2nd time around with this book and I opted for the audio this time. The narrator was great, really sold the story. Though I remembered the bones of the plot I was surprised by how much I forgot.
King writes a sprawling tale with incredible world building, and that's really what I loved the second time around. The characters all felt like people I've met before in other King books with a few wonderful exceptions, but by the time the book was over I felt like I knew Jerusalem's Lot and it's inhabitants as if I lived there myself.
It's not my favorite King book but it's up there.

This book was very difficult to get into. I started it, or tried to at least, December 2021 but wasn't able to get into it. I tried a few months back to read it again, made little progress but put it on hold once more. Last week, however, I decided that I need to finish this book for better or for worse. A friend lent me his copy a year ago and it was about time I give it back. Fortunately, once I made some progress and managed to finish the first 200 pages, I found myself immersed in the story and had a difficult time putting the book down.

More thoughts on this book to come.

The last time I picked up a King novel, my inclination towards critical analysis of a text was still just a budding obsession. Now it is an enduring preoccupation. Try as I may, I cannot overlook the subtle slips in King's plot arrangement and characterization any more - the inevitability of women being cast in the molds of the lover or the victim of abuse or the tactless ingenue is a veritable threat to my fangirlism. (This is not to mention the tropes of the 'magical negro' and other assorted cliched representations of people of color.)

And yet I cannot challenge the legitimacy of his repute as a master story-teller. Even though it has been many years since I picked up my first King title from the bookshelves of a friend, his words still make me break out in goose flesh in the middle of the night, his narrative voice exerts a hypnotic pull rendering me incapable of detaching myself from the world wrecked by paranormal phenomenon that he carefully builds from scratch. The horror that King conjures up here is not just a direct consequence of the emergence of an unknown, malevolent force which destabilizes the functioning of a secluded small town but the sinister darkness of the human soul which needs just the right trigger to be unleashed, to soundlessly absorb all capacity for reason and leave a bestial urge for carnage in its place. The supernatural forces that threaten to disrupt the lives of King's characters are symbolic of the evils existing in the realm of reality - the ominous shadows of war, hunger, poverty, totalitarianism.

All accusations of profit-making and sacrificing good writing on the altar of plot can be damned to hell. King can write a wordy passage fraught with grim philosophical reflections when he wishes to. He can still rescue me from a miserable reading rut and remind me of the hollowness of ritualism - that faith is not prayer offered without feeling or the routine thumbing of rosary beads but simply the mind channeling an inner strength to purge the darkness within, professing unwavering devotion to a worthy cause.

n  ...the good was more elemental, less refined. It was ore, like something coughed up out of the ground in naked chunks. There was nothing finished about it. It was Force; it was Power, it was whatever moved the greatest wheels of the universe.n

Before the abomination called 'Twilight' inspired the publishing industry to mass market vampires as lustful, gorgeous, innocuous hunks ready to pleasure women at their behest, there were fictional bloodsucking fiends like the ones in 'Salem's Lot. And no that is not a spoiler, given most community reviews here contain more generous spoiler-y synopses in this regard.

In terms of thematic resonance and characterization this is far from King's best work, but if you haven't yet made yourself familiar with Bram Stoker's masterpiece and wish to make the acquaintance of vampires who give rise to pure spine-tingling, bone-chilling terror, this is the book for you. Fans of The Haunting of Hill House will also find something of value here.

I am just glad that there are a great many number of King titles out there left for me to devour.