‘The muses are ghosts, and sometimes they come uninvited…’
I’ve been fully immersed in the world of Stephen King for a while now having read 37 of his novels plus several short story collections, novellas and scripted TV shows. After a while, you come to recognise specific tropes and recurring themes. Bag of Bones, published in 1998, has a writer protagonist, a small town setting and plenty of masturbatory fantasies about a much younger female character. While this feels like pretty generic King material, there’s always enough idiosyncratic singularity in King’s work to keep things interesting…
Mike Noonan is recovering from the death of his wife when he begins to suffer from writer’s block. To overcome this, he heads out to his holiday home in the incorporated town of TR-90 where he meets Mattie, a young single mother on the cusp of a nasty custody battle with her millionaire father-in-law Max Devore. Upon his arrival, Mike discovers that his house is haunted by the ghost of a long-dead blues singer named Sara Tidwell. There is a lot going on in this book.
I know I’ve previously alluded to it, but if you’re looking for a book that is mainly about a successful writer in his 40s lusting after a 21-year-old single mother who lives in a trailer then this is the book for you. As with most of King’s later work, Bag of Bones contains some of his best passages and some of his worst passages, but as someone who finds this dichotomy fascinating, I mostly enjoyed the book (although I won’t be rushing to read it again and I wouldn’t recommend it to casual King fans). There are some pretty wonderful nightmare sequences, Max Devore makes for a suitably abhorrent antagonist, and the throw-everything-at-the-wall conclusion worked for me, but the whole book is hamstrung by the fact that Noonan, almost certainly at least partly a substitute for King, is pretty tough to like. That doesn’t always matter, but when the main character is also the novel’s narrator, it’s nice to want to actively spend some time with them.
Bag of Bones, written in the aftermath of King’s acrimonious split from long time publisher Viking Press, finds the Maine writer licking his wounds and trying to offer something a little more literary. While the book was a success upon release, it hasn’t left much of a lasting cultural impact and some of the more icky passages have only become more uncomfortable with the passage of time. While not a bad book by any stretch of the imagination, this is one for the King completists.