My first Stephen King book finally done and it was great! I wasn't really sure what to expect going into this other than vampires. I certainly wasn't expecting King to introduce me to an entire-ass town and everybody inside it but it helped build the relationships and characters very well. As others have said, this book has outstanding townbuilding. We get to know who everybody is and the role they play within the Lot. Part 1 of this book is definitely the slowest portion of the entire book but it was done incredibly well, as King slowly drips in bits and pieces of what's to come. It's a very slow burn to start but a good one.

Part 2 and Part 3 are when the plot really kicks in and the pacing picks up. There are some fantastic and atmospheric horrific scenes and a sense of dread whenever someone is wandering around in the dark. King does a fantastic job of making the reader feel the situation they are in.

Without spoiling anything, I love what was done with the prologue and the epilogue and how everything comes together in this book. I'm incredibly curious to see how this will eventually tie in with The Dark Tower, as that's my main reason for starting King but that will come soon enough.

Overall I enjoyed this book a lot and it was entirely different from books that I typically read. I can already tell that King is going to put a heavy emphasis on building his characters and really making them the central focus of his books.

There are a few lines in this book that stuck out to me that I wanted to highlight as well that I just thought were wonderfully written and really captured the feeling that King wants us to feel while reading this book.

"Alone. Yes, that’s the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn’t hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym.… There was a ruined church along the way, an old Methodist meeting house, which reared its shambles at the far end of a frost-heaved and hummocked lawn, and when you walked past the view of its glaring, senseless windows your footsteps became very loud in your ears and whatever you had been whistling died on your lips and you thought about how it must be inside—the overturned pews, the rotting hymnals, the crumbling altar where only mice now kept the sabbath, and you wondered what might be in there besides mice—what madmen, what monsters. Maybe they were peering out at you with yellow reptilian eyes. And maybe one night watching would not be enough; maybe some night that splintered, crazily hung door would be thrown open, and what you saw standing there would drive you to lunacy at one look."

"If a fear cannot be articulated, it can’t be conquered. And the fears locked in small brains are much too large to pass through the orifice of the mouth. Sooner or later you found someone to walk past all the deserted meeting houses you had to pass between grinning babyhood and grunting senility. Until tonight. Until tonight when you found out that none of the old fears had been staked—only tucked away in their tiny, child-sized coffins with a wild rose on top."

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

Vampires are my personal bogeyman



I remember seeing "Salem's Lot" the movie, with David Soul as Ben Mears, when I was fifteen years old, and I truly believed in the existence of vampires for at least a week after watching that movie. (...and maybe, I never stopped believing...)

Sometime in my early twenties, I picked up a copy of Salem's Lot and read it for the first time. So it's been a while, close to thirty years between reads.

Some people may say that this book begins as a slow burn, but I didn't find it that way. From the moment that a clearly haunted Ben Mears comes to the Lot and tells of his childhood encounter with a ghost, it was on for me.

Stephen King's vampires are truly horrific, easily characterised as demonically possessed, blood drinking ghosts with the power to mesmerise their victims - never, ever, look into their eyes.

Like some other stories by Stephen King that I have read, hell is other people, and the people of Salem's Lot provide a full panorama view of themselves falling prey to their own natures as much as they fall prey to the curse of vampires sweeping their town.

On a technical note, I was completely surprised by the authors use of a deus ex machina about half way through the novel. One of his main characters is in a right pickle, and Stephen King provides him with a genius level ability to solve the problem, without any foreshadowing that I could see. It blew me right out of immersion in the narrative.

If the overall narrative was not so damn good, this would drop the rating by a star, however, I can't bring myself to not give this book, which has impacted me on multiple levels anything less than five stars.

A recommended read for anyone who would enjoy a genuinely scary, spooky, creep you out and possibly give you nightmares story.

As with many King's, I loved this even more upon reread.

This story will always hold a special place in my heart, but more than that, I'm considering proclaiming it my FAVORITE BOOK OF ALL TIME!!!

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.

‘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

King's undeniable talent is on full display in Salem's lot if not his creativity and originality. based in a small 1970's new England town a setting King is very familiar with and filled with characters with different spectral aspects of himself. This allows his personal experiences to add convicting weight to his considerable descriptive powers. which culminates into a very immersive and believable world where vampires are real and taking over.

unfortunately 1970's New England is not nostalgic to me at all. And I did not like most of the character in the book. so that aspect missed the mark for this reader. Salem's Lot just came off as hopelessly dated. I remember one of my favorite shows in high school was THAT 70's SHOW and my dad hated it. telling me and my brother that the 70's were nothing like that to him. I know this is off topic. but I use it to defend King, (not that he needs defending from a butcher from Georgia) my father would agree with this interpretation of 1970 small town America and feel nostalgic. my not feeling it is not a knock on King but a warning to other Gen Xers and millennials alike.

as I said the characters are believable and all in all well developed some are cliché but I do think they serve their purpose. the vampire aspect is also well done with Barlow embodying the classic European vampire. to me he was scary. i will admit Barlow is cliché to modern readers. king delivers the chills no the less.

Salem's lot is a 4 star read except for one major flaw AND HERE IS THE SPOILER SO STOP IF YOU HAVE NOT READ IT YET:  in the version I read he tells you in the beginning about a man and a boy who are not related trying to escape a traumatic experience. and than catalogs news paper articles about the town and you find out in a few cases who survived. this added a little intrigue but for the most part ruined the suspense because I figured out large portions of the ending>. to defend king (who again does not need defending) one last time Salem's lot may be Cliché but he succeeds in his second book his goal to make a 1970 Dracula in America. well done!

I hate vampires. I hate them and I hate books about them. I hate the way they're romanticized and sexualized and just generally presented in modern fiction. That's why I loved this book. King doesn't shy away from the fact that vampires are creatures of horror and he presents them as such. They are vile, violent, and everywhere, and that's the way I like them.

The characters pitted against them, particularly the priest, are compelling and almost too human to face the vampires. And, in the end, they don't actually triumph. They escape but that's about it. It's tragic and horrible and the perfect vampire book.

3 stars

n  “At three in the morning the blood runs slow and thick, and slumber is heavy. The soul either sleeps in blessed ignorance of such an hour or gazes about itself in utter despair. There is no middle ground.”n

'Salem's Lot is a novel that will surely be enjoyed by many. There is a lot of things that many people may find interesting and alluring. Unfortunately, this one just wasn't for me. Stephen King's second novel follows various characters from a small town in Maine called Jerusalem's Lot as strange occurrences begin to happen. Not only are people disappearing and dying way more often (in peculiar ways, one must add), but the bodies seem to be disappearing too! Will our main characters find out what is going on in this town and be able to stop it?

I know that this is a novel loved by many. There are many things here that I personally didn't love, but I know that other people might, so let's go over them. 'Salem's Lot is written in a very interesting way. The writing itself has a lot of character: it is very descriptive, gory, and will be able to convey a sense of a small town very well. You will be introduced to even the most insignificant hunchback as King paints the picture of Jerusalem's Lot. I know a lot of people love this atmospheric writing style and will love spending time in the town. Personally, it was a bit much for me. After a while I just got bored, I am sorry to say. Especially since we are thrown into extensive descriptions of the Lot so early and in info-dumps (similar to Primeval and Other Times), I had trouble discerning what information was the most important for me to continue understanding the story.

Another thing that I personally didn't love but I know that many others might enjoy is the slow burn of the story. The first half pretty much plants clues for what is to come and sets up Jerusalem's Lot very well. Of course, I knew it was going to be a slow burn but DEAR GOD it was a snail-pace slow burn. King is a master at building suspense, but I believe that he did this way better in Carrie where he still managed to keep my intrigued all the way through. This is probably because we knew exactly who we were supposed to be focused on in the narrative, whereas here random characters are thrown at you and I just got lost. So not only was the slow burn a tiny bit too slow for me, but I was also very confused. Those of you that have good memory and can really invest yourself in a story and appreciate every word this will not be an issue.

The thing that I thought was done exemplarily was the character work. Although you can have a hard time rapping your head around all the characters, once you do, you can really dig deep into their progressions. This is an aspect that I really enjoyed, but it really comes into play in the second part of the novel and left me wanting more in the first.

The introduction was also very interesting. The intrigue and mystery is set up by the very first chapter where we follow an unnamed man and boy who move around together, but are not related. I definitely can see how this influenced many novels after 'Salem's Lot.

'Salem's Lot has a lot going for it. It is highly original and intriguing. Unfortunately, I just didn't click with it.

I also just realised this is the first novel where the vampires are actually supposed to be scary *surprised pikachu face*

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.

4.5 stars

I feel like there has been a lot of debate over Stephen King's last few books about what genre he might be considered anymore. Mystery, sci-fi, fantasy, general fiction, etc. etc. etc. - you just don't hear Stephen King = horror all that much anymore. Well, if you want to get back to the roots, Salem's Lot is pure, raw, old school Stephen King horror at its finest!

I am doing a re-read of most of Stephen King's books chronologically and Salem's Lot was the next after Carrie. I read it originally sometime back in the 90s. I am so glad I did because, honestly, I don't remember any of it!

Salem's Lot is a vampire story influenced by vampire fiction, like Stoker's Dracula, as well as vampire horror flicks. The influence of both these mediums is very evident, while at the same time King crafts a new, unique, and terrifying vampire story of his own. If you are a fan of the original, raw, pure evil vampire (not ones that sparkle), you need to make sure and read this book!

Those of you out there who have heard about King, haven't read him before, and are wondering where to start, this would be a great place to do so! I think many would agree that this is up there with King's horror fiction at its best.

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!

n  n
From the 1979 movie version of Salem’s Lot

”It would be years before I would hear Alfred Bester’s axiom ‘the book is the boss,’ but I didn’t need to; I learned it for myself writing the novel that eventually became Salem’s Lot. Of course, the writer can impose control; it’s just a really shitty idea. Writing controlled fiction is called ‘plotting.’ Buckling your seatbelt and letting the story take over, however...that is called ‘storytelling.’ Storytelling is as natural as breathing; plotting is the literary version of artificial respiration.”

This nugget of wisdom is shared by Stephen King in the introduction to the 2005 illustrated edition of Salem’s Lot. I have to say that I completely agree with this philosophy. I have talked to many would-be writers who are so bogged down in getting the outline of their story completely figured out that they never actually get to the writing part of the process. I like having a few concepts in my head before I start whacking away at that mesmerizing whiteness of the blank page, but if I have it all figured out,...then why write it? The fun part is discovering the nuances of the maze before I find the exit.

Stephen King grew up in a small town in New England, and it seems like he has been waging war on small towns every since. n  ”There’s little good in sedentary small towns. Mostly indifference spiced with an occasional vapid evil--or worse, a conscious one. I believe Thomas Wolfe wrote about seven pounds of literature about that.”n I, too, grew up in a small town and fully intend, in the scope of my writing, to eviscerate some of the more heinous aspects of small town “values.”

I love Paul Bettany’s line from the movie Knight’s Tale. n  Chaucer: “I will eviscerate you in fiction. Every pimple, every character flaw. I was naked for a day; you will be naked for eternity.”n I always like to say that my career is littered with the corpses of my enemies.(Hyperbole) Just a word of warning for those still breathing: I will reveal you for the bloody bastards/bitches you are in my fiction. If you think it isn’t you...it probably is. #evillaughwahaha

Jerusalem’s Lot is that typical small town that King loves to destroy on a regular basis, and this time his weapon is...vampires. The Marsten House, the scene of unspeakable tragedies, has been left empty for many years. It is a grand mansion falling into ruin by the very evilness that seems to fester in the walls and the rafters clear down to the bedrock. Ben Mears has come back to town to write about the place and intends to actually stay on the premises, but learns on his arrival that the house has been sold. Who would really want to stay there anyway? n  ”The house smelled. You wouldn’t believe how it smelled. Mildew and upholstery rot and a kind of rancid smell like butter that had gone over. And living things--rats or woodchucks or whatever else that had been nesting in the walls or hibernating in the cellar. A yellow, wet smell.”n

The Marsten House is the perfect place for a vampire named Barlow and his assistant R. T. Straker to take up residence. The first clue should have been the initials; remember Dracula’s assistant...R. M. Renfield. The one word name as well...Barlow…. What does he think—he is Prince?

Yes, he does, and much, much more. He is, ultimately, a God fashioning people in his own image.

As Barlow picks off the residents of Jerusalem's Lot one by one and turns them into an army of hungry vampires, a small band of misfits start to fight back. After all, who else, but the freaks and oddballs would believe that there really are vampires?n  ”An old teacher half-cracked with books, a writer obsessed with his childhood nightmares, a little boy who has taken a postgraduate course in vampire lore from the films and the modern penny-dreadfuls.”n

Barlow has certainly had better men and women than these who have tried to destroy him. He has become overconfident and underestimates the courage and resolve of this disenfranchised band of eccentrics he is dealing with. Check out this condescending speech he lays on Ben Mears:

n  ”Look and see me, puny man. Look upon Barlow, who has passed the centuries as you have passed hours before a fireplace with a book. Look and see the great creature of the night whom you would slay with your miserable little stick. Look upon me, scribbler. I have written in human lives, and blood has been my ink. Look upon me and despair!”n

No one is more shocked than Stephen King that his idea for a vampire hoard destroying one of his loathed small towns turns into an inspiring, uplifting novel of the weak fighting back against the most powerful. It is a slow burn of a plot. King uses the early pages of the novel to let us get to know these people before we see them tested beyond normal human endurance. Fortunately, his working title of Second Coming was vetoed for the published title by his wife Tabitha who, rightly so, decided it would be a better title for a sex manual. It is a nice ode to the classic vampire myth and manages to add some original stake splattering moments to the genre. Salem’s Lot has become a classic of fanged literature. King proves his storytelling chops.

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