Sara (novel)

Sara (in the original: Bag of Bones ) is a novel by the writer Stephen King from 1998 . It was first published by Scribner Verlag in 1998. The German translation by Joachim Körber was published by Heyne Verlag that same year.

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Michael Noonan, a writer who lives in a summer house with his wife Jo on Dark Score Lake near Castle Rock, is hit hard by fate. His wife falls victim to a ruptured aneurysm on the way to a drugstore and dies. Noonan later learns that Jo was pregnant at the time of her death. Why did she keep this a secret? He asks, irritated. The writer suffers writer's block and is traumatized as a result of the shock of the death of his wife and unborn child.

In four years the author does nothing. He is plagued by dreams about his summer house Sara Lacht and finally decides to get to the bottom of things. In the summer house (named after the black singer Sara Tidwell, who had lived in the area with her band for a few years at the beginning of the 20th century), writer's block is resolved, but at the same time eerie occurrences are increasing; Mike hears a child crying in the empty house at night, and magnetic letters on the refrigerator door form strange messages. He learns terrifying things about the place his house belongs to; for example, about 50 years earlier, a man drowned his two-year-old child under a water pump. It also turns out that a few years earlier, without Mike's knowledge, Jo had made several visits to Sara Lacht's area and - to the displeasure of the locals - looked for information about the house's past.

In the first days of his stay at Sara Lacht , Noonan met the young, beautiful widow Mattie and her child Kyra. Mattie has a bitter argument with her father-in-law, Max Devore, a computer mogul, over custody of Kyra. Their efforts against the multimillionaire Devore initially seem futile until Noonan intervenes, who develops a deeper affection for Mattie than he initially admits.

When Noonan and Devore meet at the lake, Devore tries to murder the writer. This fails, however, and Devore later commits suicide. Mattie, Kyra, Mike Noonan and their helpers want to celebrate the victory over the tyrannical Devore with a barbecue party. But then Mattie is murdered, an act that Devore had commissioned before he committed suicide.

In a kind of trance state, Mike and Kyra flee from the storm that has now risen in Sara Lacht . There he prepares to drown Kyra in a bathtub without realizing the enormity of his actions. In a brief moment he notices that the ghost of his wife wanted to give him information about a hiding place near the house. He goes to the hiding place and finds out the truth about the fate of Sara Tidwell: the singer had never left the area, but was raped and murdered by local bullying, including Devore's great-grandfather; at the same time the same men had drowned Sara's son Kito in the lake. Sara's ghost took revenge by forcing the biological descendants of their murderers over several generations to drown their own children (whose name begins with K). In addition, Mike learns in the hiding place that he is related by blood to one of the murderers, a fact about which he himself had not known anything before. When Mike realized in this way that Sara's ghost wanted to drive him to fulfill her revenge on Kyra, he defends himself and manages to banish the curse with the help of his wife's ghost.

useful information

• The novel Sara was awarded the famous American literary prizes Bram Stoker Award 1999 and Locus Award in the categories of best horror novel.
• At an autograph session in London, King expressed his amusement at the German translation of his title Bag of Bones . It has not escaped him that his books are often translated into just one word in Germany.
• According to King himself, the oppressive dream of the house pays homage to the introduction to Daphne du Maurier's novel Rebecca .

Links to other works

• The novel itself is only indirectly attributed to the so-called Castle Rock cycle . This is probably due to the fact that King himself declared the cycle to be over with the publication of the novel In a small town . Figures from Castle Rock continue to appear, but the city itself does not matter.
• The main character Michael Noonan represents - next to Thaddeus Beaumont from the novel Stark - The Dark Half - once again an alter ego of the author King. Noonan receives little attention from the critics, but is one of the most successful writers of all. Only Thaddeus Beaumont had prevented Noonan from attaining a better position in the bestseller list under his pseudonym George Stark with the fictional novel Steel Machine . Like King, Michael Noonan is a genre-oriented writer.
• After more than two decades, Stephen King returns with this work to the theme of the house inhabited and ruled by uncanny forces, which he had already dealt with in Shining (1977). Even so, of course, this novel is not a copy of the early book, although the protagonist is again a writer.
• Mike Noonan tells of the suicide of the writer Thad Beaumont (from Stark - The Dark Half ).
• In a short scene, Mike meets Ralph Roberts, who understands his problems because he himself was insomniac for a long time .
• The pharmacist Joe Wyzer, who finds Mike's wife dead, was already at Ralph Roberts' side with advice and action in Sleepless .
• Mike's wife loved reading Bill Denbrough ( Es ) books .
• Mike Noonan writes his new novel My childhood friend during his stay with Sara Lacht . In this novel, the main character is Raymond Garraty, who can also be found as the main character in Death March , published by Stephen King under the pseudonym Richard Bachman.
• At the end of the book, Mike talks to Sheriff Ridgewick about Alan Pangborn and his wife Polly, who also played a role in Stark - The Dark Half and In a Small Town .

TV adaptation

In 2011, the US television station A&E Network produced the two-part television film Bag of Bones , which is supposed to be a relatively dense adaptation of the novel. The scripts for the series were written by Matt Venne and director Mick Garris . Starring Pierce Brosnan as Mike Noonan, Melissa George as Mattie, Matt Frewer as Sid Noonan and Jason Priestley .

Literature and Links

• Stephen King: Sara , Heyne, ISBN 3453160819
• Detailed table of contents in KingWiki