Bag of Bones (Audio): Redux

by Stephen King

read by the Author

includes an exclusive interview with the Author

(New York: Simon & Schuster Audio, 1998)

MP3 Audiobook, 1.16 GB, 22 Hours, Fiction

ISBN: 9780743551755, US$49.95

From the Cover: Stephen King’s most gripping and unforgettable novel, Bag of Bones, is a story of grief and lost love’s enduring bonds, of a new love haunted by the secrets of the past, of an innocent child caught in a terrible crossfire. Set in the Maine territory King has made mythic, Bag of Bones recounts the plight of forty-year-old bestselling novelist Mike Noonan, who is unable to stop grieving even four years after the sudden death of his wife, Jo, and who can no longer bear to face the blank screen of his word processor. Now his nights are plagued by vivid nightmares of the house by the lake. Despite these dreams, or perhaps because of them, Mike finally returns to Sara Laughs, the Noonan’s isolated summer home. He finds his beloved Yankee town familiar on its surface, but much changed underneath – held in the grip of a powerful millionaire, Max Devore, who twists the very fabric of the community to his purpose: to take his three-year-old granddaughter away from her widowed young mother. As Mike is drawn into their struggle, as he falls in love with both of them, he is also drawn into the mystery of Sara Laughs, now the site of ghostly visitations, ever-escalating nightmares, and the sudden recovery of his writing ability. What are the forces that have been unleashed here – and what do they want of Mike Noonan? As vivid and enthralling as King’s most enduring works, Bag of Bones resonates with what Amy Tan calls “the witty and obsessive voice of King’s powerful imagination.” It’s no secret that King is our most mesmerizing storyteller. In Bag of Bones – described by Gloria Naylor as “a love story about the dark places within us all” – he proves to be one of our most moving.

My Original Review: 01/11/2006 – 08:35:00 PM

My Redux Review: There is a lot to be said about a really good audiobook. It is one of the greatest pleasures in my life to find an excellent story that is told in an extraordinary way. The audio version of Bag of Bones is one of those stories. It is read by Stephen King, and for my money—if the audiobook is not read by Frank Muller or Jim Dale, getting the actual author to read the book is a pure joy. Often the author is the best gauge of where the intensity in the story is, what is important and what isn’t and how to fiddle with the dial on the story’s temperature gradient. King, who is not an actor by any stretch of the imagination, is a storyteller and knows how to play with the Listener’s emotions and commitment to the story, and boy howdy! does he play liberally with Bag of Bones’ thermostat.

It helps immensely that Bag of Bones (from a “Readerly Point-of-View”) is an exceptional story. King is at his best in this book, perhaps since he wrote The Shining. The Stand and It are excellent books in their own rights, but they cannot hold a candle to what is going on in Bag of Bones, and what is happening is one of the best examples of the Modern American Gothic that is out there. As in The Shining, King takes all the elements of the classic Gothic Novel and plays with them and modifies them to fit an American setting and sensibility. Bag of Bones has all the quintessential elements of the Gothic: a heroine in peril, an evil nobleman, a knight in shining armor, hidden identities, atmospheric locations, a malevolent threat and copious amounts of the supernatural. In fact, Bag of Bones has some of the scariest scenes in Stephen King’s fiction since ‘Salem’s Lot.

There are, in Bag of Bones, a number of unsettling dream sequences (that, in reality, may or may not be dreams) with stalking shadows, as well as a scene that will make you think twice about entering your basement ever again. In fact, King himself has said that he scared himself with the basement scene in Bag of Bones, so much—in fact—that he states that he never opens the basement door and starts down the stairs without waiting for it to slam shut behind him, the lights to go out and the thumping to start. Now, these scenes (the dreams, the basement, and a host of others) are scary enough on the printed page. But, with King sitting on your shoulder and reading into your ear, in his easy and comfortable manner, they go from scary to terrifying.

King’s story is so well-crafted, and so tightly written that it is hard to imagine a better ghost story, and you might have to go back to Algernon Blackwood to find a comparable one … but there are two big flaws—two cracks, if you will—in the story’s façade.

FIRST: King cannot write a decent female character to save his life. There is a “passive sexism” that is present in most, if not all, of King’s novels. I discussed it to a point in my review of The Gingerbread Girl; I have written on this “passive sexism” vis á vis his novel The Shining (which is about as tight a novel as you could wish for, in any genre), and it is especially present in his novels Rose Madder, Dolores Claiborne and Gerald’s Game, and once again in Bag of Bones this “passive sexism” rears its ugly head. The main female characters in the novel—Mattie Devore, Johanna Noonan and Sara Tidwell—are all, outwardly, strong, liberated female characters that call no man “master” and are in control of their own lives and destinies. Yet, they are not. Each one of these characters is subtly and subversively kept from achieving “true” liberation and becoming a truly strong female character. Johanna’s character comes the closest, but that is hampered by the fact that she is dead from Page One. Sara Tidwell is doubly handicapped as she is both female and black (more on that in a minute) and while she tries to rise above King’s “passive sexism,” she, in fact, is put down into “her place” in a harsh and brutal manner. Mattie has much the same trajectory as Sara does, however the strike against her (in addition to her femininity) is not race or ethnicity, but her socio-economic status. She is a poor single mother; “Trailer Trash,” in fact. Her transgression, like Sara’s, is to try and buck the socio-economic stratification that has arisen in TR-90, and she too is put down into “her place” in an equally harsh and brutal manner. The end result is that the men in the novel, Mike Noonan, John Storrow, even Max Devore, that have to ride in and either “save the day,” whether this “saving” is beneficial to the women in the novel is, of course, up for debate, but I would submit that it is not as “beneficial” as King would have you believe.

SECOND: King cannot write a decent African American character to save his life. Many of King’s seemingly “progressive” African American characters are, in actuality, poorly sketched-out Jim Crow-era tropes. This is the case with Dick Halloran in The Shining and is the case with Mike Hanlon in It and it is especially true in the case of Sara Tidwell, here in Bag of Bones. She appears, superficially, to be an extremely progressive black woman (especially for her time and place: fin-de-siècle Maine) yet, getting past the surface, she is nothing more than, at first, the Jezebel Stereotype and then morphs into the stereotypical African Witch who wrecks her revenge with voodoo-like magic from beyond the grave. Compounding this “passive racism” of King’s is the fact that in the climax of the novel, when the Reader discovers the fate of Sara Tidwell, she is shown to be the victim of racism and violence. Yet … yet, the overall message of the novel is that Sara (the African American and female character) is not the victim—as she appears to be—but, in fact, through King’s “passive sexism” and “passive racism” it is Mike Noonan and Max Devore (both white and male) who are King’s true victims and heroes, and the ones for whom we are supposed to feel the most sympathy. As with the “passive sexism” in the novel, in this “passive racism,” it is Mike and Max who are the truly valued characters. (This is still the germ of an idea that I am developing for a paper I am writing for my Multi-Ethnic Lit class, and so I am just test-driving it here.)

Anyway, from a “Readerly Point-of-View” (i.e. if you’re just going to read the novel for the sheer pleasure of it), you can’t go wrong with Stephen King’s Bag of Bones. It is truly one of scariest ghost stories I have ever read, and King’s reading in this audiobook presentation is top notch. On the other side of the coin, though, from a “Writerly Point-of-View” (i.e. speaking of the literary merits of a particular piece of work), in all honesty King has never been a writer of haute littérature, and we’ll leave it at that.