Ex Libris: ‘Bag Of Bones’

On a very hot day in August 1994, my wife told me she was going down to the Derry Rite Aid to pick up a refill on her sinus medicine prescription – this is stuff you can buy over the counter these days, I believe. I’d finished my writing for the day and offered to pick it up for her. She said thanks, but she wanted to get a piece of fish at the supermarket next door anyway; two birds with one stone and all of that. She blew a kiss at me off the palm of her hand and went out. The next time I saw her she was on TV. That’s how you identify the dead here in Derry – no walking down a subterranean corridor with green tiles on the walls and long fluorescent bars overhead, no naked body rolling out of a chilly drawer on casters; you just go into an office marked PRIVATE and look at a TV screen and say yep or nope.

I’m a great fan of Stephen King, and have – so far – read all of his books to date. But I found this particular novel to be one of his best-written, a true ‘old fashioned’ ghost story given a modern twist.

It's a great book to curl up and read on a winter's evening in front of a fire, with an intriguing mystery at the heart of it, and a bone-chilling supernatural revenge motive. 

I thought it’d make the best tv/film adaptation too, being almost completely free of any of King's references to his overarching 'mythology' but it was not to be; last year's US tv adaptation attempt was woeful, though it tried hard to capture the essence of the novel.

I hope you've enjoyed this little bit of monthly bibliophilia. There were several books just falling outside my selected twelve, and writing this has actually prompted me to read a few of these again. Chief amongst them Katherine Neville's 'The Eight', a superb dual-timeline novel about a mystical chess set, and Melanie Rawn's 'Dragon Prince' trilogy.

So, what shall I do for next year, I wonder?