Just Finished Rereading Bag of Bones by Stephen King

I first read Stephen King's 1998 ghost story novel Bag of Bones nine years ago and decided that a rereading was in order...I remember liking it, but forgot a lot of the reasons why.  Well, now I've been updated...

As is the case with many other Stephen King stories, the protagonist of Bag of Bones is a relatively successful writer.  But Mike Noonan has writer's block, ever since his wife Jo suddenly died of a brain aneurysm.  After her death, hints begin to come out that she had been leading a double life...and she was pregnant, information she had withheld from her husband.  With these disturbing facts, coupled with his own inability to write in the face of increasing pressure from his agent and publisher, Mike decides to move from their hometown of Derry, Maine (oh-no, not another Stephen King story with Derry) to their lakeside estate in the unincorporated area of rural western Maine called TR-90.  The estate's name is Sara Laughs, named after Sara Tidwell, a blues singer who more than a century earlier had travelled through this area with her family and entourage and lived at the very house that Mike and Jo later purchased.   It isn't long before Mike hears voices in his country home and objects begin to move around...including the magnetic letters on his refrigerator.  So he rightly suspects that his domicile is haunted by ghosts and he vividly dreams and starts to have visions of the past.  In the meantime...

One day Mike is driving and encounters a young girl walking alone down the center stripe of the highway.  He pulls off the road and whisks her out of danger...just before a large truck comes speeding by.  The three-year-old is Kyra and her mother, Mattie Devore soon shows up frantically searching for her straying daughter.  And so Mike is drawn into their story, which involves widowed Mattie's wealthy computer magnate father-in-law struggling to wrest custody of Kyra from her.  What begins as an apparently unrelated subplot eventually becomes woven into the fabric of the story, involving Kyra and Mattie with the secrets of Jo, Sara, and Mike's writer's block...as well as that town's dark and dirty past and its current residents...

No, as usual I'm not going to say how it all comes out.  But Bag of Bones lays forth the proposition that the dead will call out from their graves for justice and that there is an ultimate accounting for our transgressions against others.  The term "bag of bones" is multi-layered and referred to in different contexts throughout the book: Thomas Hardy once referred to characters in a story as nothing more than a bag of bones, but the term comes to take on a more literal meaning...but what else would you expect, this being a ghost story written by the King of horror fiction...

I've heard that Bag of Bones was adapted to television a few years ago, but I don't plan to watch it.  Sometimes Stephen King will place characters and events from other stories into the latest book he's writing: this novel is no exception as Insomnia's elderly hero Ralph Roberts has a pleasant conversation with Mike Noonan.  But, thankfully, there's no sign of Pennywise the Clown...another Derry denizen...here.  On the other hand, I'm now rereading Tommyknockers, and I know from the first reading that this evil dude from It gets to make a cameo appearance toward the end of that novel. Well, that's Derry for you...