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Loading... 'salem's Lotby Stephen King
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. King's version of vampires. A good tale. (  ) Anagarika | Nov 3, 2009 |  Seriously? I think this is THE BEST horror novel about vampires. Subtle and in your face at the same time. Nothing sexy about these vampires, just horrifying! (  ) kmoellering | Sep 21, 2009 | Stephen King's homage to Dracula is a really gripping, scary vampire story in which the small town of Jerusalem's Lot, Maine, is gradually taken over by vampires. Great early King. ( )1  sturlington | Sep 20, 2009 | King's story of what would happen if Dracula arrived in a small town (Jerusalem's Lot) in Maine in 1975. (If he'd arrived in a city, he'd get run by a "hansom" over like Margaret Mitchell.) One of the original title ideas was The Second Coming. Stephen King is a much more compelling, and terrifying, storyteller than Bram Stoker in Dracula. Stoker writes more of a personal diary, a distant narrative. King plays across your nerves and emotions endings. No movie will ever be able to capture the emotional mastery of King's writing. A good movie might be made, but it won't be the same. King is more viscerally horrifying than Koontz. King has fewer moments of lightness, and no real hope of a happy ending for anyone. The only happiness is a set up to make the impact more devastating later. The two heroes return to the town to kill the remaining vampires, but we don't get to see if they triumph, or survive. The story is actually perfectly set up for a sequel, which he never seems to have intended to write. Father Callahan, who appears in the Dark Tower series, first appears here. ( ) ktoonen | Aug 11, 2009 | A truly horrifying tale. ( ) laurab_53 | Aug 9, 2009 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0671039741, Mass Market Paperback)Stephen King's second book, 'Salem's Lot (1975)--about the slow takeover of an insular hamlet called Jerusalem's Lot by a vampire patterned after Bram Stoker's Dracula--has two elements that he also uses to good effect in later novels: a small American town, usually in Maine, where people are disconnected from each other, quietly nursing their potential for evil; and a mixed bag of rational, goodhearted people, including a writer, who band together to fight that evil.Simply taken as a contemporary vampire novel, 'Salem's Lot is great fun to read, and has been very influential in the horror genre. But it's also a sly piece of social commentary. As King said in 1983, "In 'Salem's Lot, the thing that really scared me was not vampires, but the town in the daytime, the town that was empty, knowing that there were things in closets, that there were people tucked under beds, under the concrete pilings of all those trailers. And all the time I was writing that, the Watergate hearings were pouring out of the TV.... Howard Baker kept asking, 'What I want to know is, what did you know and when did you know it?' That line haunts me, it stays in my mind.... During that time I was thinking about secrets, things that have been hidden and were being dragged out into the light." Sounds quite a bit like the idea behind his 1998 novel of a Maine hamlet haunted by unsightly secrets, Bag of Bones. --Fiona Webster (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:12 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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