'Salem's Lot

Written by Stephen King, ‘Salem’s Lot is the book that has shaken by faith in the “great horror writer”. I was left disillusioned after I loved Misery and The Shining, then I read Carrie and it was nowhere near as scary or clever or generally good. And now ‘Salem’s Lot, another bloody vampire story that is quite reflective of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and to be harsh and critical, boring from start to finish. It’s over five hundred pages of maybe-thrills and possible-horrors, but I did not find it gripping or scary or engaging in any way. And believe me, I don’t like saying this because I completely fell in love with King after Misery and The Shining, but now, two books later, not so impressed. 

Writer Ben Mears returns to his small childhood town of Jerusalem’s Lot, nicknamed ‘Salem’s Lot, to write his latest novel and confront some old fears. It was his plan to rent a spooky old house from his childhood, but this plan falls into disarray when he arrives to find it already occupied by a new and strange tenant. At first Ben gives this strange newcomer hardly any thought, but then strange things start to happen: a dog is brutally a killed, a child goes missing; nothing too unusual in a small town, but the list steadily begins to grow and soon Ben finds himself in a waking nightmare that is right out of a Stoker horror story. 

Essentially I perceived ‘Salem’s Lot to be nothing but crescendo after crescendo. Everything was leading up to some final epic conflict; a great and heroic battle of good vs. great evil, and it was the lead-ups that gained any sort of response because the climaxes are disappointing and short lived and all that tension and anxiety that you well up inside yourself, bracing yourself for the shock of discovering the bogeyman in the wardrobe, is the closest thing to fear that you get from this tale. 

The book is very reflective of Bram Stoker’s Dracula with really the only difference being that it’s not written in diary entries and newspaper articles, but the dramas and horrific confrontations are short lived and sometimes meagre, a bit of an anticlimax at the end of the day. 

One thing that I really could not grasp in this book was the bouts of King’s metaphorical satire that he tried to achieve. There are chapters where absolutely nothing happens, they are merely there to convey the irony of the general tale as well as outline the nuances of life, death, power, religion, and take a subtle satiric stab at small town routine and general small community living. I couldn’t quite discern what this book was trying to achieve from its audience and because it revolves around the entire town and its population, which calls for a lot of boring back history on each character, I found myself just getting bored and unconcerned. It was a bit like trying to watch Anonymous again. 

Filled with “horror” the Undead, action, romance, heroism, religion, and conflicts of faith, ‘Salem’s Lot didn’t do anything for me aside from give my faith in Stephen King a good hard shake. Admittedly his more genius works did not come until quite some time after this, but still at the end of the day I found this book to be trying and stale. In a precursory author’s not on the book, King says “we’ll talk about vampires here in the dim. I think I can make you believe in them.” well I can tell you that he failed with me on that note.