Book review: Salem’s Lot

After stating my disinterest in all things vampire I found myself reading my third vampire novel this year. Clearly I have gone mad. After The Passage and the classic Dracula I got a hankering for vintage Stephen King so I took down the 30+ (!) year old copy of Salem’s Lot I bought but had never read and tore through it like Barlow on a bloody bender.

Unlike some of King’s later books, Salem’s Lot is fairly lean and the ending, though predictable, is satisfying and doesn’t leave you scratching your head or perhaps turning the book upside down to see if it makes more sense that way.

The vampires in this tale of a small Maine town gone horribly wrong are classic King supporting characters — by turns vulgar, dimwitted, fat, abusive. But there are also innocent kids and girlfriends mixed in, all shepherded over by a drunken priest and a sheriff who calmly skips town when things get weird.

My favorite aspect of the story is the way King slowly then with rapidly increasing speed unravels Jerusalem’s Lot and how it’s undoing goes largely unnoticed by the world around it. The townfolk start out fairly rattled by the disappearance of the boy Ralph Glick and end up either feasting on each other or hiding away at night as out-of-towners drive through and wonder why the place is so…dead.

It’s dated in ways you’d expect a 1975 novel to be — everyone’s using party lines and people phone doctors instead of 911, the specter of Vietnam hangs over several characters and the populace generally doesn’t cotton to them ‘faggots’ and ‘queers’ (like Barlow and Straker — two men working together, they must be queer. Turns out they’re just monsters). But the dated bits don’t detract from the story.

Although I found the main characters were handled well, the transition of Mark Petrie from kid-who-has-his-stuff-together to someone more simpering felt a bit off. Sure, he goes through the wringer but he ultimately comes off as kind of a wimp, undercutting his earlier scenes of strength.

The writing is fairly tight, though King indulges in a few poetic passages that don’t quite mesh with the overall tone of the story. Perhaps these were epistolary experiments that got watered down to better fit the overall narrative. There’s only a few and they don’t go on so their presence isn’t off-putting. They do act to leaven the crudity and gore that is otherwise throughout the book.

Bottom line: Salem’s Lot holds up nicely 36 years later. It’s a far grimmer tale than Dracula and the bodies pile up like cord wood but if you like a good vampire story I think you’d enjoy this.

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