bonnybedlam 's review for:

Bag of Bones by Stephen King

1.0

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I first read this when it was new and didn't like it. It was overlong, tediously tangential and just plain boring. Unfortunately, it was such a miserable slog that I started skimming about halfway through and finally finished it without fully understanding the finer(?) points(?) of the story.

So I read it again. All of it. Every single word. And as tedious, longwinded, given to pointless digression and just in general all the way up his own ass as King has been since the mid-80s, he's created here a writer character who is even more so. It's an incredible feat, really. Almost a perfect self-parody. There is only one area in which it differs from other King novels and that is the total lack of actual horrors. Well, the racism, misogyny, and wanton cruelty are certainly horrific. But it's not scary horror. It's just plain pitiful

Spoiler

that the true villain of the piece is the ghost of a raped and murdered Black woman who needs to be destroyed by the heroic white male descendant of one of the men who destroyed her the first time

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