Full Video Review Here: https://youtu.be/_O0YIrJHy8w

It was a time before the Young Adult genre had completely made vampires not scary anymore. I first read this book in 1993 and it had a different affect on me this time than last. King is still in top form here and his love for old monster movies and comics is quite apparent. The lead is likable, as is his small group of survivors he brings along the way. King is at his most vicious here as no one in the cast is safe and they drop like flies as Barlow starts to gain hold over the town. My only criticism is that too many characters are partly developed, just so you will feel something when they inevitably perish or became undead. It helps the town to feel like a living, breathing community, the numbers just could have been trimmed down a touch. Still, a great novel for the time it was released and a must read for anyone who is sick of teen vampire romances or what the writings of Anne Rice have become the past decade.

‘The town kept its secrets, and the Marsten House brooded over it like a ruined king.’

Stephen King is a master of weaving together the narrative of a community with the aesthetics of horror. It’s part of what makes him so truly frightening: his horrors lurk in every day realities and often the community at large is just as threatening as the monsters that infiltrate in secret. ‘We’d all be scared if we knew what was swept under the carpet of each other’s minds,’ King writes in ’Salem’s Lot, and in this tale of good vs evil the ways the everyday folks of the town silently allow their neighbor’s traumas to brood and boil over onto each other becomes just as unsettling as the vampires drawn to the bad vibes. The watching eyes of a predator is just as eerie be it an undead monster or the judgemental gaze from a neighbors window.

It’s a perfect set-up of small town scaries that tap into the real fears of small towns quite literally dying out, a topic that fueled a lot of political discourse in rural areas in the last few decades of 20th century in the US. A factory would close or an industry would dry up and suddenly the infrastructure of a town would cave in on itself with no jobs and no future prospects. Kids would flee the moment they could to avoid being pulled under with it. So begins ’Salem’s Lot, with the flight from a small town in Maine seeming like another victim of a collapsed local economy on the surface, but with a darker secret bruising within. ‘The town knew about darkness,’ King writes, ‘it knew about the darkness that comes on the land when rotation hides the land from the sun, and about the darkness of the human soul.’ The bad behavoirs of the town, with the abusers, affairs, and general selfish fuckery have opened an opportunity for far worse predators to nestle in and take control.

Which brings us to the title and name of the town. Jerusalem's Lot. This may be a stretch but King does frequently play with biblical elements, and the shortened version, ‘Salem’s Lot sure feels adjacent to Sodom and Gomorrah as well as Lot from Genesis (one could also argue Salem where the witch trials occurred, seeing as a religiously tinged “purifying by fire” plays into the ending but more on that later). In reality, the town is based on Durham, Maine where King explored the real Marsten House (an abandoned home of the same name there) as a kid. But the story of Sodom and Gomorrah involves a town being destroyed because of—according to Isaiah and Jeremiah—greed, adultery, inhospitality, and lies. In Ezekial 16:49 it is written: ‘Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.’ The larger context here is that Jerusalem is as bad, if not worse, than Sodom. I’ve had people also tell me the “real” reason is lack of remnant, basically failure of the church, which is sort of happening here as well though Father Callahan does some ass kicking later on. So here we are in Jerusalem's Lot, where pretty much everyone is lying, cheating, and inhospitable. Bam, vampire time. I do love a good vampire time (and as vampires are often written as some lusty folks, SO DO THEY).

This is a genuinely creepy novel that maintains a growing tension of terrors through it’s hefty length. King is an author that can thrill and chill in the moment of reading but, like the monsters lurking out of sight, the lingering terror always strikes from your mind later on when you realize how you too could have walked right into the frights that occur in his books. Like I wrote about for Pet Sematary, the scariest bits are dropped into normal, mundane reality. Each October I love to over indulge in horror novels. I love the genre, it really works for me, and I always think “why don’t I read more like this all year?” But then something will happen, my imagination will run wild and I’ll swear off horror novels until the wheel of seasons rolls around again. This year I didn’t really have that moment and was just blissfully downing scary stories, thrilled to keep going into November while reading this book along with Nataliya (read here excellent review here). I had to feed my neighbor’s cat last weekend, and their electronic door lock isn’t working so getting it to unlock and lock was a bit of a hassle. It was late in the evening as I was walking down into the darkness of their basement where the cat dish is when suddenly my mind decided to pelt the intrusive thought “don’t think about the Marsten House” at me like a brick. Well, fuck, now I’m hoping I don’t turn around for Marsten’s dead ass chasing after me down the stairs. I did my chore SO fast and as I’m trying to lock the door, which isn’t cooperating, the windy night is creating a draft that makes it feel like the door is trying to be pulled back open from the inside. ‘The basis of all human fears,’ King says here, ‘a closed door, slightly ajar.’ YUP. So you got me King, that was my memorable imagination-run-wild fright of 2022.

‘Small towns have long memories and pass their horrors down ceremonially from generation to generation.’

I love the atmosphere of this novel. It’s a small town vibe that reminds me of the small towns in Michigan’s upper peninsula where I would spend my summers as a kid. The town itself is creepy and oppressive though. Everyone knows everyone else’s business (a bit too much), everyone is kind of a shit, and generational trauma is running rampant. It becomes sort of a question of were the people being shits the reason the town became evil or was the town being evil the reason the people are shits. Once the vampires get someone they sort of become the worst version of themselves, which is rather in keeping with the first vampire novel: The Vampyre by John William Polidori. In it, anyone who is drawn to the enigmatic vampire is met with ruin and becomes terrible versions of themselves on their descent. The vampire was based on Lord Byron and this whole road to ruin was pretty expected for anyone who decided to buddy themselves with him. There is a lot of standard vampire lore in this book that sort of lets the reader’s predisposition towards vampire knowledge fill in a lot of gaps, though the use of it is all a bit muddy.

It’s King’s early work and it shows. The writing is great but some of the book exists without much clarifications because, well, that’s just what makes the plot work. The crucifix is a key tool for fighting vampires because thats just how fighting vampires works. There is a lot of symbolism around the church, though Barlow does inform us ‘the Catholic Church is not the oldest of my opponents.’ It just happens to be a tradition that is also an effective weapon against him. It is less that it is a tool from God, but, as Ben observes, ‘a direct pipeline to the days when werewolves and incubi and witches were an accepted part of the outer darkness and the church the only beacon of light.’ It also opens the opportunity for some great moments with Mark getting vampire murdering down with a toy cross. King always does utilize childhood innocence in a great way, something that is very characteristic of a lot of his works. A very 'suffer the little children' vibe juxtaposed with the power of their innocence.

In the vibes of a small town dying out, there is a large theme about the part and reclaiming memory. Marsten House is largely a symbol for the trauma’s of Ben’s past that he has come to revisit. Why? He did it for literature (see also: profit—‘tapping into the atmosphere…to write a book scary enough to make me a million dollars’) Ben wants to dig into his past and write a good book, but also because he wants to reclaim the magic of time now gone.

’What was he doing, coming back to a town where he had lives for four years as a boy, trying to recapture something that was irrevocably lost? What magic could he expect to recapture by walking roads that he had once walked as a boy and were probably asphalted and straightened and logged off and littered with tourist beer cans?’

This resonates with the ideas of dying towns and wanting to reclaim the past, or where people hold to a golden age nostalgia to resist change or progress. You can’t reclaim the past though, and memory is often much rosier than the reality. The house becomes the general base for the vampiric plot, but its also convenient to the plot because Ben can center all the evils into one idea: Marsten House. ‘If a fear cannot be articulated, it can’t be conquered,’ King writes (I love this line, and have written frequently elsewhere about how naming a thing takes away its power or gives you power over it as seen in fairy tales) and there’s almost a metafictional aspect of articulating all the evil into Marsten House in a book about writing a book about evil. It’s King winking at us seeing if we catch the references to fairy tale theory more or less.

‘Purification should count for something.’

Okay, we gotta talk about the ending. Or non-ending really. I mean, this book hits some HIGHS that are truly terrifying (those teeth, ahhhhh!) but, as is the complaint about King so common they spoofed on it in the new film remake of It, King often struggles to stick the landing. While I’m into the whole purify the land with fire motif going on to smoke out the vampires for one last great battle we don’t get to see (it can be assumed it isn’t wholly successful as in One From the Road in Night Shift the vampires are still preying. On that note, Night Shift also contains the story Jerusalem’s Lot, written as an homage to H.P. Lovecraft and connects the town to the Cthulhu mythology (it was written before the novel but appeared in print after). But I would have been into the book abruptly ending when Ben says ‘I’ll be back’ like he’s Vampire Terminator. Imagine him riding out of town on a motorcycle if you want. I’ve always been into King’s tongue-in-cheek warning going into the end of Dark Tower, and with many of his books you can probably quit and write your own final few pages and he’d be into that.

‘Salem’s Lot is a wild ride of frights and fun that is worth the hefty size of the narrative. It’s early King and a few parts read as clunky (Ben’s interactions with women are a bit awkward too) but it’s a well told story that is worth the price of admission. There's a lot to talk about here and I do really appreciate the efforts made here to make horror into a work of literature by having a lot of symbolism and references that give some good depth to it. So enter, if you dare.

3.75/5

I love reading books multiple times because each time I read it I feel completely different about it. I find new things I missed, I view things from a different perspective. Each time its like reading a new book. I first read Salem's Lot when I was a teenager, I liked it but I didn't fully appreciate it.

Salem's Lot is a vampire novel but its so much more than that. Salem's Lot is about small town America and the disintegrating social fabric. One of the things I've come to appreciate most about Stephen King is his ability to bring out the horror of everyday life.

Salem's Lot is how I imagine a real life vampire attack would happen. The vampire would move to a small insular town and slowly rip it apart.

I recommend Salem's Lot to all horror lovers and to readers who love intricately plotted well written stories.

Well this is annoying times two. I just wrote a review and lost it, and then there's the *other* issue.

What other issue?

Oh, the one where my 14 year old self of infinite wisdom and experience remembered a boring tale lacking truly epic blood and guts from what should be a vampire tale in a small town. If that 14 year old could have had his way, then 80% of the novel would have been excised for being too-character driven, too-focused on hundreds of characters only set up to be knocked down in gruesome death (or undeath), and too detail-driven and poorly-paced for a thriller.

Damn, I was a dipshit. I'm not saying that I'm no longer a dipshit, mind you, just that I think that kid was a real idiot. I mean, I'd only been reading anything at all for less than a year and 8 months of that was focused on learning *how* to read. Of course I was going to be influenced more by the all the slasher movies rather than novel construction. I even watched the crapfest that I considered the made for tv movie based on this book, and I think I might have been a *little* too harsh on it, too.

So flash-forward to now, when I jump up the rating from a scathing 3 stars to a full-blown 5, an adult reading an adult novel of suspense, emotionally invested characters, subtle humor, more high-brow words than I remember Stephen King usually using in his novels, and beautifully crafted passages of hometown life falling into what might as well have been a modern retelling of a medieval town falling under the spell of the Black Plague, with all the horror and sadness and superstition that entails.

This novel was gripping and intense to my adult sensibilities. Do I feel like a fool for my old memories? Yes. Am I embarrassed? Yes. Am I absolutely impressed and amazed that the very first "trash" novelist I got into as a kid actually turned out to be a consummate master of the writing craft? Yes.

All the things I hated as a kid happen to be the things I love the most, here. The characters were absolutely gorgeous. I fell into them, and later, I fell into love with the whole town. The fact that it had a cancer that was eating away at it from the inside, slowly, was only a tension-driver. This may be a vampire novel, but it is really a tragedy, through and through. We expect to love and lose our loved ones, and this is the true horror. Not just the eyes like stars or the breath that smells of pure putrescence or the image of a supernatural horror that no longer needs keys because, now, the dead can squeeze between door jams.

Of course, Part 3 was all action all the time, with the stakes as high as it can be. It was all for the sake of pure survival. But Part 1 (the get to know you) and Part 2 (something isn't right) were some of the best readings of Stephen King, like, ever. :) Believe me, he has a personal formula when it comes to his writing, but I know of no one who's able to pull off exactly what he pulls off. He makes everyone so damn real to me. :)

Fun fact! There's a dead John Snow who knows nothing in this novel! Isn't that fun?

So, I've eaten crow and said that I'm sorry for being an childhood idiot, but what I really mean is that There Are No Sparkles. This is a novel of horrible anticipation and and deep sadness, of exciting vampire hunting with truly intelligent foes. There are no levelled-up vamps or long antihero arcs or Master Vampire Hunters. And best of all, there are no werewolves.

There is, however, a sense of reality and loss and fear, and if you are missing a huge dose of that in your life, if only to hold up as a mirror to your own life to say that things aren't so bad with you, then you really ought to jump out there and pick up a copy. I can't believe this is only SK's second novel! Wow!

I don’t read a lot of horror, so it’s taken me a bit longer than most to recognize the genius of Stephen King. Belated as it might be, I am finally making my way through his surprisingly versatile oeuvre. At this point, I think I’ve skimmed off much of the cream, having read several of his undisputed classics (The Stand, It, Pet Sematery, etc). Now I’m ready to bore down into the second level. Salem’s Lot is definitely a step down from King’s best, most enduring novels. That being said, horror done by King can really only be compared to horror done by King.

King is so ubiquitous (he’s written over 50 books) and so much a part of popular culture that it’s become hard to read one of his books without knowing everything about it before the first sentence. Take The Shining, for instance. You might not have tried the novel, but you’ve probably run across Kubrick’s classic film (which King hates), The Simpsons’ spot-on parody (“No beer and no T.V. make Homer go something, something”), or had the ending spoiled as the punch-line to a joke on Friends (Joey does not do well with spoilers).

Salem’s Lot has not had that same widespread cultural impact. It’s been adapted twice for television, as a movie and a miniseries. Despite this, I didn’t know anything about it when I started. This ignorance made for a better reading experience, so I’ll try to tread lightly, just in case you’re as late as I am to the Stephen King show.

Salem’s Lot is set in the small Maine town of Jerusalem’s Lot. A writer named Ben Mears, who grew up there, comes into town to write a novel and exorcise his demons. He starts canoodling with a young artist named Susan, and befriends an aging schoolteacher named Matt. Strange things start happening, emanating from the haunted Marsten House that overlooks the community. Those strange things, you will not be surprised, take a turn for the violent.

I think that’s about all I can safely say, plot-wise. I could probably stop writing right now, review complete. But then what excuse would I have for ignoring my family, specifically the child knocking on my office door right now?

Published in 1975, Salem’s Lot was King’s second novel, after Carrie. You can see early on many of the hallmarks he would work into his later efforts. There is the struggling writer as the lead character. There are children, both in danger and as heroes. There is care and detail taken into constructing Jerusalem’s Lot, which is given both geography and history. As he did later with Derry and Chester’s Mill, King gives you such a comprehensive rendering of Jerusalem’s Lot that you feel you can navigate its streets in your mind.

Salem’s Lot is written in the aggressively third-person omniscient style that he utilizes so well. King leaps from person to person, from consciousness to consciousness, giving you a story from an eclectic collection of viewpoints. Ben might be the moral and plot-necessitated hub, but there are many spokes. Among the dozens of characters, King gives us a small-town constable struggling with his courage; a young mother who abuses her newborn child; a couple engaging in a discrete affair; and a Catholic priest whose struggle is more with the bottle than his faith. Are all these characters necessary to the storyline? No, absolutely not. Many, if not most, could have been shorn. The 653 pages in my trade-paperback edition could easily have been halved, without losing any of the essence. But the excess is what sets King apart. It is what makes him great.

This is not, however, a great Stephen King novel. He is still experimenting with the themes that he’d nail later on. He does not have the complete and utter grasp of his material yet. There are lurches and sudden, jarring stops in the pacing.

Here, more than in his other novels, I strongly felt the outside literary influences guiding King’s hand. (It’s impossible not to, since King name-checks many of them within the story). Salem’s Lot feels like an amalgam of Stoker, Shirley Jackson, and Richard Matheson. Elements from those authors’ works are thrown into a pot and set to boil. King then adds his own secret sauce, that sauce being blood, and lots of it. It’s entertaining, but not seamless. There were times I was more interested in literary comparisons of early verses later King than I was in the tale unfolding on the pages before me.

The characterizations are just not there. King has the ability – think Jack Torrance, in The Shining – to create characters of incredible depth and complexity. Characters that are unforgettable. That’s not present in Salem’s Lot. More importantly, the connections between the characters is lacking. Ben saunters into town and quickly falls in love with a woman and becomes BFFs with a guy. This happens overnight, with no real explanation except expediency. As the plot reaches its endgame, and people find themselves in mortal danger, King desperately needs us to believe in the bonds – love, affection, loyalty – between his characters. But it’s just not there. I didn't believe in Ben’s humanity beyond his role as a pawn in King’s chess match. Thus, I didn't feel any stakes when Ben, and the people around him, found themselves struggling with their very lives.

Perhaps it’s not necessary to think so deeply about Salem’s Lot. It’s just a genre throwaway, right? A guilty pleasure worth a cheap thrill? Something to be read at the turning of the season, when leaves change and fall, when the air sharpens like knives, when the long dark of winter begins whistling in the wind?

I don’t think so.

King is an American treasure. He is a master. He has a gift for baking complex and knotty themes into deceptively simple spook stories. His unmatched skill has probably made it easier for us to take him for granted. The guy churns out 800-page blockbusters by the gross, books that’ll be read by millions for years to come. Yet he’ll never get the same fawning attention that some Iowa Writers Workshop alum receives for delivering a slim, affected deconstruction of suburban ennui, or the laurels heaped upon some Harvard-grad twenty-something for capturing the acute travails of being young, sardonic, and overeducated in New York City.

In that spirit, I can say that Salem’s Lot is not King at his best. It is, however, better and more effective than most books you’ll read. And I don’t mean just horror novels. I mean novels in general.

Salem’s Lot by Stephen King is a 2011 Anchor Books publication. (Originally published in 1975)

I read a decent amount of horror novels when I was a teenager. My first introduction to Stephen King was with ‘Carrie’. But it was the heyday of pulp horror novels, with lots of books to choose from out there and long story short, I never got around to reading this book until the early eighties. I had read other King books by that time, and if memory serves, I’d watched the made for TV movie before I read this book. Eventually, I got around to getting a paperback copy of the book, and while I’m sure it would have given me a few restless nights under ordinary circumstances, I had a unique, humorous and unforgettable experience while reading this book, which was truly nightmarish-

I was only a little way into the book, when my roommate invited me to stay at her parents’ house one weekend. Apparently, her family had just purchased a fixer upper Victorian and were eager to show off their latest renovations. As it turns out, the house was located out in the middle of nowhere, which is great, during the daylight hours. My room was on the top floor, and as always, even way back then, I’d packed a paperback with me. As everyone settled in for the night, the quiet, the inky, pitch-black dark, an unfamiliar house, out in the middle of nowhere… and reading Salem’s Lot, by Stephen King, made for a sleepless night spent tossing and turning and jumping at every little sound. I kept imagining Danny Glick floating outside one of those second story windows. This book scared the crap out of me!! And I loved it!!

“And all around them, the bestiality of the night rises on tenebrous wings. The vampire’s time has come.”

Spook-tacular, Fang-tastic and 4 ‘bloodthirsty’ stars for a book by an author that needs no introduction, and this time delivers a vampire-ology story about a town under siege from a growing number of vampires in Jeru-salem’s Lot.

Chilling, haunting and horrifyingly fang-tastic – once it got going!!! and my first addition to my spooky month reading list.

The Plot

With the image of Marsten House still haunting his mind, Ben Mears returns to his home town to finally put the ghosts of his childhood to rest, by writing a book about this seemingly haunted house.

“The town kept its secrets, and the Marsten House brooded over it like a ruined king.”

However, Ben’s arrival coincides with the disappearance of more of the town’s folk – but only slowly and with no connection which helps supress the towns hysteria and suspicion, and creates that perfect hunting atmosphere. Add to this, Marsten House finds itself a new owner. The strange and reclusive Straker who brings his own brand of mystery and menace, but it is the investigation, discovery and hunt for the vampires that delivers the most in suspense, thrills, and chills.

With Susan, his new love and former college student, and Matt (the schoolteacher), all three embark on this classic hunt for answers and ultimately the vampires. Although not an easy task because this breed, unlike other vampire stories, can operate in daylight which added to the ever-present sense of doom and evil.

Review and Comments

We had a lot of peripheral characters in this story, which was probably needed for the numbers the vampires eventually kill off – a blood thirsty lot!!! Other than that, the characters did not add much to the story. It was this and the very slow pace at the start that brought this down to a 4 star read. However, the rest of the book was spook-tacular.

The pacing in the rest of the novel was just right, which helped create the perfect atmosphere and tone for this spine-chilling book. The evil was accretive, gradual, and penetrating and the events were so well articulated and put together, that on occasions I found myself at the edge of my seat or doing my Meerkat impersonation with every noise around me. Ok, horror is not my thing for a reason.

I do love authors who dare to kill off some of the main characters, instead of playing safe. So, in all a wonderful and compelling book for Halloween month, a timeless, eerie, and creepy classic and a recommendation to anyone who enjoys a bit of yearly fright or horror stories in general.

Lingering, ominous, and spine chilling without the gore.

“If a fear cannot be articulated, it can’t be conquered.”

Ok I confess my fear - this scared the pants of me, in some chapters - now I’ve conquered. Sorted!!!

Don't know why this is marked as unread, I've read it four times.

It's one of the best horror novels of all time.

On my journey to reading all Stephen King's books in publication order, this was the next on my list. Well, what a book. This book is a masterpiece in horror fiction and one of the best things I've ever read. If you were thinking about reading Stephen King for the first time this would be a brilliant place to start.

Like so many of SK's books we follow a group of unlikely hero's trying to save a town from evil. I think the character development was brilliant even though this isn't that long of a book. SK manages to keep the reader engrossed from the first to the last sentence.

I have never been a big fan of vampire stories, but this book completely changed my mind. This book will leave you with chills running down your spine and a feeling of dread next time you venture into a deserted looking town. Although written so long ago this book still feels like a modern horror and has stood the test of time.

The plotline of this book is so well done, and it flows effortlessly and that's one of the reasons that I rate SK so highly. His work never feels messy or unorganized and its easy for the reader to digest everything that's going on with ease. Barlow is so creepy and is the perfect villain! I think it is also worth mentioning that between the creepy fast-paced sometimes tragic moments there are moments of beauty, creating a perfect parallel.

"But when fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you."

"The basis of all human fears, he thought. A closed door, slightly ajar."

"The town kept its secrets, and the Marsten House brooded over it like a ruined king."

Why didn't I give this book the full five stars...well it just comes down to the fact that vampires don't scare me all that much - but SK nearly changed my mind! It isn't often I give a book five stars unless it stays with me for weeks and although a killer horror, it didn't stay in my mind for much longer than a few days.

Truly a work of art, I will be putting this book back on my shelf to re-read because it is an amazing story and deserves all the credit it gets.

Me encanta que usen los vampiros tradicionales.
Los personajes son buenos, y Stephen King no le tiembla la mano para deshacerse de algunos con los que te encariñas. Tiene escenas que amé como no tienen idea, escenas únicas y truculentas que no encontrarás en otro lado. Me gustó mucho la historia y todo su desarrollo. Sin embargo, noté mucha similitud con Drácula: el bien contra el mal, y una persecución; que ya he visto en varios libros. Pero, aquí Stephen King lo utiliza de buena manera saliendo un poco de ese camino. Utiliza al pueblo de Salem's Lot como un personaje adicional. Repito: ¡TIENE ESCENAS INCREÍBLES! ¡Totalmente recomendado!

Closer to a 3.5
I had a lot of fun reading this book, and I vlogged my experience reading it: https://youtu.be/MmRbre1wn8o

1.24.19-I just finished my third read of SALEM'S LOT, this time via audiobook. The narrator, Ron McClarty worked well for me and I found this tale as satisfying as it ever was.

11.1.2014-Original review.

I just finished a re-read of this book with the Horror Aficionados group here at Goodreads. I'm so glad that I participated!


Remember little Danny Glick?

I first read this book in junior high or high school. It's been about 30 years since then, unfortunately. I've read The Stand and IT a couple of times each, but I never did pick this one up again. Finally, that has been rectified and what a payoff!


I forgot how well this story wrapped its arms around the reader and refused to let them go. We meander through the town, meeting its residents and learning about their daily lives. (I think Stephen King excels at this, mostly because you can tell he knows what he's talking about.) We focus our attentions on a few different characters-some strong, some weak-but they're all human with characteristics, (both good and bad, )that we recognize.

Quote: "The town cares for devil's work no more than it cares for God's or man's. It knew darkness. And darkness was enough."

I feel that's all I need to say. I have nothing new to bring to a review of a book that has thousands of reviews already. If you haven't read this tale, you should.