Mike Noonan is a successful novelist in his early forties in Maine. When his wife Jo suddenly and somewhat inexplicably dies in the prime of her life, Mike goes into crisis. Writer’s block keeps him from working. To get a break, he decides to move into their vacation home in the south of Maine.

Surrounded by small town life, the starts to see improvement right away. But then he meets Maddie, a woman in her early twenties, a widow, with a three-year-old daughter named Ki. Mike quickly falls in love with the little girl, and in lust with her mother.

He finds out that the tech billionaire named Max Devore, who has a house in town, is the grandfather of Ki, and he is trying to wrest custody from Maddie. As Mike starts helping the young mother fight back, he encounters that he does not live alone in his house.

There appear to be ghosts.

Stephen King is a master storyteller. Bag of Bones is a thick book of 529 pages. It drew me in and kept reading, despite the fact that large portions of the narrative are about Mike’s dreams. Stephen King writes a lot about dreams in many of his books. The Stand is full of dreams. Dreams of King books are always nightmares, and he describes them explicitly and in detail.

I can’t stand reading about dreams. They may move the story along or embellish it, but I always lose interest when I have to read about somebody’s dream, and I start turning the pages quickly to get through them. The violent ghosts, the killed children, the dark secrets of the town that everyone hides from the strange intruders like Mike, all get jumbled together into a plot line that probably works, is meticulously sketched out in Stephen King’s notes, but sorry – I got lost quickly and it went downhill from there.

King is a master storyteller, and I kept reading because I just enjoy his skills. But other than that, this book is just a Bag of Bones.