Bag Of Bones: Chapter 1 (pages 1-15)

First person narrative. Starts in Derry Maine one of the famous fictional Maine towns that King loves so. Nice first paragraph, where we discover the protagonist's wife is dead. It's quick and to the point with a nice "real life" detail thrown in to give it greater force. This is what fiction is about. A non-writer would write: "My name is blah-blah my wife died in 1994." But King, for all his faults, is a writer and he uses the writer's tools to flesh out his characters and his plot. He makes everything very real and that's where his success comes from. Authenticity. When he fails on authenticity, his books fail, and almost every time at some point because the reality breaks down and we can all see the strings that move the puppets but his best work contains long stretches of "real life."
He describes the car crash that led up to her death. Her death wasn't called by the crash but by an aneurysm that occurred while she was running to help. I think that he did this because he wants to make sure Joann (the wife) is labeled as a "good person." Why King didn't just have her in the car crash I'm not sure, maybe that will play a role later in the book, maybe not.
He goes into the funeral and the concrete details are superb. I've never lost a spouse but my mother died when I was young and I can imagine that he felt like the protagonist in this book losing his wife at a relatively young age (36). Finding her stuff laying around the house. Little notes etc. I mean it's all cliche but it's also real that's why it's a cliche. It happens to everybody.
The biggest plot point revealed in this chapter is that she was pregnant which Mike Noonan ( the main character) didn't know about. When they performed the autopsy they could tell it was a girl which must mean that Joann was at least a couple of months into the pregnancy. This of course adds more to Mike's grief. Not only has he lost his wife, he's lost a child also.
This is the first chapter that Joann's "ghost" appears to Mike. In a dream of course but I think that soon she will be appearing "for real."
She's an angry, scary ghost which I thought was unusual. It seems odd to me as imagining your just deceased wife as some zombie corpse coming to get you. But that's what she is so far. The Undead clutching her copy of Maughm's "The Moon and Sixpence," and declaring, " It's my dust-catcher." Spooky. Let's read on.