Plagued by vivid nightmares of the summer house he had shared with his late wife, grieving widower Mike Noonan returns to his former Maine getaway, only to find a town in the grip of a ruthless millionaire and tormented by a series of ghostly visitations. 1,750,000 first printing. BOMC Main.Bookswagon.com ReviewBag of Bones is partly inspired by Daphne du Maurier's classicRebecca, but there's more than homage in this novel of horror and romance. Like du Maurier's Manderley, King's scary old place (on the shore of Maine's remote Dark Score Lake) is haunted by the late lady of the manor. There are many gory ghosts afoot, though: men, women, and wailing kids. The hero, a thriller novelist, stirs up hell's plenty of angry shades while investigating his wife's death. It turns out she either had a dark secret herself or was onto some dread scandal lurking in Dark Score Lake. As in King's previous book,Wizard and Glass, the fabric of reality is thin, and nosy narrators are in peril of plunging right out of this world and into a rather hostile otherworld. Bag of Bones is a writer-haunted book, too. The spirits of Herman Melville and Ray Bradbury are deeply felt, and so are the tale's two romances (the hero muses on his marriage and falls for a young single mom with a marvelous, psychic daughter). There is also good-humored satire of the real bestseller book world--the hero complains that "the publicity process is like going to a sushi bar where you're the sushi." In its deep concerns with love, sprawling families, the writer's life, endangered children, and good old-fashioned storytelling, the book resembles a John Irving novel. It is also absolutely classic Stephen King, packed with nifty turns of phrase, irreverent wit, and lurid ghouls who grab you from beneath the bed while you cower under the covers. --Tim AppeloFrom BooklistIt never rains but . . . First, 35-year-old pop novelist Mike Noonan's wife, Joanne, dies suddenly. Then, no sooner does he finish his current book-in-progress than he comes down with severe writer's block. How severe? How about sweating, chest pains, and, finally, explosive vomiting when Mike merely looks at his word-processing program? Fortunately, Mike has three complete, unsubmitted yarns in a safety deposit box, so his one-a-year schedule isn't immediately disrupted, and he doesn't have to tell anybody he is hung up. As the fourth year winds down, Mike revisits the lake place he and Jo kept and, after meeting a little girl and her young, widowed mother, stays on. Which puts him in harm's way, for he hears voices in and around the place--a child crying and Jo's voice, too--and his new friends are menaced by the richest man in town, the dead father's father, who wants to take the child from the mother and who, despite being old and wheelchair-bound, is as good at ultraviolence as any King heavy. Except in word count, this is half the book that one of King's best (e.g.,'Salem's Lot,Delores Claiborne) is, or that the classic ghost romance that haunts Mike, Daphne du Maurier'sRebecca, is. King's attempt to write an American lumpen bourgeois cognate to du Maurier's masterpiece founders because of a couple of his constant temptations: too many words and too much vulgarity. But remember, this is a Stephen King book: libraries have to have it.Ray OlsonReviewAmy Tan What I admire most aboutBag of Bones is its intelligence of voice, not only the craftsmanship -- the indelible sense of place, the well-fleshed characters, the unstoppable story line --but the witty and obsessive voice of King's powerful imagination. It places both the ghost story and Stephen King in their proper place on the shelf of literary American fiction.About the AuthorStephen King is the O. Henry Award-winning author of more than thirty books, includingThe Shining, The Stand, The Green Mile, and the stories on which the Academy Award-nominated filmsCarrie, Stand by Me, andShawshank Redemption