by Jay Wilburn
The plan is to reread all of Stephen King’s works in the order that they were published. Richard Chizmar of Cemetery Dance had the vision. I’m doing it because I am a writer and I want to improve my fiction. And I love Stephen King’s stories. I think there is something to be learned through this process.
You can also go back to the beginning and read Before Carrie or any of my other posts up through this one and beyond by checking out this link to the Master List of all my #StephenKingRevisited posts.
“So what? Ghosts can’t hurt anyone. That’s what I thought then.”
We visit Derry again for this novel which is a pretty good town when the cosmic horror clown-spiders and the bald doctor fates with scissors aren’t around. Bag of Bones opens with a first person account, from another writer character, of course, of a visit to the Derry Rite Aid doesn’t go well at all. Our old pharmacist from Insomnia is there and does everything right, but it doesn’t matter.
It is a great turnabout on the opening tragedy when you think everything is going wrong, then will be fine, and then it’s not. A jarring reveal afterward twists the knife on the opening sadness a little more.
The protagonist from Insomnia makes a cameo, too. His fate is mentioned, but readers already knew about that. Thad from The Dark Half is mentioned along with his fate beyond the end of that book.
The image of a fast spirit racing up a driveway has stuck with me since the first reading back in the 90s. Speed instead of the slow moving of a “normal” ghost was unnerving to me then. I probably would have passed right over it this time, but the memory of that feeling from the first reading stuck with me. I remember the ghost tapping responses in the basement scene clearly too.
A child weeping in a house that is supposed to be empty is the first hint that there is a haunting. King grapples with the “why didn’t they leave” conundrum of ghost stories fairly well. The incident is quick and jumps right out as he opens the door. A taste of lake water that turns out to be nothing is another. A ringing bell is yet another.
King’s theory on ghosts being a combination of leftover energies in a place was first introduced in The Shining. It is revisited several times throughout his catalog of work. It works as a way to explain ghosts, hauntings, possessions, and group consciousness that might drive a whole town of people to act under some blanket supernatural influence. It is a little different than most other author’s work, something unique. In this story, the ghosts retain a bit of their personality and individual purpose as well.
King discusses “The Outsider” in this novel. Not the novel of that title written a good bit later than this book, but this concept that has trickled through his work all throughout in a couple forms. It is there as a concept of simply existing outside of the “in crowd” broadly and as some cosmic force that attaches itself to trouble as we see ever so briefly in this novel.
“I have never been back” as our narrator leaves a particular location is some foreshadowing that could go either way. In a Stephen King novel, you would assume it’ll go not so great.
“Bag of bones” as a turn of phrase is used a number of different ways throughout the novel to sort of misdirect the final meaning of the phrase. My favorite reference to it is that the most boring, ordinary person in real life is infinitely more complex than the best written character in a book, who will always ever be no more than a bag of bones by comparison.
“Life is not a book.” Stephen King uses this sort of meta statement by characters in his stories to give their choices and the consequences more weight. Maybe to hide that they are just bags of bones.
Pulling grass out from under the hot car to avoid starting a fire is an interesting piece of business and maybe a reference to reveals later in the novel.
UFO voice is King’s term for a character’s thoughts as they argue with themselves inside their own heads. A voice that seems to come from nowhere. No voice they recognize from real life.
“Evil little fat folks” A character the narrator doesn’t like. King may have a problem with certain types of fat people based on the number of times the subject comes up in his work.
“Sometimes things work because you think they work, That’s as good a definition of faith as any.” Good turn of phrase.
A surprise twist for a Big Bad left me thinking, how is there this much story still left, even though I had read the story before. I had forgotten how the story played out.
The mystery of the late wife’s actions prior to her death in the months leading up to her end is played out very well and is significant to the story. There is a scene with the main character reading a lot of news clippings all at once which King falls back on fairly often, but what are you going to do?
A lot of Stephen King characters live in Cape Cod style houses. Guns and Roses music appears a lot in King’s late 80s and 90s fiction
“I never found them again. I might have, if I had more time, but by that Monday morning, time was almost up.” King’s foreshadowing is like a hammer, but you can build beautiful things with a hammer in the right person’s hand.
“Blankets are boogeyman kryptonite.”
It wasn’t the storm of the century, some of the old timers said. That television event and screenplay were coming from King shortly. It was on his mind at the end of this book.
Norris Ridgwick, county sheriff ever since Pangborn, comes to straighten everything out as he tends to do at the end of stories time and again. Castle Rock is close enough to see the fireworks from Dark Score Lake, so it makes since. It also gives us a chance to catch up on how Pangborn is doing.
Murder is the worse form of pornography, the writer character narrator laments on King’s behalf, talking about how easy it is to kill a character in fiction, but how much it pales in comparison to the true costs of loss in real life. Another problem of writing bags of bones, I suppose.
Knowing the ending was a curse this time. It didn’t ruin the book for me. It made it hurt all the more painful.
Bag of Bones may be a contender for one of King’s top ten books. Top twenty for sure.
Everything’s Eventual, the forthcoming short story collection as of the writing of Bag of Bones, was almost called “One Headlight.” If I’m reading his notes correctly at the end of the novel, King wrote Hearts of Atlantis in the middle of writing Bag of Bones.
My next post in this series will be Before The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon which will be linked on the Master List of all my Stephen King Revisited posts.
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