Salem’s Lot – Review

Author: Stephen King
Publication Date: 1975
Publisher: Signet
Pages: 427

“Almost everyone thought the man and the boy were father and son.”

“Salem’s Lot“, one of Stephen King’s first novels, reminds me of the saying,”The journey is the thing.” I very much enjoyed the first three-quarters of the book, while all the pieces were put into place and the small town details carefully crafted, but the actual culmination of the confrontation between humans and vampires in the last part of the story did not engage me as much as I thought it would, most likely because it has become well-worn territory in books and film in the three and a half decades since this book first came out.

Ben Mears is an author who returns to the fictional Jerusalem’s Lot, looking for a cathartic release from a childhood incident. What he finds instead is the imminent explosion of a vampire infestation in a small isolated Maine town. King applies the device of opening with what happens near the end of the story, so it lures me in with the knowledge that something horrible has happened, alluded to in such a way so as to confirm its evil essence. And so the hook is set, and then I am free to enjoy the way that King sets up story, and he establishes the characters quickly and efficiently. Along the way he populates the story with a wide range of townspeople, and skillfully depicts their evils and sins as would be found in almost any small town.

One part of the story that resonates with me is the way in which King shows some people being willfully ignorant of how little their safety is guaranteed, not only from supernatural threats but from the everyday evil that humans do.

“From the front yard you can see your own house. Now, what in God’s name can happen to you in sight of your own house?”
- p. 261

Deep inside, how do most of us feel about our safety? Are we safe in our yards, or in our homes? We should feel safe because we are safe, but that’s not normally because of the presence of our vigilance but because of the absence of malefic intent. As I ponder that, I hear on the radio about Tori Stafford’s body being found, three months after she was abducted on her way home from school. King doesn’t shy away from including snapshots of these kinds of human evil, including one that provoked an intense visceral reaction in me as the father of an infant. His combination of weaving human and supernatural evil together is certainly effective.

In other books, I’ve found that King does a great job of planting early and paying off later, and he shows that same skill here in his early work. Even when there are several payoffs later in the story that are disconnected from the main story line, they are still satisfying on their own for the closure they provide. This, however, also leads me to a disparity in how much I enjoyed the story – I enjoyed it much more in the setup and in the middle portions, but then the last 125 pages or so, when the vampires fully come on the scene and the action ramps up, it didn’t really have the same impact for me. King includes implicit and explicit nods to Stoker’s “Dracula“, but in the years since “Salem’s Lot” came out – 1975 – there have been so many vampire movies and books that what may have been fresher back then for a humans versus vampires matchup now seems like standard fare. That said. I think King does a great job with the characters and setting everything up through most of “Salem’s Lot“, and he delivers on several particularly creepy moments.

*******

As an aside, during the second night I was reading this novel and getting into some of the creepier passages, my dog Dakota was sitting up in the near dark next to my bed, staring down the hallway. There’s a Far Side cartoon where an old lady sits in her house and one of her dogs says to another dog: “Want to see something funny? I’m going to stare at the closet and just growl.” That kind of summarizes it well. So of course, I had to check through the house to confirm all was okay. The next night was when I discovered that we had raccoons coming around the house. In any case, it gave some extra atmosphere to the creepiness in the book.

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