Customer Reviews

Salem's Lot

5 star:		(358)
4 star:		(110)
3 star:		(40)
2 star:		(12)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

The Illustrated Edition of 'Salem's Lot is set up much like a 'Special Edition' DVD. The book boasts over 50 pages of 'deleted or alternative' scenes, a new introduction, and two previously published short stories ("One for the Road" and "Jerusalem's Lot"). The short stories don't have much to do with the characters or plot of the novel but certainly flesh out the 'special features' that the Illustrated Edition has to offer. If you've never read 'Night Shift' (or maybe even if you have, and it's been awhile), then they'll serve as an added treat.

If one is a fan of Stephen King, this is a must own. A somewhat already infamous passage (mentioned by King before) where one character is offed by a gang of rats in a basement is restored in all its deliciously gory glory. While we're on the topic, the bonus passages are NOT inserted into the text of the novel but offered in a later section. This is not a 'director's cut' of the book but set up like a DVD where one can flip to and peruse the deleted sections if one chooses to do so. It's the same novel as before, so if you're looking for something completely new a la Revised version of 'The Stand', this may not be what you're looking for. However, if you are interested into further delving into the world of 'Salem's Lot or interested in what King and/or his editors decided to take out from the original text, then you'll be in Stephen King heaven.

The photographs are stark, chilling, and beautiful... though sparse throughout the book. Basically, they seperate the sections and serve as covers.

As for the novel itself, it is both a compelling and entertaining read. As mentioned in the Amazon review, all the King staples are here (i.e. small town, secrets, and darkness pervading the ordinariness of life). I read this when I was probably way too young to have read it, and it scared me for weeks and turned me into a King junkie for life. If you're a King fan, horror fan, or just looking for a great read, you cannot go wrong with 'Salem's Lot.

Jerusalem's Lot is an unassuming small town in southern Maine. It is the kind of town where everybody knows everybody else and most of the residents have lived there all of their lives. In this atmosphere it was odd indeed when three strangers came to town at almost the same time. One of these strangers wasn't really a stranger at all. He had spent part of his childhood there and had returned in hopes of ridding himself of some old demons. The other two strangers also had an old connection with the town but it was a much darker and sinister connection.

Stephen King starts his macabre tail with these facts and then begins to weave a fascinating tail. He introduces the reader to the town in such a way that it makes one feel as if he had actually been to this fictional place. The reader will get to know many of the residents, some all too well. Some are likable, some are loathsome, and some are described so well that the reader will actually mourn their passing. One can easily feel Ben Mears' pain when he finds out that someone that he is very close to is gone.

As the dark cloud of vampirism spreads across the town there are a few residents who figure out what is going on. Some refuse to believe what logic and their senses tell them and they fall victim to the curse while others figure things out in time to flee. A few try to stop the spread of this evil and pay dearly. For those who have not seen one of the movies based on this book, this is all of the story that I am going to give away. For those who have seen the movies, neither movie follows the book too closely and the book is far superior to either film.

King's flair for this type of story is well known and I can assure you that you will not be disappointed with this book. It will entertain you, it will scare you, and it will delight you. While reading parts of this book I was able to feel the sense of dread that many people in the Lot were feeling. King is indeed a master when it comes to bringing gloom and doom off of his pages and into the hearts of his readers.

There are a few places where it is a little hard to follow just who is saying what in some of the conversations but beyond that I could find few flaws. I found it very interesting that the reader would not be able to figure out what was happening to the town until about the same time some of the characters do. Of course, that was when this book first came out. I dare say that few people who start this book now, nearly thirty years after it was written will be surprised by the basics of the story. The creepy factor must have been much greater before the plot was given away by the movies, but rest assured, there are still plenty of creeps between the covers of this book.

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

This is King's best book. I read it fifteen years ago, when I was the last student still living in my gothic dormitory at Yale. It scared the hell out of me. Too bad, but by now, almost everyone knows that 'Salem's Lot is a vampire novel. I consider that a spoiler. What was so frightening for me the first time through was not quite knowing what was wrong with this town. Much is made of the old vacant Marsten house, and I thought I was reading a haunted house story. It's not until well into the book that King makes any overt reference to vampires, and when he finally does, it is with a sense of both discovery and inevitability that the reader learns the true nature of what is afflicting the town. Why, of course it's vampires. What else could it be but but vampires?

As for the book being a ripoff of Dracula--well, yes. In the same sense that the movies Blade or The Hunger rip off Dracula, or that the novel Mary Reilly is a ripoff of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. They are retellings. The Dracula thing isn't much more than an imaginative launching point. As someone who's actually read Stoker's Dracula, I think it's an important Gothic novel and preFreudian allegory -- but not all that scary. Not nearly as frightening as 'Salem's Lot.

King is at the top of his game here, and he portrays people who make sense, who belong in this story, and whose character is their destiny.

For all his prolific output, I wish King would do a sequel. This remains his most elegant, most successful, taut and transporting novel.

In my opinion Salem's Lot definitely is the second best modern vampire story ever told. Richard Matheson's "I Am Legend" is the best.

This is a typical Stephen King book: quiet small town, mysterious stranger arrives and settles in the Marsten House (which has already a history of its own), vampires start to knock on your windows. The story is fast-paced, with well-written characters, and interesting twists and turns that make the hair at the base of your neck stand up.

And even if you have already read it, it's certainley a book you can reread without losing the original thrilling atmosphere you experienced when diving into the story for the first time.

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.

I am a big Stephen King fan; he has written so many terrific books, but 'salem's Lot, one of the first I read, is still one of his very best. His handling of the classic vampire tale is stunning and his characters are people you really care about (not always true of his later works). This lends an additional sense of horror; every time something happens to one of the characters, you can hear yourself say, "oh, no!" This of all King's books has haunted me over the years; every so often I take it down and re-read it, and it is just as scary and effective the twentieth time as it was the first.

Sure, we've all read vampire stories, seen the movies, heard the legends. But we don't really believe in those archaic old beasts do we? You bet your eternal soul we do! This novel was Stephen King's first really good book (if you haven't read my review of Carrie let me just say I wasn't too impressed with it) and I would like to believe that this was the work that really cemented Mr. King in the publication world. Affirmation that he wasn't a one hit wonder and such. If you have ever read Bram Stoker's Dracula you will undoubtedly notice similarites in the story line but in no way is this the same as Dracula. I was not alive when this book was written, I don't really empathize with certain events; but the overall novel is timeless. That is the great argument for Stephen King's works being literature, he defies the critc's notion that current events become dated with the passage of time. There is this little concept of setting in stories! What really gets me with this piece is that the characters are people we've all met. Adulterous, Sly, Vindictive, Violent, Evil. We all know people like that. So when you finish the book you think two things: 1. They got theirs in the end. 2. Hey, this is left open as if the author intended a sequel!

No question this book will try to get under your epidermis, hopefully it will succeed. Provided you haven't already been visited by a soul thieving vampire!

Buy the book= knowledge that you own a copy of a classic.

Stephen King's second book... starring the small Maine town of Jerusalem's Lot and the pervasive evil that comes to inhabit it. The town knows horror, of course. Years before, a man named Hubie Marsten (prisoner to psychosexual disorders he can't control) committed a murder, and now his house stands empty, seeming to watch over the town. The Marsten House becomes the symbol of evil, a central place from which terror and death resonate.

Introduced to the town are three strangers: Ben Mears, a writer who lived there as a child, Mark Petrie, a kid obsessed with monsters and horror movies, and Mr. Barlow, a mysterious figure who opens up a shop in town (a precursor to Leland Gaunt in Needful Things?). Though Barlow doesn't make an appearance in the novel until more than halfway through, his assistant, Mr. Straker, takes care of his business while Barlow takes care of the town's business.

Following the arrival of these strangers, a young boy is found dead. The scene at the funeral in which the boy's father throws himself at the coffin screaming for his son to wake up is perhaps King's most gut-wrenching. Then, when darkness falls on the town, the boy emerges from his coffin and his father's wish becomes prophecy - though not the way he would have wished.

Death invades the town. Worse than death, Salem's Lot is gripped by the ravages of the undead. By the time Ben Mears, Mark Petrie and their friends discover the truth, the town is almost beyond hope. Their only chance is to destroy Barlow, burn the town, and escape.

The novel begins and ends with Ben and Mark leaving to once again visit the Lot, as they have discovered the vampire threat hasn't vanished. Salem's Lot ends with a cliffhanger that will probably never be balanced. What we have, though, is one of King's most intense and scary books. After the steady buildup, the moments of terror come in one-two knockout style, and King's mastery of vampire myths and legends is first class, especially the way he infuses them into modern-day society. The fact that the major villain stays behind the scenes for the first half of the novel only adds to the excitement and anxiety.

Salem's Lot is not just a vampire novel. It is a novel of pure and unbridled fear, a truly scary book. It is about small towns and the nature of evil. It is about love found, love lost, and the persistance of hope. And, well, it has those vampires...

King's second novel, I think, and I still enjoy it. It feels classic, but still a great read. I had lost my hard cover of the original, so I bought this thinking, "Bonus, illustrations." Well, if you're buying for the illustrations, save the money. They're black and white photos by a photo-artist friend. They have little/nothing to do with Salem's Lot and are certainly not worth the steep price tag. Mind you, it's the only way to get a hardcover version new, so by all means if you're a King fan. I have all his books hardcover, now, so that's good news. Maybe I should have gone for that first edition used cloth I saw for only $1200. Oh well. Still a good, entertaining novel. Kingisms are here a-plenty, and his strong voice has emerged. It's Dracula revisited, and King admits as much. I did find the "boy and the man" less engaging than I remembered it (at the beginning of the novel), but once he hits town it flies along at a great ol' pace. Pure entertainment. The characters are okay, not as good as later novels (or Carrie) but it's still fun. Early King, very nostalgic for that reason.