★★★★☆ | Horror | Digital + Audio | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads

I read this one before, some twenty years ago, but I didn’t remember much of it other than the setting: a log cabin set on a lake in western Maine. I had a hankering to revisit this place long locked away in my memory.

This is a classic haunted house with enough mystery and spooky parts to keep the pages turning. We meet many of the residents of this lakeside Maine setting, and King captures both the joy and discontent of multi-generational life in an isolated community. Having spent over twenty years on a rural island in Washington state, I laughed and cringed at the similarities.

But, like most good Stephen King novels, it’s the exploration of the deeper human condition that lingers. In this case, the grief of losing a soulmate and how a loss like that changes you.

Grief is like a drunken house guest, always coming back for one more goodbye hug.

The narrator is a well-known writer who suffers from a debilitating bout of writer’s block. Through him, we learn a lot about the highs and lows of the publishing industry. The title is borrowed from a Thomas Hardy quote after he stopped writing novels: “the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones.” It’s a humble admission from our generation’s greatest storyteller that, as effortless as the final product seems to readers, writing is a tough business.

Highlights

I think reality is thin, you know, thin as lake ice after a thaw, and we fill our lives with noise and light and motion to hide that thinness from ourselves.

This is how we go on: one day at 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 us 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. Even when the lightening flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.