Bag of Bones

Stephen King always impregnates his books with wonderfully detailed drama, horror, mystery and sometimes romance, creating a book that is a terrific example of his best writing techniques combined. The main character, Mike Noonan, is an acclaimed writer who recently lost his wife to a brain aneurysm. He is still in mourning, and since her death has been unable to write (known as “writer’s block”) “I walked around, touching things, looking at things, seeing them new. Jo seemed everywhere to me…I put my face in my hands and cried. I suppose it was the last of my mourning, that made it no easier to bear” (125). For some reason, Mike is drawn back to his lake lodge located in a “one-stop town” in Northern Maine. Named “Sarah Laughs”, after a previous owner, the lodge proves to be haunted. While visiting town the next day, Mike meets a young lady named Mattie after coming in to a close encounter with her three-year old daughter, Kyra. He instantly falls in love with the 20 year old beauty. While trying to start a relationship with Mattie, she informs Mike that her father-in-law, Max Devore, desperately wants custody of Kyra “But Kyra wouldn’t. She was the hood ornament in all of this, doomed to go where ever the car took her”(360). Both being millionaires, they battle it out through court, and Mattie and Mike win the case. But in the meantime, Mike is being mysteriously haunted through his dreams by Sarah, the owner of the lodge (named after her) at the beginning of the century, who was gruesomely raped and murdered by Max Devore’s Father. While having a party to celebrate their victory, the deceased Max Devore (he had died near the end of the trial) had hired hit men to kill them all (Mattie, Mike, the lawyer, and their P.I.). The hit men managed to wound the lawyer, mortally wounding Mattie, and slightly injuring the P.I., the whole time Mike was in the trailer-house with Kyra. Mattie dies in Mike’s arms as the P.I. manages to disable the get-away car, and capture one of the men, while the other burned alive in the car. Mike takes Kyra back to Sarah Laugh’s, where he understands why Sarah has been haunting him in his dreams “’Hey, Irish!’ Sarah called from the stage. And her voice was so like Jo’s that I could have screamed. She wanted me to turn back-I could will working on the side of my face like fingers-but I wouldn’t do it… ‘Almost done, Irish!’ Sarah shrieked after me. She sounded angry, but not too angry to