Salem's Lot [Mass Market Paperback]

This was the second Stephen King novel I ever read, but it has been the one to keep me up the longest. The novel is very engrossing. I was only 13 when I read it the first time, so it was not entirely understood, but enough was understood to make me sleep with a light on. I reread this book every Halloween and it still sends shivers down my spine.

Unlike most hard-core Stephen King fans, I have been reading his books in no particular order...just whichever one I can get my hands on next. Thus, I happened to read the entire Dark Tower series penned by King before I happened onto this novel. In that series, I learned more about Father Callahan, who was first introduced in this book. By reading things so disjointed, I figured that "Salem's Lot" was just a book about vampires who had to be expelled from a small town. Once I dove into this text, however, I realized that the true genius of this novel has nothing to do with the vampires themselves, but more so how King sets up their appearance.

The biggest thing that surprised me about this book was that actual vampires do not appear until the last 100 or so pages of the novel. They are hinted at many times earlier, but never fully exposed/explained. However, at least to me, that is where King makes this story so scary. Pretty much the entire first half of the book is devoted to trying to capture the small-town feel of Jerusalem's Lot but examining its citizens, their relationships, and the day-to-day events of the little town. Thus, when the great evil is unearthed towards the end of the novel, it makes it all the scarier that the evil is coming from such an out-of-the-way place, a type of place usually reserved for a slow, uncomplicated life. That, not the vampires, is the most interesting theme of the novel.

Of course, in typical King fashion, the characters are also very well-written and interesting, thus easy to root for (or against, in some cases) as they fight to extinguish the evil in small-town America.

So, although "Salem's Lot" was first published way back in 1975, it is still a thrilling read even today, as small-towns still exist all over America...small towns where he feel safe and never think anything can hurt is. In King's universe, that is not so, which is what makes this book so frightful.

Until Stephen King happened along the horror genre had languished, continually put down by a variety of critics in the so-called mainstream. King broke into print with "Carrie," and quickly followed up his initial success with a quasi-gothic story of a modern vampire. King's story brought new life into stories of vampires, firing the memories of those who fondly remembered the TV soap "Dark Shadows."

King sets his story in the small Maine town of Jerusalem's Lot. King starts his story by detailing the recent and not-so-recent past of many of the denizens of Jerusalem's Lot. It also becomes apparent to the reader that the residents of Jerusalem's Lot are so caught up in their own petty problems and evils, including nosing into the lives of others, that they are unable to see the real evil that has come into their midst.

Rising above the concerns of the typical townspeople are Ben Mears, a young author with thus far minor success in the publishing world, Mark Petrie, a boy who would have been remarkable in any setting, Matthew Burke, an aging teacher who wonders whether he has made any real difference in the world, and Father Callahan, a priest who has either lost his faith or is on the very edge of doing so. While the team is small, they are the few who are capable of leading the fight against the vampire who is slowly taking over the town, person by person.

On the other side of the fence are Mr. Barlow and Mr. Straker. We wonder early on whether there really is a Mr. Straker and though we know the story of Salem's Lot well enough to know there is a vampire, we wonder whether we are going to be fooled by some literary slight of hand.

Stephen King's success in this story comes not from the tale of the vampire, but by imbuing Salem's Lot the town with life, which King was able to do well because of his own personal knowledge of small town life in the northeast. The reader must believe in the dozens of mundane individuals that inhabit the town; how absolutely normal it all seems. Yet, there is an undercurrent of foreboding because there were already bad things in this town long before the vampire arrived. King has wrought a novel that is easy to dismiss at the beginning, but is rewarding for those that allow the characters to develop.

I consider this novel one of the best vampire novels ever written, and easily worth five stars.