AFTER LISTENING TO the twenty-three hour audio version of Stephen King's romantic horror novel, Bag of Bones, it occurred to me that King's allure involves the combination of the best in American Gothic - sans literary pretension - and an ample empathy for the wisdom of pop culture. He epitomizes the phrase, “Nevermore… now.” Like Edgar Allan Poe, King rides the cusp between supernaturalism and psychological thriller. You are never sure if his protagonists are suffering from a mental disorder or experiencing another dimension of existence. This is the secret of the dark romanticism in both Poe and King.
Bag of Bones narrates the struggle of a moderately successful, recently widowed England writer, Mike Noonan, whose bereavement has driven him out of his familiar urban in Derry, Maine to his wilderness summer cottage called Sarah Laughs. Mike's bout with writer's block prevents him from the comforting distraction that writing brings to an overwrought mind. A mind filled with grief, as well as a haunting suspicion of his beloved Jenny whose post-mortem revelation of pregnancy, makes matters all the more confusing. Jenny has a secret which opens out into a labyrinth of buried layer upon layer community secrets involving a wicked octogenarian version of Bill Gates, and a sultry blues singer, Sarah Tisdale, who laughed in all the wrong parts of a plot. Sarah's laugh echoes to the point of grinding itself into the social membrane of area residents.
Mike falls in love, first with a prodigious and incredibly endearing four-year-old Kyra whom he meets walking precariously down the centre of the county highway. As if his emotions are not swirling enough, given the tragedy of Jenny and poltergeist activity at his cottage, he finds himself enmeshed as a knight in shining armor by supporting a custody suit involving Kyra's attractive, way-too-young trailer park mother, Mattie. Mattie's history coalesces with that of the computer mogul, the tale of Sarah Tisdale and that of the whole lake community in mysterious ways. It ends in a King-like cacophony of apocalyptic occurrences and one of his most satisfying conclusions to date.