Two of the earliest TV broadcasts to give my brother nightmares were Carrie and 'Salem's Lot, adaptations of the first and second novels by Stephen King. Mrs. White locking Carrie in the closet with a crucified Jesus bothered him, as did a boy turned vampire in the town of Jerusalem's Lot floating outside the window of Mark Petrie, asking to be let in. Those scenes sent him running from the den, probably because I went running out first.Published in 1975, King had described a work in progress of 'Salem's Lot to his wife as "Dracula meets Peyton Place." He showed considerable vision by dragging the vampire from its Old World haunts of carriages and castles and relocating it to an All-American town, with its school buses and hardware store. It's in the small town detail, not the horror business, where King put daylight between himself and his peers.The tale begins in a California border town called Los Zapatos. An Anglo man and boy appear one day. The man makes a forty-mile trip each week to buy a Maine newspaper, the Portland Press-Herald, and scans it for stories about the town of Jerusalem's Lot. He finally finds one (GHOST TOWN IN MAINE?) documenting the virtual disappearance of an entire town overnight. The boy visits a village priest and leaves a hell of a confessional. A week later, the pair decide to return from whence they came.Moving back in time to the previous September, Ben Mears returns to 'Salem's Lot, the town he spent time in as a boy. Recovering from the tragedy of losing his wife in a motorcycle accident he was responsible for, Ben begins work on his third novel, which he keeps close to the vest, but has something to do with the Marsten House, a notorious house of horrors which has sat on a hill overlooking the town for forty years. Ben makes an inquiry to rent the place, but to his surprise, is told that a new owner purchased it less than a year ago.Ben meets Susan Norton, a graphic designer who lives with her parents and has her sight set on bigger horizons, like New York. Susan is actually reading one of Ben's books in the park when she notices him. The pair hit it off immediately and begin a courtship. Ann Norton disapproves of her daughter's new steady, much preferring a known quantity like an ex-boyfriend, Floyd Tibbets. Both Ben and Susan are intrigued by the Marsten House and its sinister history.King breathlessly introduces several characters about town. These include a competent sheriff, Parkins Gillespie, and his itchy deputy, Nolly Gardener. The boardinghouse where Ben rents a room is operated by widow Eva Miller, who lost her husband in a mill accident and has more than amiable feelings for one of her boarders, the town drunk Ed "Weasel" Craig. There's a moderately liked high school English teacher nearing retirement named Matt Burks. His doctor is a young guy, is Jimmy Cody. Mark Petrie is 11 years old and new in town, an only child who has a complete set of Aurora plastic monsters. Mark is no punk, standing up to the schoolyard bully and winning their fight. One of his classmates, Danny Glick, heads over to Mark's for a visit one night and his brother Ralphie tags along, taking a shortcut through the woods. An hour overdue, Danny stumbles out of the woods in a daze and without his brother. A search of the woods turns up no trace of the missing boy and a few days later, Danny drops dead in the hospital.Suspicion turns to the new faces in town: Ben, and Richard Throckett Straker, a regal man who purchased the Marsten House, as well as the Village Washtub, announcing his intention to retire in 'Salem's Lot and open an antique shop with his partner, a man he refers to as "Kurt Barlow" and who is conveniently in New York pursuing antiques. Straker likes old things, from his car (a 1939 Packard) to his cash, which has been out of print for fifty years. No one visits him at the Marsten House.After Danny Glick's funeral, groundskeeper Mike Ryerson has the job of filling the boy's grave, but is overcome with the dread that he's being watched. From inside the coffin. He pops up the next evening at the local bar, where Matt Burks takes pity on him and invites him to sleep off what's gripped him at his guest room. Matt has heard rumors from Jimmy Cody that the Glick boy had been bled white and the marks on his neck weren't fingernail scratches from a pervert; they were puncture wounds.Softly yet clearly in the silent house the words came, spoken in Mike Ryerson's voice, spoken in the dead accents of sleep:"Yes. Come in."Matt's breath stopped, then whistled out in a soundless scream. He felt faint with fear. His belly seemed to have turned to lead. His testicles had drawn up. What in God's name had been invited into his house?Stealthily, the sound of the hasp on the guest room window being turned back. Then the grind of wood against wood as the window was forced up.Read today, 'Salem's Lot loses some its novelty. In the forty years since it was published, it's been adapted into a TV mini-series twice, with David Soul playing Ben Mears in 1979 and Rob Lowe cast in 2004. The two classics that owe a debt to King are Fright Night and The Lost Boys. By the '80s, the vampire lived next door and the teenage heroes were experts in monster movie cliches. King got there first and his book is undeniably spooky in ways Hollywood has only had nightmares about.In addition to chilling scenes, King manufactures a hell of a backstory for the town's house of horror. Instead of ghosts, King occupies it with evil, as a rat unable to resist a hole in the wall. The prologue and epilogue are spiked with news items about disappearances around 'Salem's Lot which read eeriely real. Also real is the existential terror that Ben, Mark and the others experience once they see with their own eyes what's behind the disappearances. None of them are ever the same. King takes his horrors seriously here.I like King's world building, down to describing the different quadrants of town and who lives there, but there's so much detail that the characters seem to get lost in it. Not only do all the main characters seem like different sides of the same guy, they're all guys, with Susan Norton getting the short end of the stick. She's (view spoiler)[dispatched far too early and in spite of telling Ben she loved him before turning into a vampire bride, his reaction seems more like that of a boy than an adult; she isn't missed much. (hide spoiler)]
Audiobook – Narrated by Ron McLarty – Excellent narration.McLarty does a terrific job with this book, sometimes too good. His pacing is perfect and there is no grating falsetto for the female voices. Bless you Ron, you have my undying gratitude!As an added bonus there’s an introduction by the author. Quite funny, especially when he talks about vampire comics he read when he was young, where the vampires hung their victims upside down and inserted spigots into their necks!These days I like to listen to my audiobooks when I go to bed at night, which was not such a great idea with ‘salem’s Lot, as it turns out. Last night as I was nearing the end of the book I needed to use the bathroom. I got out of bed without turning the lights on and as I walked through the dining room I noticed a tall, dark shape that shouldn’t have been there. I froze, my heart started to pound and I turned tail, ran back to bed and pulled the covers over my head. Bugger the potty visit. When I eventually calmed down and my wits returned I realised it was my cats scratchy tower, which I had moved into the dining room when I had my carpets cleaned yesterday. I very wisely decided to finish listening to the book this morning.***Ebook:Among my favourite King books ‘Salem’s Lot ranks as number one for two reasons…firstly, because this was the first book by Stephen King that I read. Many years ago I was browsing through a second hand bookstore, where I was a frequent visitor, when I noticed the title. I took it from the shelf and read the blurb on the back…Vampires! The author’s name wasn’t familiar but I when the owner of the bookstore recommended it I happily paid and took it and home.I opened the cover, started reading, and didn’t stop until I was finished. The next day I returned to the bookstore and bought a copy of every Stephen King book he had.And there began the obsession.The second reason is because it’s such a great story, one that still scares me senseless every time I read it. And that’s why, after more than thirty years and countless rereads, this will be my last visit to The Lot. There’s only one thing to be a little picky about in this book and that’s the thankfully brief romance…‘Ben?’‘Yes.’‘Make love to me? Do you want to?’‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I want that.’‘Here on the grass,’ she said.‘Yes.’She was looking up at him, her eyes wide in the dark. She said, ‘Make it be good.’‘I’ll try.’‘Slow,’ she said. ‘Slow. Slow. Here… ’They became shadows in the dark.‘There,’ he said. ‘Oh, Susan.’UGH! The audio made it even worse! Maybe I was too precipitous in my admiration for McLarty’s reading! A great story, great characters and brilliantly written.***It tickled my fancy when I found out that ‘salem’s Lot was originally to be called The Second Coming…that is, until his wife, Tabitha, said it sounded like the title of a bad sex story!Connections:The town of Chamberlain (Carrie, The Body) gets a mention when Ben Mears contemplates driving past the turn off to ‘salem’s Lot, continuing on to Chamberlain or Lewiston, having lunch and then returning home. Father Donald Callahan, who leaves ‘Salem’s Lot under somewhat of a cloud after losing his faith. He appears in three of The Dark Tower books.Kurt Barlow rates a mention by Father Callahan in the Dark Tower series.Chopper, the dog - Milo Pressman, the dump-keeper (The Body), owns a dog called Chopper. Thanks to Edward Lorn for this one. I missed it.Mechanic Falls (Mrs Todd's Shortcut, Rita hayworth and Shawshank Redemption)Some interesting photos of the location where ‘Salem’s Lot was filmed and the house they used for Marsten House:http://davidjrodger.wordpress.com/201...
What do You think about Salem's Lot (1991)?
This is the fifth Stephen King book I've read so far, and each time I read one, I feel like I'm practically a part of the story. Unlike certain books, you don't have to torture yourself into getting past the first few excruciatingly slow chapters to find something interesting.I love the fact that King's characters all seem like people you'd meet off the street; real, not too righteous. Even the bad guys have a streak of good, usually. 'salem's Lot is an incredible book due mostly to the depth King puts in his characters. And there are so many of them: multplie families, each with their own personality and mannerisms, you feel like the Lot is a real town.
—Robotribble
Something's amiss in the town of Salem's Lot. The body count is piling up. What could be at the root of this trouble? It takes a few hundred pages for it to become clear in the text, but I can't help but think this picture of a person with two puncture wounds in her neck on the cover of my edition might be a clue . . . . Probably werewolves. Or mummies?As close observers of my profile will know, I'm quite the Stephen King fan. This is one of his earlier novels, and I think it shows. The writing's a bit clunky in places--sometimes the dialogue feels stilted or forced, sometimes the descriptions of the town seem overwrought. That being said, I think this book has many features that make it an excellent (spoiler!) vampire story. I liked that King stays very conventional in terms of the "rules" of the vampire world--there's no attempt to cleverly invent a new spin on the vampire. He just uses the conventional forms and themes and makes the most of them. The familiarity of these rules lends, oddly enough, a sense of realism to the story--we get a good feeling of what it would "really" be like to be confronted with monsters who, on the one hand, can't be out in the day, don't like crucifixes, can't come into your house uninvited, etc., but, on the other hand, are very hard to kill and multiply rapidly. Because these rules about vampires are so conventional, they don't seem arbitrary to the reader, and there's a certain strange believability to it all.The sense of "realism" is aided by another feature of the story that I liked, which was that the protagonists are also familiar with the basic rules about vampires. They're just like you and me, if we had good reason to believe there really might be vampires abroad: we'd know to stock up on holy water and stakes, we'd get home by dusk, we'd get a copy of "Dracula" out of the library to brush up on all the more obscure stuff we've forgotten, and so on. I liked that after the initial disbelief, there was a real sense of "okay, vampires, we know what we're dealing with here. Let's roll."The writing is still a bit off. But the story and some of the imagery has stuck with me, now about three weeks after reading it, so I have a fondness for the book in spite of some of its flaws.
—Jim
Hearsay is that King is a great writer of people. His characters, word-of-the-binate-mouth has it, are well-fleshed out, plausible human beings with the plausible scree that we all accumulate. ‘Salem’s Lot’ being only his second novel is possibly not the substantiation offered for this postulation. In ‘Salem’s Lot’, there is a foreshadowing of incipient proficiency, but that is just about it. I found the characters fuzzily delineated at best, and caricatures at worst. And this was not the only thing that piqued me. In his own words, he wanted to write a “world that had begun to choke on its own effluent...at the other end of the technological rainbow”. I looked forward to a counterpoint to Stoker’s Dracula where technology acquires a baleful patina, where the end of the said rainbow is not a gold pot of enlightened reason but regressive sophistry and dogged ignorance. Given that the claim was tall, and my expectations heightened from reading his excellent ‘On Writing’, I was disappointed. While there are half-hearted expositions of the vacuity of the modern human condition and desultory anguishing over faith and faithlessness, the result was far short of his ambition. Given the limitations of the derivative plot, I daresay it would have been difficult to achieve this anyway, and all this does make me wonder if this attempted juxtaposition of Evil and garden-variety evil could have been done more effectively now, more than a decade into the lot more technological, and equally, if not more lost 21st century. I do intend to read more King. His powers of description are redoubtable, effortlessly setting the bucolic scene for the subsequent events, which on the other hand failed to secure my admiration.
—Shruti
