I’m most certainly a broken record when it comes to Stephen King at this point. Many of you probably saw King’s name in the review title and thought, “I can sit this one out, since it’ll be nothing but praise and adulation for King.” I mean…you would not be wrong about that. King’s career has been pretty strong since the beginning with Carrie and then it continued with ‘Salem’s Lot not long after.
‘Salem’s Lot, despite not having read it in over a decade, has stayed with me. The name Kurt Barlow is almost synonymous with Count Dracula in my head, and the hanging ghost of Hubie Marsten in his decrepit house on the hill has remained a haunting image. It may not be spooky season anymore, but it is always a good time for a King read, especially during these dark, cold winter days.
Writer Ben Mears makes his way to Jerusalem’s Lot, a small Maine town where he lived for part of his childhood. While living there, he had a spooky encounter inside the infamous Marsten house, and the experience has inspired him to write a book about the nature of evil. He makes connections with some of the townspeople, including English teacher Matt Burke and college graduate Susan Norton. But a man named Kurt Barlow and his business partner Richard Straker have set up a furniture business at the Marsten house, at the same time that several untimely deaths take place. Soon Ben and his friends discover the horrifying secret behind Barlow’s appearance and what is happening to the residents of ‘Salem’s Lot, and it’s a race to save the town before the sun goes down…
One thing I’ve really come to expect from Stephen King are his lengthy tangents about his characters. He sets the scene through these people and how they observe the world around them. There is no omniscient narrator describing the changing of the seasons or the nature of the town: these things are observed through the people living in ‘Salem’s Lot. This seems especially important since this story is about the evil evolution of a town, and that change must be readily observed by the reader.
In other words, you need to get to know these people in order to sense the danger approaching them and their town. Even if it takes a long time to get there.
There are a lot of characters in this book, and in typical Stephen King fashion, he uses many of the same names as his other books. I like to imagine he has a list of favorites that he picks randomly from every time he needs a more or less disposable side character. Which is not to say that these characters are not memorable. Or, at least, their roles in the transformation of ‘Salem’s Lot, are not memorable.
For example, I do not immediately remember the name of the gravedigger, but I do remember his spine-tingling feeling of being watched, despite being the only living thing in the graveyard. Not to mention his horror upon realizing that he is being watched by the vampire lying in the very grave he’s digging.
The truth about Barlow, Straker, and the Marsten house slowly falls into place with a great dread that none of the characters can explain. A delivery is made to the Marsten house basement and the crew gets the job done quickly so they can leave the creepy place. The house itself seems to have a magnetic draw, since many people at one point look out their windows towards it, whether remembering the tragedies that happened there or wondering what Barlow and Straker are doing there.
But everything starts to go wrong when young Ralphie Glick and his older brother Danny are attacked in the woods by their house. After that, the character tangents slow down and we get a much more pervasive dread.
The atmosphere of this book is pretty impressive. This time, I consumed ‘Salem’s Lot as an audiobook on my way to and from work, when it was cold and dark and windy. I couldn’t help thinking, as I went out to my car early in the morning, whether there was something waiting in the shadows beyond the streetlamps. After all, vampires thrive in the dark, so it makes sense to be afraid of what you can’t see.
Stephen King partially wrote ‘Salem’s Lot when he imagined what would happen if Dracula lived in the 1970s, and in many ways, this book is a modern reimagining of that story. It’s easy to assign parts if you’re familiar with Dracula: Kurt Barlow is Count Dracula, Ben Mears is Jonathan Harker, Richard Straker is R.M. Renfield, Susan Norton is Mina Murray, Matt Burke is Abraham Van Helsing, Jimmy Cody is Dr. John Seward…the list goes on. It’s kind of funny since the novel Dracula exists within ‘Salem’s Lot, and the characters seem to be aware that they are filling these roles.
‘Salem’s Lot plays with the same underlying fear as Dracula: that a powerful monster has come to town with the intent to make more monsters out of the townspeople, and it’s up to a ragtag team of everymen to stop him. ‘Salem’s Lot is a little scarier in that regard. More and more quickly, the townspeople meet screaming fates, and we realize the growing danger our team is in.
King uses time as a way of heightening that danger. As our heroes prepare for battle, they check the time, feeling sunset draw nearer: the moment when daylight will disappear, and there will be nothing left to protect them but superstition and wooden stakes. And with every kill that happens, the time is marked, showing how long it will be before dawn will render these monsters powerless again.
We watch what feels like a dozen separate episodes of people getting turned into vampires, but each one is frightening in its own way, building slowly to reveal who is the vampire and who is about to be turned.
‘Salem’s Lot would have been even more terrifying to read during the pandemic, since vampirism feels like a fast-spreading plague getting closer and closer no matter what preventative measures you take. There’s also a little Invasion of the Body Snatchers thrown in, with the townspeople losing their humanity to an evil force with a hefty amount of dread thrown in.
‘Salem’s Lot is not just a terrific vampire read, but a great read for cold, dark winter nights. Of course, you’ll need a heavy blanket to help prevent the shivers you’ll get from reading it anyway.
The Library Key 