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Stephen King’s an old dog, and I doubt he’d disagree. The thing with old dog though, apart from being inable to learn new tricks, is that they’re persistant. They’re set in their ways. And, if they’re well trained, they still know a thing or two that’ll impress you. Bag of Bones is classic King. I was never a fan of his mid-life work, always preferring his earlier work. The Stand, The Dark Tower (bearing in mind that the majority of it was written later in his career), It, Tommyknockers - anything with ghastly, fantastical monsters. Misery was borderline, just about everything after The Dark Half was too realistic for me. “Realistic” in the sense of, “it could really happen”, anyway - I always found King at his best when he dealt with the things that really go bump in the night. Bag of Bones is somewhat of a hybrid of the two - it deals with relationships and semi-”real” characters, but it also delves into the fantastical (and phantasmagorical). Without getting too involved in it, I’d also add - there’s ghosts a plenty, but they don’t dominate the story. The novel basically follows the experiences of a writer coming to terms with the sins of his forefathers - anyone reasonably read in King’s back catalogue already knows this character. About the only change is that he doesn’t drink too much before things go wrong. King’s real ability comes in his ability to distill a story into its rawest elements without losing any clarity, transparency, or accessiblity of language. There may be too many words, but that probably has more to do with indulgence than sheer filler. And, unlike Dan Brown, he doesn’t become facile in the process - he’s no James Joyce, but that’s also probably his biggest strength. Almost without fail, King’s stories are good yarns - they’re not literature, but then again, they don’t aspire to be either. And, he’s prolific enough that if you enjoy one, you’ll probably enjoy at least another five. It’s a good book, but I can’t really recommend it. Too many plot elements have been pulled from his previous books, and while I quite enjoyed it, it’s not exactly King at his absolute best. The family trees become complex enough to become distracting, and with a relative dearth of plot (compared to other books he’s written), there’s far too many words. Probably a quarter of the book could have been cut, but that’s not really anything new - it’s a rare book of King’s that couldn’t be condensed a little. It’s enjoyable, but it’s light. There’s better out there, but if you’re a King fan, you’ve probably already read it. If you haven’t read King, there’s better places to start. |
Recommended? "no"