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“Grief is like a drunken houseguest, always coming back for one more goodbye hug.��

This is a story of grief and loss and marriage and hauntings - both by ghosts and memories - told in Stephen King’s trademark sprawling narration that has dark secrets that haunt small towns, the thin lines between reality and supernatural that can so easily snap, and regular people caught in the jaws of a world that has teeth and is not afraid to bite. But more than anything this is a story of a man missing his dead wife and a writer struggling with the loss of his ability to create stories. And King is excellent at that - human emotions and human nature and the pain of loneliness.

“I cried because I suddenly realized that I had been walking a white line ever since Jo died, walking straight down the middle of the road. By some miracle, I had been carried out of harm’s way. I had no idea who had done the carrying, but that was all right—it was a question that could wait for another day.��

Bag of Bones is a story of marriage and the immense grief at losing a partner. These motifs are common in King’s books �� the special intimate world of a long-term partnership, the secret language and rituals of a marriage not ever fully understandable to outsiders. The overwhelming numbing pain Mike feels, with all the anger and despair and loneliness, rings so true and is so profoundly moving. The love and understanding between partners, in this case literally transcending death, is fascinating. King writes about this with such feeling that it stops me in my tracks, makes me catch my breath and nod in recognition and terror about eventually having to go through something like that. Because King knows and *gets* people and love and the invisible strands that tie us together, and understands how fragile happiness can be shattered.

“[…] Any good marriage is secret territory, a necessary white space on society’s map. What others don’t know about it is what makes it yours.��

Yet again King exceeds all expectations creating a small New England town - this time a place that is not even a town but an unincorporated township known as the TR. A tight-knit closed-lipped insular community where stubborn pride and sincere generosity, seeming good-naturedness and almost claustrophobic distrust of strangers are all intertwined. A seemingly folksy place full of skeletons - or rather bags of bones - hidden in metaphorical closets, buried under lake waters, closely guarded. The world where “summer people�� will never fully fit in. The place that can shield one of its own behind a shoulder-to-shoulder wall �� but you are not going to enjoy being on the other side of that wall.

“There is such a thing as town consciousness—anyone who doubts it has never been to a New England town meeting. Where there’s a consciousness, is there not likely to be a subconscious?��

Another thing that King does very well is showing us the existential fear of writers �� the desperation and frustration that comes with losing your ability to write and you are helpless to make it stop. King is at his best when he writes about his craft, and I can’t help but think that he allows us to peek behind that curtain in his brain just for the briefest moment.

“That is in some ways the strangest part of the creative process. The muses are ghosts, and sometimes they come uninvited.��

And beneath it all - the love, the loss, the community ties - are strands of visceral anger and revenge. This is one of those few books where you feel the pain of both sides because the true dangers don’t usually come from the world beneath our reality but from our fellow humans, and revenge and justice do not always go hand in hand. Two wrongs never make a right, and it’s painful and sad and poignant.

“I suspect that fright, like pain, is one of those things that slip our minds once they have passed. What I do remember is a feeling I’d had before when I was down here, especially when I was walking this road by myself. It was a sense that reality was thin. I think it is thin, you know, thin as lake ice after a thaw, and we fill our lives with noise and light and motion to hide that thinness from ourselves.��

Like most “later�� King books, this one is almost leisurely slow, going along at a walking pace, taking breaks often enough for us to get to know the characters in vivid brush strokes �� and yet it does not quite feel drawn-out or bloated. When King takes his time to explore the characters and the plot slows down to a halt, I still don’t mind because the strengths of his characterizations and observations are a pleasure to read. And his language is particularly strong here; King stated before that he emphasizes the story over the literary form, but this one slants literary nevertheless �� all while keeping his ear for dialogue and his razor-sharp observations and damn good storytelling.

“I think houses live their own lives along a time-stream that’s different from the ones upon which their owners float, one that’s slower. In a house, especially an old one, the past is closer.��
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“The last of these dreams was a nightmare, but until that one they had a kind of surreal simplicity. They were dreams I’d awake from wanting to turn on the bedroom light so I could reconfirm my place in reality before going back to sleep. You know how the air feels before a thunderstorm, how everything gets still and colors seem to stand out with the brilliance of things seen during a high fever?��

Honestly, don’t come to this book expecting horror in a traditional sense, there’s none of that to be found. Yes, there’s plenty of creepiness and unsettling moments �� but it’s something else altogether, something more contemplative and observant and haunting and often unexpectedly brutal. It’s simply a “King��, its own genre by now. It’s not about the typical scares. The true dread comes from unexpected places �� like that bizarre and almost surreal rock-throwing scene, for instance, where seemingly mundane becomes truly creepy.

“At night your thoughts have an unpleasant way of slipping their collars and running free.��

It’s not perfect by any means. There’s a bit too much relentless precociousness in the kid character, and a bit over-the-top villain, and the denouement is a tad too long. And yet those faults are minor, and what stayed with me ever since I first read it at 16 and what is still there now is the haunting gut-wrenching atmosphere and the weight of learning to survive your grief and loss. And yes, it did hit me much harder now than back when I was a teen, yet to have things to lose.

Stephen and Tabitha King

The audio version is narrated by King himself, all 22 hours of it (which is how I ended up spending a whole month with it), and it’s pretty damn special hearing the story in the author’s voice. Plus it has a 30 min interview with King in the end, and that was quite interesting.

4 stars.