Bag of Bones

Bag of Bones is a 1998 horror novel by Stephen King. Its narrator is Mike Noonan, a popular novelist who suffers from writer's block and from dreams he cannot explain after the death of his wife Jo, and who ends up at the family's summer house on a lake in western Maine, a place he had avoided for years and where the dreams become worse.

In the town around the lake, Noonan is drawn into a custody fight between a young widow, Mattie Devore, and her wealthy father-in-law, who wants her daughter. The novel sets that very ordinary legal and social pressure against something older in the house and in the water, and King lets the two run together rather than separating the ghost story from the court case.

The book reuses plot elements of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, which King acknowledged, and gives them a New England setting and a male narrator. It won the Bram Stoker Award for best novel in 1999, as well as the British Fantasy Award and the Locus Award for dark fantasy and horror.