Publication date
17 October 1975
Standalone or series
Standalone
First time reading this author?
No (also not the first time I’ve read this book).
Why I picked this
There’s a lot of reflection in the author’s note of Stephen King’s most recent short story collection and it’s prompted me another re-read of his back catalogue.
Review copy or purchase
I’ve had this in paperback for a long time, but bought both the ebook and audiobook to support this re-read.
What it’s about
Novelist Ben Mears returns to the Maine town of ‘Salem’s Lot thinking to write about the old house with a dark past that has haunted his nightmares. He finds new friends and an even darker secret that is taking over the town.
Review
‘Salem’s Lot is the Stephen King book I always remember my mum telling me she found the scariest. It’s probably the purest most traditional horror story making no secret of its homage to Bram Stoker’s classic. The blend from a relatively peaceful sense of a small American town to pure horror is so subtle that I’ve never found it an out and out scary read. Like most of King’s work it’s the people stories and perspective I’m drawn in by.
In this time of re-reading (my fifth or sixth I think), I noticed more the concepts that King revisited in later works. Straker, the vampire familiar, has a blend of charm and condescension towards the people visiting his antique shop cover that you can see developed into a core concept for Needful Things. Danny Glick who survived the disappearance of his younger brother Ralphie only to fall ill himself reminded me of the beginnings of the subplot of the young magician who vanished his brother in The Tommyknockers (I think, not googling as if I’ve misremembered the story this is from I’ll discover that at the relevant stage of this reread.
These moments of foreshadowing of future stories are largely unintentional I imagine, but are part of that overall experience of Stephen King’s work where there are sometimes very clear overlaps and placing in a shared universe (including overlapping dimensions) and sometimes simply a result of all the stories coming from the universe that lives inside his imagination. There is literally no other author I’ve read where I feel as much as if readers are invited into their minds, although that may just be a feeling that comes from the combination of the amount of stories he has published and the insights in his dear Constant Reader author notes.
Rating
⭐⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
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