Salem's Lot (1975) by Stephen King
Death is when the monsters get you
So here we are at book 2 in the Stephen King published bibliography.
Background
King was inspired by Dracula, one of the books covered in the class. "One night over supper I wondered aloud what would happen if Dracula came back in the twentieth century, to America. 'He'd probably be run over by a Yellow Cab on Park Avenue and killed,' my wife said. He also mixed Peyton Place into the mix. In two separate interviews, King said that of all his books, 'Salem's Lot was his favorite.
King first wrote of Jerusalem's Lot in a his short story "Jerusalem's Lot" of the same title, penned in college (but published years later for the first time in the anthology collection Night Shift). I'll be discussing this as a follow up to this main look at Salem's Lot.
In his non-fiction book, Danse Macabre, King recalls a dream he had when he was eight years old. In the dream, he saw the body of a hanged man dangling from the arm of a scaffold on a hill. "The corpse bore a sign: ROBERT BURNS. But when the wind caused the corpse to turn in the air, I saw that it was my face - rotted and picked by birds, but obviously mine. And then the corpse opened its eyes and looked at me. I woke up screaming, sure that a dead face would be leaning over me in the dark. Sixteen years later, I was able to use the dream as one of the central images in my novel 'Salem's Lot. I just changed the name of the corpse to Hubie Marsten."
Another inspiration for the book outside Dracula and Peyton Place is Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House - he references this book in the text, and uses the opening passage of that book as and epigraph for Part One of Salem's Lot. Yet another were the vampire stories found in horror comics, especially EC comics.
Thoughts
This was a fun read. It's amazing that I remember the story as much closer to the 1979 miniseries than it actually was, but I do think the 79 Salem's Lot was a great TV adap, and was a formative TV experience among kids of my age (I'll talk about this another time, I intend to rewatch that series within this month too, and report on it). I remember a lot of the urbane Barlow's dialogue being spoken by Straker, for example!
There are clearly direct inspirations from Dracula and EC in handling the horror elements - Barlow is very, very suave and ancient and is clearly an analogue for the old Count D himself, and there are numerous EC moments - especially the bus driver finding his bus full of vampire kids, and Danny Glick floating outside the window, and just thinking about a vampire baby... King seems to relish the small-town gossip stuff too, but I found this less engaging, and wished there was a little more inner dialogue for some of the characters to draw them in even finer detail. King does suprising things throughout which stops it becoming too formulaic, though I do wish he'd written some of the events that he skims - I was kind of irritated he didn't write the turning of Susan - that could have been a classic piece of writing that's entirely absent. I also wish he'd have give us a passage explaining exactly why Barlow did what he did to Straker near the end...I know Straker messed up, but it seemed again skimmed over.
I don't know why, but I think King's thinking about small towns precipitates near the end when the lawman is ready to quit town, and says he reckons some of those people will be happier as vampires. It made me chuckle.
7.5/10 for me
Last edited by diebitter; 05-17-2014 at 08:42 AM.