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.