Bag of Bones

In Chapter 3 of Bag of Bones, narrator Mike Noonan compares his summer house, Sara Laughs, to Manderley, the house featured in Rebecca (1938) by Daphne du Maurier. Stephen King uses repeated allusions to Rebecca to invite parallels with his novel. This plays into a light metafictional strategy for Noonan’s character arc, allowing him to engage with the tensions between fiction and reality.

In Rebecca, an unnamed narrator marries a wealthy English widower named Maxim de Winter. Following their honeymoon, Maxim takes his wife to his home estate of Manderley, its beautiful façade masking the dark secrets of de Winter’s previous marriage to Rebecca. Through her confrontations with a cruel housekeeper named Mrs. Danvers, the narrator learns more about Rebecca, who is said to have been beautiful and charming in ways that drive the narrator’s insecurities.

Mrs. Danvers leverages the narrator’s insecurities to psychologically abuse her, encouraging her to harbor thoughts of death. Eventually, the discovery of a shipwreck causes Maxim to admit that he murdered Rebecca, who was cruel and chronically unfaithful. Rebecca provoked Maxim into killing her by claiming she was pregnant with another man’s child, though it is later implied that she was goading Maxim into killing her after she learned that she had cancer. The narrator is relieved by the prospect of a peaceful future as the new Mrs. de Winter, especially after she and Maxim learn that Mrs. Danvers has suddenly left Manderley. The novel ends with the de Winters’ return to the estate, which has been set ablaze.

Just as Mike compares Sara Laughs to Manderley, the major characters of Bag of Bones fall into similar dynamics as the characters in Rebecca. Mike Noonan corresponds to the second Mrs. de Winter, finding himself enamored with Mattie Devore, who corresponds to Maxim de Winter (additionally, Mattie and Maxim’s character names bear a resemblance to one another). Unbeknownst to Mattie, Mike is harassed by Max Devore and his accomplice Rogette Whitmore, who function much as Mrs. Danvers does in Rebecca. 

King uses these literary parallels to develop Mike’s relationship to fiction, which forms an essential part of his character arc in the novel. Since Mike is struggling to overcome his writer’s block, his engagement with the Devores is designed to feel serendipitous, as though he has been plucked from the real world and placed into the plot of Rebecca. Mike also discovers that his late wife, Jo, was leading a secret life, which parallels the revelation that Rebecca’s moral character was not what the narrator initially perceived it to be. As the novel progresses, Mike finds himself more drawn to the reality of his world than his manuscript, foreshadowing his eventual retirement from writing at the end. Unlike the de Winters, Mike settles into Sara Laughs, overcoming its foreboding character by accepting it as his new home.