Salem's Lot

I remember being completely enrapt reading 'Salem's Lot. I don't know if I just outgrew King or if King indeed sloughed off talent-wise over the years, but rarely have I read something so outstanding, whether genre or literary; a book so ridden with doom, so sickly sinister, and such a phantasmagoric page turner that it sucked in its lust all my free time dry (and sucked time dry I didn't have that should've been spent studying or sleeping). O what a brooding, gloomy, pseudo gothic (gothic chic, let's call it), macabre masterpiece, 'Salem's Lot.

A vampire novel written the way vampire novels were meant to be written back when they were still written right by writers with actual know-how and skills (Anne Rice's debut included): with show more actual, that is, creative and ingenious implementation of literary stylistic and narrative techniques such as character and plot development; creepy foreshadowing; nuanced, perverted symbolism (both libidinal and religious); and physically palpable suspense ever increasing, pulsating like punctured carotid arteries, raising high the blood pressure to a breathless denouement....suspense so intense I flipped on all the lights at night when I recklessly read it, 'Salem's Lot, alone and vulnerable to imagined, (but-it-felt-so-real!)-vampire attacks inside an isolated suburban tract on a full moon'd cul-de-sac; the skeletal-like houses under construction each side of my house, grotesque and baroque in their exposed incompletion, adding to the awful ambiance of dread and the undead, emanating like an evil breeze from outside my foolishly left open windows.

Or written, I should say, a la Stoker, a la Lovecraft, to which 'Salem's Lot paid its rightful (and frightful) homage.

The made-for-TV-movie of 'Salem's Lot, starring David Soul of Starsky and Hutch and Here Come the Brides fame, singer of the 1976 #1 Billboard hit, "Don't Give Up on Us, Baby," stunk it up like garlic - just like that schmaltzy pop song of Soul's - but not the book by Stephen King. Never the book by Stephen King. So read the book, 'Salem's Lot, by Stephen King...if you dare.

Ah hahahahahahahahaha.... show less

My revisit of Salem’s Lot a couple of years ago reminded me of what a great writer King has always been, even if this one also has that ‘I wrote this mostly as a student feel’ to it. I'd read this originally in the 80s when I was either in middle or high school. I devoured so many of his books and then in the mid 90s just stopped.

This one is a perfect vampire tale. Like many of his books, it uses childhood fears mixed with modern problems of adults to build tension. It also use epistolary tricks to heighten the verisimilitude leaving the reader unsure of what they think about the things that go bump.

Don't skip this book but leave a light on for yourself.

I’ve mentioned repeatedly that I have a hate/love relationship with vampires. Yes, I can deal with the brooding Byronic overtones (especially when you look at Polidori’s inspiration for “The Vampyre” but that’s not for this review); but there’s a point where I can’t take “Woe is me, I am an immortal monster, I feed on innocent human blood and I can’t help myself.” To which I say, if living forever sucks that much, please just stand outside until daybreak and die in a fire.

(This other reason why I hate Twilight oh so very much.)

Of all my Stephen King books, this is the one that I read most recently before embarking on my library reread project. Because it got to the point that I need a good vampire read, with the show more vampires being the magnificent charming bastards that they are and blood and death and creepiness. Vampires who do actual vampiring.

(I know I keep harping on it with nearly every vampire book I come across, but it’s so easy to mock and point fingers and blame and like actual vampires, it just won’t die and it keeps coming back in the forms of more terrible books and rip-offs and auuuugh.

…I’m done. No more mention of that series, I just had to get that out of the way.)

King mentions in both Danse Macabre and On Writing (and the endnote in Different Seasons, actually) that Salem’s Lot is his updating of Dracula, and you can definitely tell the parallels between the two. There’s not a direct recasting of each role in the proper place—I actually like that Susan fulfills the role of both Lucy and Mina, and even Mina’s corruption scene is recast in a nice way—and I like that there are so many nods to the original Stoker, while even bringing in more modern ideas (for the 1970s) of the vampire mythos. (Vampires bursting in sunlight started with Nosferatu, for example.) You don’t have to read Dracula to read Salem’s Lot, but it’s nice to pick up on the parallels if you have read both.

I also really love Salem’s Lot for the fact that it has its own mythos apart from the larger ‘Verse of Stephen King. There’s “Jerusalem’s Lot” and “One for the Road” from Night Shift, which expand on the whole town history (and future) of Salem’s Lot, and this isn’t even including its involvement in the Dark Tower cycle. (I have not read the Dark Tower books. I know Father Callahan shows up, though.) But even in the book itself, there’s the whole history of the Marsten House, and that another writer could have just done the whole “Town with a Dark Secret” story based on that alone. And that’s not even what I love about the book. The “Town with a Dark Secret” angle isn’t based on the vampires or the devil-worshipping former owners of the creepy house on the hill; it’s the everyday darkness that’s in the townspeople. That’s why this book works so well for me. There’s the main story with Ben and Mark and the other band of Fearless Vampire Killers, but when you add in the little sketches of all the townspeople, that’s what works so well in this book. (I would argue that sometimes, King’s greatest strength is all of these little moments involving periphery characters.) Barlow has a line about how most of his kind would have gone to a city to breed a new army, but this one small town is much more suited to his purposes-- I love that idea.

I don’t want to say I dislike Our Heroes, but I’m not as invested in their stories as I am in the little character sketches. Mark is probably my favorite of the bunch, the poor kid. He also gets one of the best lines in the whole book: “Understand death? Sure. That was when the monsters got you.” Mark’s the one who does grasp the situation the best, and he doesn’t have adult rationality to doubt his suspicions. (Taking into account IT, and most of King’s other works involving kids, I think horror works so much better from a childlike viewpoint. Or when it’s simple and not overtly complex.) Matt is another character I really like—could I have had him for my high school English classes instead of the teachers I actually had? It could be argued that Matt is Mark all grown up, realizing that vampires do exist and oh my God we have to stop them…but he does have that adult rationality that forces Matt to realize what he’s thinking and how that will make him look to the rest of the town. Father Callahan is the only other character that I really like; mostly because he could have been so easily turned into a stereotype (alcoholic Irish Catholic priest who’s lost the faith) but it never goes that far. I also really love his confrontation with Barlow and the fallout from that.

Ben and Susan are…eh. Ben exists to be damaged and has to be fixed by rising to the situation. There’s no real conflict with his character or even a lot of guilt over what happened with his first wife. Once he meets Susan, Ben feels it’s okay for him to move on. And speaking of Susan—I’ve said it multiple times as I’ve been rereading Stephen King. I think he has some fantastic characters and writing and dialogue, but when it comes to young women, especially if they’re in a lead role, he can’t write them. I’m sorry; I don’t like Susan. She exists to be a victim and has to need Ben to save her. There are good female characters that Stephen King has written, but if they’re between 18 and 35, they tend to be helpless and need a big, strong man.

As I mentioned above, a lot of the book’s creepiness comes into play when the whole town is involved in the story. The climax of the population getting vamped is chilling and disturbing, and there’s a town of payoff that was set up in the opening sketches. Even the scenes of the sleeping kids becoming vampires was creepy in how it’s portrayed. And there’s the fact that King does explore their weaknesses and the individual darkness that Barlow uses to seduce people into his service. Is King the first author to do that, especially with vampires? No, but he still does it well.

Yes, I have read this a few times in recent years to scrub my brain of whiny ineffectual immortals, and in the post-Meyer influx, it feels good to get back to some good ol’ fashioned blood-letting. (And for the record, Anne Rice—I tried The Vampire Lestat once, couldn’t do it. Although her vamps seem to have more fun.)But even aside from all of that, Salem’s Lot is just a damn good story and a fun and creepy one at that. This has been one of my favorite Stephen King books since I first read it, and it’s still up there. show less

A Masterwork of Horror

Ever wonder what Bram Stoker would make of the industry that has sprung from his groundbreaking 1897 Dracula? Though not the first vampire novel, it proved to be the one that launched hundreds of sharp-fanged anti-heroes. It’s an industry and a character writers, film studios, and television have worked practically to death. Yet, we never seem to tire of the Count and his brethren.

Which brings us to Stephen King, the writer most will acknowledge as the modern master among masters of horror and the macabre. For his second outing, he chose vampires in a small Maine town, and readers, even now, are the luckier for it. You can say this about most of King’s early works, Carrie, The Shining, and The Stand (first show more half): it’s a masterwork of terror.

What makes ‘Salem’s Lot, as well as these others so appealing, appealing enough to read a second time years after your first reading? It boils down to small town life, ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events, clear writing, terrific pacing (at least in these early novels), and powerful, literal descriptions. King puts you in the situation and the action and because his characters are much like his readers, you can easily project yourself onto the pages. In short, he’s completely relatable.

You’ll find no better work among his pile of writing illustrating King’s strengths. Could there be a more representative American small town than the Lot? Don’t many small towns have a sinister house occupied, or once home to, the town curmudgeon (not a killer, for sure, but scary, especially in the eyes of children). The Lot has a rhythm to it, a way of living that stretches back years, a dull sameness that locals like and set their emotional clock by. Like any town, though, it’s not perfect bliss, or even close to blissful. It’s relatively poor. It’s filled with its share of misfits. It even has a town dump that many who grew up in small towns will recognize. Above all, everybody knows everybody else, maybe a virtue but which contributes to its succumbing to evil.

Even Ben Mears is a small town boy. He’s published a couple of books, true, but hasn’t achieved any kind of fame and no fortune. He returns to his roots to face a fear that has haunted him, and to get a really good book out of the experience. That fear resides in the old, abandoned Marsten House stilling atop a hill overlooking the Lot. Horrible things happened there long ago, long before when Ben was a boy.

Ben gets more than he bargained for. He gets his greatest fear multiplied a hundredfold in the form of Barlow, an ancient vampire come to establish residence in the Lot coincidental with Ben’s arrival. Poor Ben loses so much: a new love in the form of tragic Susan, new friends in the forms of Matt the high school teacher and Jim the doctor, the new novel he’s written deeply into, and most of all, any comfort and joy in living. Yet, with young Mark at his side, he does gain a new and pretty meaningful purpose in life as one who now can see behind the curtain of quotidian life, like that that the Lot enjoyed before Barlow’s arrival.

There’s one other characteristic of King’s writing that unfortunately ‘Salem’s Lot doesn’t have: stunningly memorable characters, among them religious lunatic Margaret White, rabbi fan Annie Wilkes, pyromaniac “Trashcan Man,” the list is long. Vampire master Barlow could have been such a character, ancient, big, nasty, egotistical, and above all, wonderfully bombastic. It isn’t often said about novels, but ‘Salem’s Lot would have benefited immensely from deep background on Barlow. Nonetheless, ‘Salem’s Lot is still a heck of a powerful horror yarn. show less

It's been a long time since first reading this early book by Uncle Stevie (1988), and like some of the others I've re-read recently, it definitely stands the test of time. One of the benefits of reading this one again is to see Father Callahan, who returns in [The Dark Tower] series to play an important role in the fight against evil. Getting to read Callahan's origin story freshly really helps to put him in the proper context for the later work. Another benefit to this reread is that I'm also reading King's [Danse Macabre] at the same time, and he refers to his own writing process for ['Salem's Lot] as he describes the origins of horror in literature, harkening back to Stoker's [Dracula]. King details how he payed homage and updated show more Stoker's classic, where he ventured into new territory and where he remained true to the early concepts. You really can't find many better vampire novels than this one - there's no shiny, romantic vampires here - only monsters. In [Danse Macabre], he says, "We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones." That's a clue that not all the monsters in this book have sharpened incisors, a universal King theme.

Highly recommended.
5 bones!!!!! show less

Salem's Lot was one of the first Stephen Kings I read, but even as a teenager I was already familiar with the story from the David Soul-starring TV mini series. (By the way, has anyone seen the Rob Lowe remake from a few years back? Worth my time?) Reading it again after all these years, I was captivated by the strength of the storytelling. King is at his best when given a large cast - or a small town - to play with, and there are many times in the first half of this book that I found myself wishing the horror wouldn't even come, such was I enjoying the everyday goings on in the Lot. King creates well-rounded characters you care about, so much that you hate the idea that anything horrible might happen to them... even though you know show more it's going to. Salem's Lot is a huge sprawling epic of a story (yet much tighter than much of the author's recent output), and were it not for all the vampires, it'd now be regarded as one of the great American novels of the 70s - by everybody, not just those of us unblinkered by genre snobbery.

Read the full review at my blog. show less

Don't get me wrong--I love Buffy--but one of the things we can lay on its doorstep is the glamorization and sexing up of vampires. And we can probably blame Anne Rice too. And LK Hamilton. So nowadays vampires in one blockbuster series popular with tweens sparkle, shine and are the (rich) boy next door. Not King's vampires though--these are old-fashioned vampires--monsters--the ones that make you fear the dark and appear in nightmares--and that's what I love this book for. I think this book along with another Stephen King book, The Shining, are tied for scariest book I've ever read. You might want to read this one in bright sunlight--but be warned if at night it comes back to haunt you nevertheless.