Book summary

Mike Noonan, an author who has had writer's block since his wife died four years ago, retreats to a country house in Maine. Once there, he becomes entangled in a complex relationship between a 3-year-old girl, her young mother, and her grandfather, and, since this is, in fact, a Stephen King novel, Mike is also in for sleepless nights haunted by secretive pasts and the ghosts that those secrets have left in their wake.

Media reviews

"As brilliantly as [King] crafts horror and suspense, he's not so hot with the supernatural. His spectral universe lacks the internal consistency of Lovecraft's or the ambiguous subjectivity of Poe's....[I]n the end, the book falls apart in a fusillade of bullets and a gathering of ghosts that spoil the delicate tension that King has laboured for 400 pages to establish....Like THE SHINING, another nearly great novel held captive by King's ghostly preoccupations, BAG OF BONES just misses being more than a page turner."