'Salem's Lot [Mass Market Paperback]

Stephen King (Author)

Book Description

Release date: December 27, 2011

Ben Mears has returned to Jerusalem's Lot in the hopes that living in an old mansion, long the subject of town lore, will help him cast out his own devils and provide inspiration for his new book. But when two young boys venture into the woods and only one comes out alive, Mears begins to realize that there may be something sinister at work and that his hometown is under siege by forces of darkness far beyond his control.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Before vampires became sympathetic characters with their own alternate worlds, complete with vampire coffee shops and vampire politics, they used to be bad guys, scary not sexy, and they preferred wreaking havoc in horror novels rather than exuding tortured sensitivity in YA coming-of-age fiction. Fortunately, we don’t need to go all the way back to Dracula and Boris Karloff to remember those halcyon days: we have Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot, from 1975. Oddly, it’s not the vampires that make ’Salem’s Lot great popular fiction. Mr. Barlow, our lead vampire, is no Dracula. He doesn’t even appear until the story is nearly half over, and he is perhaps the most one-dimensional figure in the book (but that single dimension is enough: unadulterated evil). The real main character isn’t a person at all, human or vampire: it’s the seemingly idyllic New England town of Jerusalem’s Lot. King once said that in ’Salem’s Lot, he set out to create “a fictional town with enough prosaic reality about it to offset the comic-book menace of a bunch of vampires.” He did just that by drawing on our universal fear of outsiders, and nowhere is that fear more recognizable than in our traditional image of the New England small town, where insularity itself becomes a defense against incursion by strangers. The stereotypical Yankee, befuddling outsiders with a series of cryptic yups and nopes, may be a comic character from folklore, but he is also a soldier defending his Maginot Line against potential blitzkrieg. And behind the crotchety Yankee’s seeming impregnability, there is the constant fear that one day a stranger will come to town who won’t take nope for an answer. That juxtaposition of prosaic reality against outlandish terror has always been central to King’s technique for scaring his readers. In ’Salem’s Lot, he does it by looking beneath the surface of idyllic New England. We see the pastoral beauty, the close-knit community, and the unpretentious lifestyle, yet from the beginning, we also see the harbinger of something else, something other. The novel begins with a stranger, not Barlow but a writer, Ben Mears, returning to the Lot, where he’d lived briefly as a boy. Mears has come home again not to reclaim his innocence but to expunge his demons—the memory of the body of a man dead for decades, still hanging in the closet of the Marsten House. Mears believes he hallucinated this horrible scene, but he wants to explore why it happened, why this house prompted him to imagine evil. What Mears finds when he returns to the Lot is that the Marsten House is now occupied by another stranger, our Mr. Barlow. As the known gives way to the unknown, King shows how the small-town insistence on maintaining the illusion of tranquility makes easy pickings for a vampire intent on fomenting a little evil. If ’Salem’s Lot were just another old-fashioned vampire novel, it would portray a straightforward struggle between good (people) and bad (vampires). It would not portray the arrival of vampires in the Lot as a kind of supernatural manifestation of the town’s distorted sense of itself. King feels both affection for and anger toward his small town. A part of him wants to see ’Salem’s Lot get its comeuppance, and this part gives the novel a degree of frisson that most vampire stories lack. And yet, in the end, the vampires don’t win, at least not exactly. Yes, Ben Mears pounds a stake in Barlow’s heart, but that isn’t enough. The evil continues to thrive. The town needs its own stake. Writers of every kind—from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Grace Metalious to John Updike to Carolyn Chute—have wrestled with their mixed feelings about the small towns of New England. But it took Stephen King to burn one down. --Bill Ott

Review

"Spine-tingling fiction at its best." --Grand Rapids Press

"A master storyteller." --The Los Angeles Times

"An unabashed chiller." --Austin American Statesman

“[The] most wonderfully gruesome man on the planet.” —USA Today
 
“A super exorcism...tremendous.” —Kirkus Reviews
 
“A novel of chilling, unspeakable evil.” —Chattanooga Times
 
“[King is] . . . the guy who probably knows more about scary goings-on in confined, isolated places than anybody since Edgar Allan Poe.” —Entertainment Weekly
 
“Stephen King has built a literary genre of putting ordinary people in the most terrifying situations. . . . he’s the author who can always make the improbable so scary you'll feel compelled to check the locks on the front door.” —The Boston Globe
 
“Peerless imagination.” —The Observer (London)

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 672 pages
• Publisher: Anchor; Reprint edition (December 27, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307743675
• ISBN-13: 978-0307743671
• Product Dimensions: 4.2 x 1.5 x 6.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (138 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #12,563 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

64 of 70 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Today's Readers are Jaded July 11, 2011

By Karen E. Rice

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Today's readers, first becoming introduced to Stephen King, are jaded. They have been spoiled by the explosion of more graphic and explicit entertainment of late. When I first read 'Salem's Lot as a young teen, I was horrified, terrified, petrified. It was (and still is) brilliant storytelling. I was scared, not by the graphic scenes (which were few) but by the *implications* and the unwritten horror, there between the lines.

I feel sorry for today's readers who seem to have little or no imagination left. For us old fogies, who discovered King in the dark, under the sheets and with a flashlight after Mom went to bed and knowing she'd take the book away *for good* if she found you reading it, 'Salem's Lot is a delicious masterpiece of terror.

This Kindle edition was a great treat. I downloaded it without reading much about the edition...what was there to "know?" It was 'Salem's Lot, the only King novel to give me NIGHTMARES. As I was reading, I remembered a short story about "The Lot" from one of King's other books, about a guy who left his wife and kid in a snowbank in the car...and I was straining to remember the name of the story or the book it was from....imagine my delight at the "end" of 'Salem's Lot to discover it wasn't THE END...there was MORE! The story I was trying to recall was "One for the Road" and there was another one I hadn't read before called "Jerusalem's Lot" and then there were the "deleted" or edited scenes from King's original plan for 'Salem's Lot....oh the joy! You hate to see a good book end, and so I was happy that 'Salem's Lot didn't end quite so soon. :)

For unimaginative readers who desire an author to spell out lot of blood and gore and graphic sex, 'Salem's Lot is not for you. For the rest of us, who love to curl their toes at the unspoken, who break out in goosebumps at the subtlety, who long to feel the emotions and terror of the characters....'Salem's Lot welcomes you.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars This Book Made Me A Fan June 6, 2009

By SerenityFL

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Salem's Lot was the very first Stephen King book I ever read. I was 13 years old and already had an overactive imagination before this book walked right in to that imagination, smacked it around and demanded recognition and respect.

For many weeks after reading this book, I was petrified to look out my bedroom window at night lest I see a vampire hovering there, asking to be let in. To this day, I cannot watch that particular scene in the movie adaptation.

I love a good thriller; a book that will scare the ever loving garbage out of me and this is THE book that did it. This book had such an impact on my 13 year old mind that I have been too scared to pick it up and read it again in over 20 years. However, now that I have a Kindle on the way, I'm adding it to my soon to be built up electronic SK library. And I will read it again.

This time I'm leaving all the lights on.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Real vampires are NOT sparkly! June 25, 2012

By Clarice Marchman-Jones

Format:Kindle Edition

This is a story of vampires the way they SHOULD be portrayed. Vampires are not "sparkly". Vampires are not "sexy" and full of angst and guilt. They are soulless predators. Stephen King got it exactly right and took it up a notch by setting his story of vampire infestation in an isolated 20th century small town. Forty years later, this tale of ancient evil transported to the 1970's still holds up.

It's such an old story, already re-told in popular culture Ad nauseam, so you are certain you know where this is going. And yet..... who can resist a good vampire story? Not me. And this is without doubt a most EXCELLENT vampire story.

King was pitch-perfect with this story which begins with the description of a town that seems to already be on life support and it's residents - many who are less than perfect, but all very real. Some folks you might like to have as friends, others you would avoid, still others so despicable that you are already picking them out to be the first blood donors. But, good or bad, you feel like you know these people, so when bad things start happening in their town, you care what happens to them.

King doesn't emphasize the gore; he is highly skilled at planting seeds that will do most of the work in the reader's mind. The plot moves at a deliberately steady pace allowing the tension to build and encouraging the reader to "fill in" the creepy bits you just KNOW are going on in the background. When the first innocent child disappears... well, you KNEW that was going to happen. But, still, the story continues oozing menacingly along in a vaguely familiar path, and you just can't stop reading and wondering if it will lead to the expected conclusion.

It does, and it doesn't. The story maintains the integrity of the Bram Stoker mythology but adds the interesting variants necessitated by the 20th Century setting - and THAT is what makes it so creepy!

A classic mythology adapted to a modern (at the time) setting, "Salem's Lot" is now a classic in its own right and a really fun read.