My favorite Stephen King novel is Bag of Bones. That’s what I took with me to Yosemite. After dark, you can’t do much in the park, so I’d head to my tent-cabin and immerse myself in the story until I got sleepy. Bag of Bones doesn’t seem to be a favorite of many King fans, but I love it. Like so many of King’s best stories, Bones is much more than merely a supernatural thriller. At it’s core, the story is about real human problems: dealing with bullies, loss, facing mortality, moral ambiguity, the dark side of human nature and finding out surprising, even shocking and disturbing things about someone you’ve loved for years. Bag of Bones is wistful and elegiac from beginning to end, and it is deeply emotionally honest.
A big part of the appeal for me might be the lifestyle of the protagonist. Mike Noonan is a successful novelist, but not too successful. He’s sold enough copies of his books to make him independently wealthy, but not conspicuously rich. He can still walk around in public without many people recognizing him. He’s comfortable and hasn’t been seduced into wasting his money on private jets, mansions and designer clothes. He drives an ordinary car, wears a Timex and enjoys eating cheeseburgers at greasy spoons. He lives in a Victorian in Derry, but most of the story takes place at his woodsy summer home on Dark Score Lake. I can do without the ghosts, the heartache and the run-ins with a psychopathic billionaire, but I’d take the rest of it in a New York second, especially the lake house, Sara Laughs.
I’ve heard that many of the fictional communities in King’s novels are inspired by real places in Maine, so I wondered if Dark Score Lake had a factual counterpart. According to one article I came across, Dark Score is really Flagstaff Lake, a 20,000 acre body of water in Summerset and Franklin counties. I’d love to visit.
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