Bag of Bones
Stephen King, 1998
★ 3.92 from 216.5k ratings on Goodreads
A grieving novelist returns to a Maine lake house and finds a haunted history that won't stay buried. A slow, melancholy ghost story steeped in grief and marital love, with quiet unease that gathers into dread.
Feels like grief, melancholy and unease. About death, love and solitude.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you want a ghost story more interested in loss and marriage than shocks. Be aware that readers often find it long and slow, and the custody plot and age-gap romance draw criticism.
Why read it
It gives you a haunted house story rooted in a widower's grief, where love and memory press on the present.
A page from the book
The small routines that keep us from turning around when something follows.
This is how we go on: one day a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time. Dentists go on one root canal at a time; boat builders go on one hull at a time. If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things — fish and unicorns and men on horseback — but they are really only clouds. What readers say
Readers often describe this as a grief- and marriage-centered ghost story: many were moved by the widower’s loss and loneliness, and some found the haunting atmospheric and unsettling. Others felt it was too long and slow, with the custody plot and age-gap romance drawing criticism.
Stephen King.Bag of Bones won the 1998 Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel.
Books that feel like this
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Stephen King, 1986
A Maine town, a childhood summer, and the shape-shifting thing that hunts its children — a horror novel about memory as much as monsters.
The Stand
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A flu escapes a lab and empties America; survivors choose between a saintly old woman and a smiling dark man. King's big, bleak, compulsive plague epic.
Pet Sematary
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A doctor moves his family to a Maine town where the local pet cemetery sits beside something older, and grief becomes a door that should stay shut.
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Questions readers ask
- Is Bag of Bones for me?
- You may like it if you want a ghost story more interested in loss and marriage than shocks. Be aware that readers often find it long and slow, and the custody plot and age-gap romance draw criticism.
- What is Bag of Bones like?
- A slow, melancholy ghost story steeped in grief and marital love, with quiet unease that gathers into dread. Feels like grief, melancholy and unease. About death, love and solitude.
- What should I read after Bag of Bones?
- If you liked Bag of Bones, try New Moon (Stephenie Meyer), The Road (Cormac McCarthy) and The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold).
A taste of the feed
Grief keeps its own clock, and it does not keep good time.
Time passes. Even when it seems impossible. Even when each tick of the second hand aches like the pulse of blood behind a bruise. It passes unevenly, in strange lurches and dragging lulls, but pass it does. Even for me.
New Moon · Stephenie Meyer
What a child sees in a snow globe, and what her father answers.
Inside the snow globe on my father’s desk, there was a penguin wearing a red-and-white-striped scarf. When I was little my father would pull me into his lap and reach for the snow globe. He would turn it over, letting all the snow collect on the top, then quickly invert it. The two of us watched the snow fall gently around the penguin. The penguin was alone in there, I thought, and I worried for him. When I told my father this, he said, "Don’t worry, Susie; he has a nice life. He’s trapped in a perfect world.
The Lovely Bones · Alice Sebold
The hardest defence to make is the one you make to yourself.
I have no more now to say. I do not know, Hastings, if what I have done is justified or not justified. No — I do not know. I do not believe that a man should take the law into his own hands... But on the other hand, I am the law! As a young man in the Belgian police force I shot down a desperate criminal who sat on a roof and fired at people below. In a state of emergency martial law is proclaimed.
Curtain · Agatha Christie
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