 Hello everybody, E here. Welcome back to another Stephen King review. I had this video shot and uploaded and ready to go and I got hit with a demonetization due to a trigger warning that I gave. I'm going to try and be as vague as possible but still there is a trigger warning for this book due to a very specific type of abuse. For some odd reason I can't even mention the type of abuse or else I will get demonetized. But anyways, so today we are talking about Bag of Bones. This is a change of pace for Stephen King. This is pretty much where he went from more horror, horror, horror or sci-fi or dark fantasy to a very literary mindset. There's not much horror in this book. For some people they feel that this is where the tide turned and Stephen King got bad I guess is their opinion. But the book focuses on an author whose wife dies at the beginning of the book. We're thrown in in media res and we're shown his descent into depression, how upset he is and how it affects his writing. He deals with writer's block, all different kinds of stuff so he decides to go out to a cabin that he owns on Darkscore Lake on T-90 in Maine. All that stuff is connected in my Thursday Theorist videos. By the way, if you're wondering hasn't he already reviewed this? No I have not. I've done the Thursday Theorist video and that series is spoiler-heavy and it covers Stephen King's entire universe. It's where I connect all of his books to either well I connect his books to the Dark Tower but I also connect them to the Stephen King universe in general. With this one this is going to be a spoiler-free review. So Mike Noonan goes out to Darkscore Lake and he comes across an affluent, a very rich man in a wheelchair and he ends up meeting a woman who helps him with finding love again. There is a supremely tragic scene in here. I think it's probably my favorite part of the book. The one criticism I have, even though this is in my top 10 Stephen King books, the one criticism that I have is that the antagonist is taken care of off-screen and I didn't like that aspect of it. But since the book's told in first person there really was no way unless Mike had been there for it and it was a closed kind of situation when the antagonist dies. But that's not to say that it ruins the book at all for me. In fact, like I said, it's one of my favorites. It's in the top 10. Other parts of the book, I'm going to go ahead and say this. I get why so many people were upset at King completely changing lanes here, going for a very adult novel, dealing with the aftermath of a writer losing his support structure, losing the love of his life, that stuff. And this is where I came to fully fall in love with Stephen King's books. So needless to say, I'm giving it a glowing five stars. I mentioned in previous videos how I believe it was Leesy's story is when he went full literary. And when I say full, I mean full. There's almost no horror in that one. There are some thriller elements, some supernatural elements, things like that, but he went full bore into the literary side of things. And he's always been literary leaning. But after Bag of Bones, especially with Leesy's story, I feel that's when King really hit his stride. And of course, Leesy's story, I believe, yeah, it follows the trilogy of Trash, which is coming up soon. I will discuss those in separate videos, of course. But this is the last one that he published before his car accident. It's also the first book that he published with Scribner. There's an interview in the special edition of this, the re-release, I believe it was the 20th anniversary, 25th anniversary, something like that. I don't suggest you go out and find that one because honestly, the only difference is there's a short interview with King at the end of the book. It is interesting to read, but King put all of his cards down and went all in on this one to try and please Scribner. I think he did a fantastic job of it. But yeah, this is a very light, and I stress this, a very light ghost story. Not light as in content, but it's very light on the horror supernatural aspects. I always talk about the movie adaptations here. The movie adaptation has Pierce Brosnan as Mike Noonan. And there is a scene, and this is why some of King's stuff does not translate well. I'm looking at you, the fire hose from the Shining Many series, and the terrible looking hedge animals, but there's a scene where Mike Noonan fights a tree. And it is probably one of the most unintentionally funny moments in any of Stephen King's adaptations. I am not a huge fan of it. It is good, it is serviceable, but again, I'd say pass unless you're Stephen completionist and you feel like you must watch every adaptation of his books. Other than that, it's very faithful to the to the book. But yeah, that one scene, man, it really gets me. Talking about the book some more, the tragedy that happens that occurs toward the end of the book, it came out of nowhere. It was a very shocking take. It's almost as powerful. I feel, I know people are going to disagree with me, but I feel it's almost as powerful as Gage in Pet Cemetery, because it does come out of nowhere. Nowadays, if you read Pet Cemetery, I think pretty much everyone knows what happens in that one, but I'm not going to spoil it here. The emotional weight of this book resonates with me, but I will say again, well, I've said this in the past in other reviews and my Thursday theorist, I didn't like this book at all when it first came out because I was in a very horror mindset and I appreciated Stephen King's early horror novels. But to say that he to say that he got worse with age or after he kicked the drugs or what or after the accident, so on and so forth, I don't agree with that. I think he's only gotten better. Of course, the trilogy of trash is coming up next. So when we get there, we will discuss that. But there's very specific reasons why I feel those books failed and I will discuss those in those reviews. But if you read Bag of Bones by Stephen King, if you have, let me know what you thought of it down there in the doobly-doo. But until next time, I have been E, you have been U. This has been another Stephen King review. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye!