscious, especially when King via Noonan writes
about the ethics of authorship. 

Noonan is an interesting character
for two other reasons unrelated to any potential relationship to King.  First, he is suffering terrible grief about
the loss of his wife, and second, consequentially, he has a severe case of
writer’s block.  He used to write two
bestsellers a year, living in domestic bliss, but now he can’t bear to look at
his typewriter, and he manages to fill up his time doing nothing.  That is until he goes back to his summer
home, with the odd name of "Sarah Laughs."  He becomes friends with a beautiful young woman and her daughter,
and gets involved in a legal fight over custody of the little girl.  King fills his story with lots of small
details of the local life, and in his performance of the audiobook, he does the
different accents of the locals and Massachusetts interlopers.  He conveys a strong sense of the traditions,
thoughts and prejudices of his characters. 
Bag of Bones is a long book, spreading over 20 CDs, taking about
22 hours to read, yet it is a pleasure to listen to, even for those who are not
normally fans of Stephen King. 

Some potential readers might be put
off by the supernatural theme.  Sarah
Laughs is haunted by crying children and fridge-magnet-moving spirits, and only
by the end of the book does Noonan discover who they are.  There’s no getting around the fact that Bag
of Bones is a ghost story, but King manages to make his characters
believable and naturalistic enough to avoid the silly spookiness that bedevils
the genre.  He leaves many of the
details of the spirit-activities vague, showing more interest in Noonan’s
thoughts about other actual contemporary writers and his thinking about his
dead wife.  While the book does not aim
to reveal any great insights into mourning or the creative process of writers,
it is a story well-told.  King’s
performance of his own work on the audiobook is lively and engaging. 

© 2005 Christian Perring. All
rights reserved.

Christian Perring, Ph.D., is
Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College, Long Island, and editor
of Metapsychology Online Review.  His main research is on
philosophical issues in medicine, psychiatry and psychology.

Categories: Fiction