Product Description

Thousands of miles away from the small township of 'Salem's Lot, two terrified people, a man and a boy, still share the secrets of those clapboard houses and tree-lined streets. They must return to 'Salem's Lot for a final confrontation with the unspeakable evil that lives on in the town.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #34358 in Books
• Published on: 1982-07-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Stephen King's second book, 'Salem's Lot--about the slow takeover of an insular hamlet called Jerusalem's Lot by a vampire patterned after Bram Stoker's Dracula--has two elements that he also uses to good effect in later novels: a small American town, usually in Maine, where people are disconnected from each other, quietly nursing their potential for evil; and a mixed bag of rational, goodhearted people, including a writer, who band together to fight that evil.

Simply taken as a contemporary vampire novel, 'Salem's Lotis great fun to read, and has been very influential in the horror genre. But it's also a sly piece of social commentary. As King said in 1983, "In 'Salem's Lot, the thing that really scared me was not vampires, but the town in the daytime, the town that was empty, knowing that there were things in closets, that there were people tucked under beds, under the concrete pilings of all those trailers. And all the time I was writing that, the Watergate hearings were pouring out of the TV.... Howard Baker kept asking, 'What I want to know is, what did you know and when did you know it?' That line haunts me, it stays in my mind.... During that time I was thinking about secrets, things that have been hidden and were being dragged out into the light." Sounds quite a bit like the idea behind his 1998 novel of a Maine hamlet haunted by unsightly secrets, Bag of Bones. --Fiona Webster

Frances Fyfield, Express
‘Splendid entertainment...Stephen King is one of those natural storytellers...getting hooked is easy'

Review
‘An incredibly gifted writer, whose writing, like Truman Capote’s, is so fluid that you often forget that you’re reading’ (Guardian )

‘A writer of excellence...King is one of the most fertile storytellers of the modern novel...brilliantly done’ (The Sunday Times )

‘Splendid entertainment...Stephen King is one of those natural storytellers...getting hooked is easy’ (Frances Fyfield, Express )

Customer Reviews

A Beautiful Darkness
Stephen King has always been regarded as more of a pop fiction writer than a literary author--but in 1975 he turned out a book which, although overshadowed by the massive success of his later work, will stand the test: 'SALEM'S LOT. Simple yet multi-layered, elegant yet grotesque, this is the book that shows what King can really do when he sets his mind to it.

The story opens with Ben Mears, an author who has come to his childhood home of 'Salem's Lot with the idea of writing a novel about the small town's "haunted house" of note. As he observes the town, he also becomes a part of it, meeting a young woman who might be more than a passing interest, making new friends and renewing old acquaintances. But there is something--indefinable. Something that is slowly going wrong in the town. And it is connected with the "haunted house" of his childhood memories.

King is clearly drawing from several sources for inspiration, most particularly Bram Stoker's DRACULA and Shirley Jackson's THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, as well as from traditional vampire lore. But what he does with this story of a vampire infestation in a quiet New England town is completely original, peeling back the lives of the townfolk in layers and then showing their gradual corruption as the plague spreads.

'SALEM'S LOT is more subtle than most King novels. It builds with a deliberate slowness and gradually develops a sense of paranoia--that suddenly explodes into a classic horror that keeps you reading through the night with every light in the house turned on. And King's style here is extraordinary: everything about the book is very precise with not a word out of place, the plot at once fantastic and disturbingly logical. There are several Stephen King novels on my bookshelf, and I enjoy them... but this is the one to which I most often return. If you've never read it, prepare yourself for Stephen King at his best. If you have read it, it's time to read it again.

GFT, Amazon Reviewer

Taste of This Blood
I don't think many people would argue the fact that 'Salem's Lot is the best novel produced in King's "early period." In some ways, it was a gutsy novel for King to write. For one thing, his editor warned him about becoming viewed as a "horror writer" (as opposed to a "real writer"). All great writers write what they have to write and don't care how it is viewed, so this book really made a statement that this young author loved to write and was going to do it his own way. For another thing, it is a great challenge to write a vampire novel that does not just sift through the ashes of millions of pages already consumed by the public. I wish I could read this book today without knowing so much about it (having first read it many years ago, having seen the miniseries, and having heard and read so much about it since then)--I wonder at what point the wide-eyed reader actually understands that vampirism is responsible for the Evil overtaking Jerusalem's Lot.

Literally hundreds of readers have already reviewed this book, so I am sure anything I say is just a rehash of what has already been said. I will mention the fact that this novel is quite different from Carrie, its immediate predecessor. Where the events of that book were somewhat disjointed, this story unfolds quite smoothly. The characters in this book are much more "real" than those in Carrie. Rather than jumping from one viewpoint to another, King's prose now allows itself to take root and grow, yielding a bumper crop of complex, realistic, knowable characters. While I felt as if I were watching the events taking place in Carrie, I felt much more like a character myself in 'Salem's Lot. If anyone out there has yet to read Stephen King, I would recommend reading this novel as your introduction to his work. The blood and gore is there, as it should be, but most of the horror is below the surface, always present and ready to spring out whenever King's imagination bids it to do so. It is a wonderful reading experience. I can picture Stephen King saying to his readers the exact same thing that the vampire says to Father Callahan: "Taste my communion." Millions of us have tasted it, and we have been held under the sway of our master ever since.

Vampires in small town America
What would happen if Dracula moved to your home town and started preying on your neighbours? This is the premise of `Salem's Lot, Stephen King's second novel, in which an ordinary New England town that becomes victim to a modern day vampire. Like all King's books, it was a sensational bestseller when it was published in 1975, but does it stand the test of time?

King's talent is for bringing the supernatural to a familiar setting, but I didn't feel that the book really measures up to King's reputation. It is an effective page turner, but horror fiction should be chilling or shocking, 'Salem's Lot is foreseeable and unremarkable. In King's world, vampires are fairly predictable. They don't like sunlight. They don't like crosses either, or garlic. They do like drinking your neighbours blood, and then your neighbours become vampires. Sounds familiar? Small town folk are equally predictable, going about their daily chores with little idea what is in for store for them. The town's population are a collection of shallow stereotypes. Step forward a weary, chain-smoking detective, a depressed teenage mother, an alcoholic priest, a gossipy old woman, a greedy estate agent, etc etc. Characters are defined by nothing deeper than their job, their clothes and their brand of cigarette. Salem's Lot is a town populated by cardboard cut-out vampires stalking cardboard cut-out town folk and it is difficult to feel any empathy with either group. No empathy means no fear. There were only a couple of moments in the book that I found genuinely frightening.

In his defence, King does keep the narrative moving at a steady pace, and you will stick with it to the end. Something is always happening in 'Salem's Lot. There are some effective twists. Yet what can be made of sentences such as "it conjured up an image of fate, not blind at all but equipped with sentient 20/20 vision and intent on grinding helpless mortals between the great millstones of the universe to make some unknown bread." This is a description of falling in love. The soap opera dialogue also made me smile ("I`m scared, but I`m mad, too. I lost a girl I liked one hell of a lot. I loved her, I guess."), but is that the intention of a horror story? If you've ever wondered how King managed to write so many books, here is answer. He probably spends very little time crafting and editing his work.

I'm not a devotee of Stephen King, but I did read Carrie a couple of years ago, and found it a much better book. There is no character in `Salem's Lot as original and disturbing as Carrie White. Some might consider it unfair to criticise `Salem's Lot for blatantly recycling Dracula (is there anything wrong to a modern day 'homage' to a classic horror story?), but a couple of years after King published this book, Anne Rice wrote Interview with the Vampire , a far more imaginative and sinister resurrection of the vampire. Beside Anne Rice's book, 'Salem's Lot seems stale.