Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Genre: Horror

Salem’s Lot name comes from Jerusalem’s Lot and it is a small town in New England where many strange things happen that do not make any sense. Now an author, Ben Mears returns to his childhood town to write a new story about the town and the horrific incident he faced when he was a child. When he decides to rent and stay in Masten House, the place where that incident happened to him, he is informed that the scary house has been bought by a strange man called Kurt Barlow to turn it into an antique store. Things start to change and intensify in the lot with the disappearance of a young boy. And then horror strikes in a big way!

The story is narrated from multiple POVs but mainly it covers Ben and Susan’s perspectives and then the lot in general. Thankfully the narration is in third-party style so there will be no confusion or any kind of mix-up between the characters. This is a slow-burn horror and as Stephen King stated, it is a kind of a modern version of Dracula (I still have not read that one). However, I am not sure besides the vampires what is similar between the two books.

While reading this book, I made sure to create the right atmosphere for it. I read it at night in my bed in total darkness with a single bedside table lamp. You have no idea how many times I got scared and gasped whenever I heard the random little noises. I was so immersed in the story that I felt myself to be a part of the residents of the lot. Of course, the amazing writing and atmosphere building by the author helped it a lot.

Like most of King’s novels, the characters are well developed and have strong personalities. The author gets in so many tiny details to make you feel as if you already know these characters. And that includes the secondary characters as well, not just the main ones. I liked everything about this novel! This was written at a time when vampires were scary creatures unlike today when they are oversexualized and are more like love interests!

The edition of the book I own also includes two short stories, One for the Road and Jerusalem’s Lot. The first is many years after the events of Salem’s Lot and the second is like a prequel set in 1850. I enjoyed both. They are creepy and highly atmospheric too. I still don’t know what is the connection between this book and The Dark Tower series. I think one of the characters in this book might appear in one of The Dark Tower’s books. I guess I will find out when the time comes for the next tower book.

Note: Salem’s Lot is a part of my reading of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series. This is Book No.8 of 24 books I am going to read for this series.

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.

‘Salem’s Lot was my first Stephen King read and boy it did not disappoint whatsoever. It gave me sleepless nights. Honestly.

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

Stephen King is an author who I’ve always wanted to read, but just never got round to it. Not long ago my dad said it was time for my brother and I to be introduced to the world of vampires. So it began. We only read at night time.

‘Salem’s Lot is a story of 3 parts. Part 1 introducing the town of Jerusalem’s Lot, mainly following the main character of Ben Mears, a writer who has returned to his boyhood town looking to conquer some sort of fear. We are also introduced to a wide cast of characters and see their lives in the town. It was slow but poignant and written very well.

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

Part 2 - the tension built, I started to eye the window in my room peering out into the darkness with suspicion. By the beginning of Part 3 I had covered my window with a new blind, which I vowed to keep pulled down until I finished the book.

It is a story of vampires, of how it can feel real, how no matter how close you are with the residents who live around you, you never really know what’s going on behind closed doors.

“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.”

I loved the pacing and the storytelling of ‘Salem’s Lot. There were so many twists, so many threads that were pulled together producing lots of satisfactory smiles, or even panic at the realisation of a favourite character about to find themselves in deep horror.

Stephen King has a way of making Jerusalem’s Lot feel like a very real, breathing and living town. The characters are quirky and intense with all manner of personalities interacting with each other. I loved the main cast, such as Ben Mears, Cody, Mark Petrie, Susan and Matt. And this connection with them early on made Part 3 hit even harder.

“If a man dethrones God in his heart, Satan must ascend to His position.”

It’s a scary book, with moments that actually felt like jump scares. There are creepy scenes that I’m sure will stick with me for a long time. I fear I won’t look at looming trees, the sunset, or a cemetery the same way again. Or antique dealers.

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

5/5 - One of my favourite reads this year. I am so glad I ventured into this fantastic reimagining of vampires. It’s authentic and all-too-real. Highly recommended to everyone.

This is a hard review to write because I didn’t enjoy Salem’s Lot as much as I was hoping – my expectations were way too high - although I now better appreciate how good Stephen King is as a writer.

I’ll get straight to the point. This is a terrifically fluid read, but it’s not particularly scary. Essentially, horror for the mainstream - gripping, but not up-all-night intensely compelling - massive on scope with so many characters and potential side stories, in some ways rambling but also coming full circle to focus on the wider picture in a concise and satisfying way.

It’s the sort of book you might buy at a newsstand before a long-haul flight, content with being introduced to so many new characters, friends, families and confidants, seamlessly invited into the fictional world where day-to-day events unpretentiously roll into your subconscious. People get along well in a friendly community in which world building and character development are excellent. When the real action gets going there's already an important sense of investment and personal attachment and Stephen King does a great job of tenderizing our soft underbellies before exposing us to any real threat. He tends to over develop the characters, though, and keeps on introducing less significant personalities instead of concentrating on the core horror, which, for me, failed to deliver enough caustic punch to counter the buildup. It not hard-hitting enough, but these are mild criticisms.

Stephen King is brilliant at developing relationships in a Tolkien-esque and delusional world where human beings are soft little hobbits ready to keep the Shire harmonious at all costs, and once the evil is extinguished, we're all best friends again. The story focuses on friendly chit-chat and getting-to-know-you vibes and is almost clean cut and convivial at times. We know where the evil is coming from, but we won’t get to know what’s going on in the Marsten house until Stephen King is good and ready to tell us, and let’s face it, we never really find out where the evil comes from or why it's there.

It's impressive for only Stephen King’s second book, published in 1975, and I am keen to step back to Carrie, his first book, to compare it with prior knowledge (I knew nothing about Salem’s Lot) and to see if it’s written in the same way, before moving on to later and more mature works, hopefully.

The book gets properly going about a third of the way in when it starts to acknowledge the existence of vampires. And by 40% it ramps up quite a bit, and there's a really mature, educational and rationalized chapter about halfway through that helps to allay any fears that things are becoming OTT or ridiculous, taking things back down to earth before any serious life-changing confrontations can take place. This is a skillful technique of slowing things down when the bombastic nature of monster slaying could get out of hand.

I really enjoy these slowdowns, but this is where I start to query the originality of the book.

There's a large smattering of The Exorcist in here, published three or four years earlier in 1971! Priests with flaming crosses against dark, evil hosts.

There are so many more throwbacks to other important horror books, too, with some openly discussed while others are well hidden.

- The Haunting of Hill House - 1959 - with the house on the hill element. The classic horror trope.

- The Whippoorwill birds from The Dunwich Horror, cawing nightmarish terror in the presence of evil.

- The mention of Christabel by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and its character Geraldine who assumes a proto-vampiric role, written around 1797, similar to the lesbian undertones of Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan le Fanu, although there are no LGBTQ+ references of any sort in Salem’s Lot.

- Dracula, of course, with vampires needing to be invited in, having extreme hatred of crosses, sunlight and running water, plus stakes, garlic, holy water, metamorphoses into thin air, fangs, etc.

- Straker as the equivalent of Renfield in Dracula, as the human henchman.

- I am Legend - 1954 – let us carve hundreds of stakes to rid the community of the vampire plague!

Yes, I’m thrusting the word cliché around and the excessive use of crosses and bibles gets a bit much. The assumption that vampires are Christian, too? Or anti-Christian. Would a copy of the Koran thrust into a vampire's face have a similar effect? If not, why not? I’m not trying to establish scientific caveats in the plot, but the use of crosses is a bit generic, but then again, so are vampires and I love everything about them!

In vampire literature there’s always a sinister undercurrent. Vampires are subtle, highly educated and maliciously determined. Movie directors sometimes portray them as fast, rushing, powerful super beings, often coming at you in zombie-like hoards, ripping flesh wherever they can. In historical fiction they live in small covens and hide at night in secrecy and are considerably scary, and this is where Stephen King gets it right. This is his version. Vampires will attempt to slowly dominate the entire landscape like an unstoppable and almost invisible plague. Think of the shuffling hoards circling the house every night in I Am Legend (stunning book) and compare that to movie adaptations that have nothing in common with it.

Stephen King is such a fantastic writer that I’m in awe of him, but he emphasizes too much on humans needing to get it right, and less on vampires and how they might feel, which is what makes Let The Right One in so amazing. Sometimes I want more restraint, more unexplained mystery and less hand-holding, less delivered on a plate.

We know we're in for a treat, the question is, how to arrange the final push? I like a bit of blandness, darkness, ordinary textures and failure, but I thought Salem's lot was a bit obvious and convenient and therefore failed to shock or surprise. It feels kind of dated and borrowed.

But this is only his second published novel! Wow! If you gave me fifty versions of myself in a parallel universe with unlimited time, resources and keyboard-tapping monkeys, I couldn't write a tenth as good as this. Like a beehive with its intricate and perfect hexagonal construction, scientifically understandable but also inexplicably complex at how it joins together.

The lack of hard-hitting splatter or gore as the plot unfolds bored me a bit and made the storytelling feel whitewashed, clean and almost sandpapered to a commercial sheen. But hey, when the character development is as good as this?

I wish I'd read this book 40 years ago when I had zero expectations, it might have blown my mind the way Tolkien did - I can imagine my teenage self breathlessly guzzling through the chapters to reach the conclusion - but on closer and more retrospective inspection it’s kind of breezy and farfetched and doesn't always hold up to closer scrutiny, but it's still a great introduction to Stephen King and I’m kind of excited to see what comes next? Who knows, I may become an SK crusader and go on a six-month virtual tour of his novels.

I remember being severely creeped out when I first read this book in early high school. I probably read it initially to irritate my mom about my reading choices but soon found that by carrying it around while I was reading it, many girls asked me questions about the book. Reading was even more cool! :)

After seeing the new trailer for "IT" I decided to pull up some early King to see if it was just my young age that terrified me or if there really was something about the writing. I am pleased to say there was much more to it! This book terrified me yet again.

Ben Mears comes back to his home town to see if he can get rid of some of his personal demons while he writes a new novel. While growing up, he and his friends had dared each other to go into the Marston house where a suicide and murder had taken place. The house is almost like a beacon to him. He will definitely get more than he expected in this house of horrors.

There are moments where I was chuckling about a comment from one of the characters and then three pages later I had cold-chill-goose-flesh going down my back. Though some of the in-depth descriptions could have been shortened to heighten the action, I still really enjoyed re-reading this very much!

If you haven't had the opportunity, you really should pick up this book. Stephen King certainly does have magic in his writing.

I watched a Stephen King interview recently and he was talking about when he first fell in love with reading and he said if had to choose between love and books he would really have to sit and think about that choice and in all the SK books I have read so far his love of books and reading is always evident. There are always books, there are always references to books, there are always quotes from books and this alone is what I adore SK for. He is a fellow bookworm, or maybe book dragon is more appropriate for him.

The Haunting of Hill House, Frankenstein, Dracula, they all feature and I love how Dracula especially was incorporated into this book.

I went into Salems Lot completely blind so imagine how excited i was to meet vampires! I had no idea that SK had a vampire novel and without a doubt these guys are my favourite vamps so far!

Totally loved this, i connected with all these characters (and I'm overjoyed to now realise that some of these guys feature more of the SK multi-verse), I adored the way myth, legend, books and comics all ground together to create an amazing plot that totally freaked me out and I loved the whole small town syndrome, it felt very visual to me.

Awesome book, SK as always providing the best in both character development and plot lines for a read that I personally adored even if I will be sleeping with the lights on for the next week!

5 blood soaked stars.

2.0 Stars
Unpopular opinion time. I really did not enjoy this one. The story took forever to get going and by the time it did, I was bored and not invested in the characters or plot.

Salem’s Lot is the first and only Stephen King novel I’ve ever read.

To be honest, this is a short review because I didn’t finish it. The problem wasn’t that King wasn’t a compelling writer who has obviously honed his craft. Every single chapter was interesting and immersive. I found myself drawn into the world he was spinning and deeply intrigued by the mystery of it all.

However, I suppose I couldn’t read it because this book is what I imagine it would be like to live with ADHD. It bounced around for no apparent reason following random people’s lives. Whilst I know King probably has an excellent reason for showing all these random stories, his story-telling fell short just enough to make me lose interest.

I figured since he showed no compulsion to get on with the damn story, then maybe it was because he found the various stereotyped small-town occupants and their day-to-day lives more interesting than the thrilling horror this novel promised to be.

I’m sad I could only give this novel three stars because what I read of this book, I actually really enjoyed and would earnestly consider finding some of his other work to read. At least the man can string together a sentence quite nicely, even if he did lose me on his great American horror orgy.

Horror is a hard genre to write. A novel of that genre doesn't have the striking imagery of horror comics, or the endless toolbox of tricks a horror film can pull on its viewers to get their heart rate up. And yet, Stephen King knows something a lot of other authors don't, because his books never fail to make me feel uneasy. With 'Salem's Lot he takes his inspiration from Bram Stoker's vampire classic, Dracula, and manages to make his take on a vampire tale feel fresh and contemporary without sacrificing the eeriness or darkness of the familiar story.

King's writing style fits the setting particularly well. As someone who has criticized his obsession with details before, I have to say that I loved every word of this novel, which also feels very Gothic. The atmosphere he creates, and the autumnal setting play into the mood here, and every little detail helps create a unique reading experience. Anyone who is at least somewhat familiar with Stephen King's work already knows he is a master of character development (which is brilliant here as well), but there is a special character in 'Salem's Lot that comes to life through the pages: it's the town. Whatever the author is talking about, whatever the characters are experiencing—the town is always there, like some mysterious, bewitching entity that I just couldn't get enough of.

n  "Being in the town is prosaic, sensuous, alcoholic. And in the dark, the town is yours and you are the town’s and together you sleep like the dead, like the very stones in your north field. There is no life here but the slow death of days, and so when the evil falls on the town, its coming seems almost preordained, sweet and morphic. It is almost as though the town knows the evil was coming and the shape it would take."n

And then there are the vampires—dark, ruthless, and dangerous. Not the kind of glamorous, romantic, brooding vampires who are so often found in film, TV series, and young adult literature these days. King is not here to feed your romantic fantasies—he's here to fuel your nightmares. And yes, I did dream of the Marsten House a few times while reading this (which isn't an effect an lot of books have on me), and it was an unsettling experience, to say the least.

So, let's summarize: a small New England town, an old mansion, compelling characters, and vampires, all wrapped in an addictively eerie atmosphere, crafted masterfully by Stephen King. Can there be a more perfect novel to read during autumn? 'Salem's Lot is the way vampire novels should be.

n  “The town knew about darkness. 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.”n

I really enjoyed this book from beginning to end. The overall mood of the story is an eerie one. It was my first Stephen King attempt and I'll be reading others of his for sure. The storytelling, the imagery, and the overall sense of creepiness kept me locked in the story. The interest of the story had me breeze through this pretty quickly. I would recommend it to anyone who likes a good horror story!

The last time I read Salem's Lot was sometime in the 1980s, but some things haven't changed. Then, as now, amidst all the elements of horror it is the mother hitting her baby that upsets me the most. The other thing that has remained the same is that when the character of Straker speaks I still hear the voice of the late great actor James Mason who played him in the 1979 TV movie.
All these years on & Salem's Lot is still a great combination of small town life & brooding horror that Stephen King writes so well. It's a surprisingly long novel for a young author to produce, but unlike some of King's later work not a word is wasted.
Salem's Lot has alreday been filmed twice, so it's with a little trepedation that I wait to see what the new film version will be like when it is released in 2023.

There are thousands of reviews of this book. My review is for the AUDIO CD version, which I thought was pretty darned well done.

This was read by actor Ron McClarty



yet another one of those guys I've undoubtedly seen in dozens of things but can't quite place. He did a great job with character voices, imbuing some with heavy Maine accents, and even using a womanly warble to choke out hokey lines like, "Make love to me, Ben." (Somewhere I imagine there must be an "outtake disc" where he burst out laughing the first ninety-four times he tried saying that.)

I really enjoyed listening to this on the way to and from work, even though I got pretty creeped-out when I had to drive home after dark. I highly recommend hearing this one. I'm looking forward to more Stephen King on audio in the months to come.

And, okay - one thing about the book . . .

When they discovered the blue chalk, and every character immediately thinks school? Seriously? Seriously? NOBODY but me thought POOL HALL?