So, I love vampire stories. Dracula, Anne Rice, Lost Boys, Fright Night, Blade, the Buffy-verse, even Twilight (though it gets a little rough when I start thinking about the relationship dynamics going on there). So many others. Serious and silly, I enjoy them.
Salem’s Lot is quintessential vampire. They can’t go out during the day. Holy water and crosses hurt them if the wielder believes in them. They can’t enter a home without permission and hypnotize their victims to get inside. They can mist through things and their reflections are not solid if present at all. A stake to the heart is the preferred method to kill them.
When people break these vampire “rules”, the story is harder to enjoy. I just think the author is trying to fix holes in their plot. Twilight is the worst of the rule breakers. Blade also breaks the rule but has a much better plot line explaining why Blade can go out in the daylight.
Salem’s Lot is a small town in Maine. Writer Ben Mears has returned to the Lot to work on a book about the town’s most notorious murder/suicide and the home it happened in, Marsten House. He planned to rent the house and write his book there, but he learned the home had been purchased. The new owners seemed to be moving in around the time Ben arrived in town.
A small boy disappears one night in the woods and his older brother is stricken with illness and can’t remember what happened to them. Eventually the older brother dies. Others come down with a similar illness and die as well.
Ben and his group of friends suspect the new owners of Marsten House are vampires and come up with a plan to confront them. One-by-one, Ben’s friends are picked off until it is just him and a boy from town. They manage to kill the head vampire and then flee town.
My biggest complaint about this book is how fast Ben and his friends decide a vampire is running around, almost like it was an everyday problem. Sure, they get concrete confirmation soon enough, but the initial jump to that conclusion was too soon.
Otherwise, I think this is a great book. The character development is spot on, which I expect from Stephen King. He can give a random, short-lived character life in a way that few other authors manage.
Next up, I’m reading Rage by Richard Bachman (aka Stephen King). King made the pseudonym because back in the 1970s, a writer couldn’t publish more than one book per year (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bachman). King is known for being prolific to the extent that I’ve heard some people say he has a team of writers working for him to churn out his books. Seems unlikely to me, but you never know for sure. Either way, I don’t really care. I still enjoy his books.
I found there was a hurdle to reading everything King, out-of-print. Rage is the first book I’ve come to in King’s list that is OOP. There was a collection of the Bachman books (image above), but that is also OOP. I found an old used copy for sale online finally so I’ll be able to keep reading everything in order.
Til next time.
S. E. Baran 