Bag of Bones

This has been a month of firsts. I finished my first internship, which was a wonderful summer as the Assistant to the Director of Youth Services at the Murrysville Community Library. I gleefully accepted my first (and hopefully last) marriage proposal on a hot and sticky Thursday evening, and celebrated with my first post-engagement pizza. I moved into my first apartment with said first fiancé, and we shared our first argument about furniture – a white bookshelf, to be specific. I began my first full-time position as a student teacher at Glenwood Elementary School in Perrysburg Ohio, teaching grades K-6 five days a week with the help of a cooperating teacher. I taught my first lesson to a group of first graders, and then my second, and my third…I’m now teaching grades 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. I attended my first staff meeting and participated in my first tour of ‘bus duty’, which is quite complicated with kindergarteners. I took part in my first cookout combining the ‘new’ family, both Brett’s and mine together. I purchased my first real vacuum cleaner. And used it, willingly, for what was most definitely the first time.

Between all of that, I had time for another first. One that I never thought I would experience. I am a literary purist – this is pretty much the only part of my life in which I am conservative. But in a time of electronic readers and novel “apps” and books-turned-movies, someone has to stand up for the little guy. What’s so wrong with a hardback? Does industry really think that a machine, even a beautifully sleek and backlit machine, can replace the lovely scrape of a page across a page? How can you dog-ear a DVD to mark your favorite quotes? I have been tempted by books on tape before. My sister is a die-hard fan of them. “You can read while you’re cleaning the kitchen!” She cries. “You can read while you drive! They’re amazing!” But I was too stubborn to give in to the industry that was so vehemently trying to put me out of work.

So what changed? Time. Suddenly, my afternoons weren’t mine anymore. They belonged to lesson plans and wedding blogs, to staying after school for disciplinary meetings. My evenings were dedicated to seeing Brett after a full 12 hour day apart (he has officially signed his full-time contract with New York Life and has about 3 minutes at home per day) and trying to stay awake long enough to eat a full meal. And night time? Forget about it. We’re in bed by 10 and asleep within minutes. The only time that really belongs to me is my travel time. About twenty miles to school and twenty miles back everyday is free to curb my appetite for good reading. But in the real world, its not possible (safely, at least) to read while driving. So I have two choices – give up reading for pleasure all together until my schedule clears or bend my convictions and participate in the gradual destruction of society. Bring on the destruction!

The book of choice with which to begin my freefall? Stephen King’s Bag of Bones. Appropriate, as I’ve always thought of Stephen King as one of the figureheads of literary destruction. After all, what writer doesn’t scoff at ultra-wealthy authors, as well as those that churn out hundreds of books? “He’s so mainstream,” we sniff, sipping our snobby lattes in our snobby coffeehouses. “He writes for the masses! How pathetic! Where’s the heart? The creativity? Real artists scrounge quarters from the sidewalks and live in their parents’ basements. Real artists don’t make millions.” The same book-on-tape loving sister swears up and down by the genius of Stephen King. So on my way from Pittsburgh back to BG I decided to give the tapes a try.

That was just about a month ago. In bits and pieces, most about a half an hour apiece, I have worked through the 16 tapes that make up Bag of Bones. The book centers around Mike Newnan, a moderately successful author of mainstream thrillers (well isn’t that funny!), and the hole where his life used to be. Because in the first few minutes of Bag of Bones, Newnan’s beloved wife Jo drops dead in a drug store parking lot of a brain aneurism. As if that wasn’t enough of a bang for a beginning, she was pregnant, and didn’t tell her husband. Need more? They’d been trying to have kids for ten years.

With such a slap of events in the very beginning of a book, it can be difficult to decide if you really like the story or if you’re just drawn in by the immediate action. I can’t even count the number of books I’ve started to fall in love with because they draw me in from the very first page – but forty pages later, once the action sequence is over and the plot begins, I’m bored to tears. But right after Jo’s death there comes a sad little scene that hooked me right away. Newnan sits down at his kitchen table with his deceased wife’s purse. He dumps it out and shifts through the contents, still emotionally numb from seeing her dead body in the morgue. This is where the reader would expect an emotional monologue of epic proportions. I was sitting, ready to be harassed by cliché after cliché about losing a loved one and wading through waves of grief. Instead, Newnan discovers a small chocolate mouse, filled with marshmallow, that his wife had purchased before exiting the drug store. He turns it over in his hands and studies it. Then he quietly and eats it. Newnan can’t deal with the insides of his own body right now, so he nibbles on the mouse’s. This man has just lost the love of his life as suddenly as one can lose anything, and he is finding temporary solace in a small chocolate mouse whose insides are made of marshmallow. It’s beautiful.

Over the next four years, Newnan’s life changes dramatically. He becomes a bit of an invert, having lost the social half of his marriage. He throws his attention to crossword puzzles, almost obsessively. He has also lost his ability to write – in the past he had churned out as many as three full novels in a year, and now being anywhere near a computer with a word processing program induces a massive panic attack. At the end of his rope, Newnan heads to the summer property that his wife, Jo, had loved. Sarah Laughs, which sits in the fictional town of Dark Score Lake in Maine, is a beautiful old wooden lodge right on the lake where the pair had spent countless summers together. Newnan heads there because he assumes that he has nothing else to lose. He is, of course, incorrect.

At this point, a marvelously rich tapestry of characters, scenery, and plot begins to form. Past friends and acquaintances mix and mingle with new ones, and the property of Sarah Laughs itself comes alive. Eventually Newnan meets, in an incident simultaneously lucky and unlucky, a little girl named Kyra DeVore and her young mother, Maddie. These women turn Newnan’s life upside down, as women often do. What’s not so common? A haunted property teeming with battling ghosts – of mistreated African Americans from Maine’s racist past, of Newnan’s wife, silenced abruptly and perhaps not as naturally as the coroner had thought, and a cornucopia of other spirits smattered around the lake and throughout Sarah Laughs, each wanting to be heard and avenged.

And then, as my mother (who gave me the tapes, thanks mom!) so delightfully puts it, “all shit breaks loose.” Once you’re at tape four, there’s no turning back from Bag of Bones. But when you get to tape nine, you don’t even want to get out of the car. You find yourself wanting to drive in circles just so you can get through the next chapter. We need milk? Oh, darn… I don’t like this grocery store, I better go to the one in the next town over. Yes! Fifteen minutes of book time!

The most interesting thing about this story, to me, was the characters; but more than that, one specific character. Maine. King makes Maine come alive. I mean this on a few different levels. For one, the characters are so lively, and so attached to their little chunk of the world, that it personifies Dark Score Lake. Lively, bitter, two-sided and deceptively dangerous, Maine is as good a villain in Bag of Bones as I’ve ever seen. Second, in trying to fulfill their ghostly goals, the spirits in and around Sarah Laughs literally bring the landscape to life. Newnan is haunted by trees, rocks, paths, the house, and of course, the dark and ominous lake, most dangerous not only because of its size but also because of the murky secrets within. And finally, Maine comes to life through King’s carefully chosen figurative language. Foreshadowing and symbolism are hanging from every branch and hidden beneath every rock. The entire tone of the narration shifts as Newnan travels to and from Sarah Laughs, and around Maine. 

I learned two huge lessons from Bag of Bones. First and foremost: all you literary snobs, quit bitching about Stephen King and pick up one of his books. Perhaps it’s just this specific story, or maybe it’s all of them – but he’s great. The characters are three-dimensional and entertaining, the plots are complicated and twisting nonstop. Sometimes the current is slow, and sometimes it’s a bit too quick for comfort, but there is definitely no time to get bored. The dialogue is realistic and interesting, and the figurative language is strong and creative. I’m not a huge ghoulie and ghostie person, but I still found myself captivated and spooked by King’s descriptions of supernatural events. On top of that, the guy reads his book himself. All sixteen tapes. I like to think that this is because he put so much of his heart into this book that he couldn’t chance the idea of someone else butchering it vocally. King gives a captivating performance - including singing, screaming, and a special voice for the character of a three year old girl. Now that’s dedication.

I may have changed my mind about Stephen King, but I’m still not 100% sure about books on tape. There are some definite pros and cons. The pros, of course, include the fact that you can listen to a tape while doing just about anything. Driving, cooking, cleaning, running, you name it – you’re in northern Maine battling ghosts with Mike Newnan. That makes reading easier and more accessible for people who don’t have a lot of spare time, or who don’t enjoy the act of reading. But there are some serious cons.

First of all, tapes can be damn hard to deal with. They’re bulky, they break easily, and it’s not easy to find a player for them anymore. They love to disappear down into the cracks between the seats and they don’t do well in the heat – poor tape number 7 didn’t quite make it, to my dismay. This left a gaping hole in my story. It’s not easy to lose an entire chapter out of hardback book. If you lose a book, you lose a book. But with tapes, if you misplace one, the whole story is thrown off. I still enjoyed the rest of the book, but I will always wonder what that disappearing hour entailed. In the climax of the story, there were references to a specific dream I didn’t understand. I wasted most of tape eight grappling, trying to catch my footing again. Yes, it’s my fault for losing the tape, but it still counts as a con, because I say so.

My favorite thing about books on tape, other than the time well spent? They up the ante. When you read, you’re free to imagine the scene in your mind’s eye. But when you hear the novel, you’re left with all of that extra brainpower to create a full blown movie in your head. The novel is all around you. You’re hearing it, seeing it, feeling it, experiencing it. Consider a film without sound versus film with sound. Turning up that volume makes everything more powerful. And in this specific case, you’re hearing every word exactly the way the author meant it to be heard. There is no opportunity for misplaced pronunciation or sarcasm. What King meant is what the reader hears. There is a certain power in knowing that.

My first book on tape experience has been a lot like all of my other first experiences this past month. Scary, exciting, aggravating, funny, and over too fast. Overall, the experience left me slightly shaken, but smiling. Shaken because my firm anti-book on tape beliefs have been seriously wounded. Smiling because the story was addicting and my urge to go to Maine is even stronger now than it’s ever been. So where do I stand now on my battle against “over-convenienced reading?” I have no idea. But hopefully, no matter where the future of the book is headed, Stephen King will be there.