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'Salem's Lot

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'Salem's Lot Kindle Edition

by Stephen King (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.6 21,749 ratings

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#1 BESTSELLER • Ben Mears has returned to Jerusalem’s Lot in hopes that exploring the history of the Marsten House, an old mansion long the subject of rumor and speculation, will help him cast out his personal devils and provide inspiration for his new book.

But when two young boys venture into the woods, and only one returns alive, Mears begins to realize that something sinister is at work.

In fact, his hometown is under siege from forces of darkness far beyond his imagination. And only he, with a small group of allies, can hope to contain the evil that is growing within the borders of this small New England town.

With this, his second novel, Stephen King established himself as an indisputable master of American horror, able to transform the old conceits of the genre into something fresh and all the more frightening for taking place in a familiar, idyllic locale.

From the Publisher

something sinister is coming...soon to be a major motion picture

Editorial Reviews

Review

“A master storyteller.” —The Los Angeles Times

“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)

“An unabashed chiller.” —Austin American Statesman

“[The] most wonderfully gruesome man on the planet.” —USA Today

“[King is] the guy who probably knows more about scary goings-on in confined, isolated places than anybody since Edgar Allan Poe.” —Entertainment Weekly

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

“A super exorcism. . . . Tremendous.” —Kirkus Reviews

“A novel of chilling, unspeakable evil.” —Chattanooga Times

About the Author

Stephen King is the author of more than fifty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. Among his most recent are Full Dark, No Stars; Under the Dome; Just After Sunset; Duma Key; Lisey&;s Story; Cell; and the concluding novels inthe Dark Tower saga: Wolves of the Calla, Song of Susannah, and The Dark Tower. His acclaimed nonfiction book On Writing is also a bestseller. In 2003, he was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and in 2007 he received the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. He lives in Maine with his wife, novelist Tabitha King.

--This text refers to the mass_market edition.

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 --This text refers to the mass_market edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

Ben (I)

By the time he had passed Portland going north on the turnpike, Ben Mears had begun to feel a not unpleasurable tingle of excitement in his belly. It was September 5, 1975, and summer was enjoying her final grand fling. The trees were bursting with green, the sky was a high, soft blue, and just over the Falmouth town line he saw two boys walking a road parallel to the expressway with fishing rods settled on their shoulders like carbines.

He switched to the travel lane, slowed to the minimum turnpike speed, and began to look for anything that would jog his memory. There was nothing at first, and he tried to caution himself against almost sure disappointment. You were nine then. That's twenty-five years of water under the bridge. Places change. Like people.
In those days the four-lane 295 hadn't existed. If you wanted to go to Portland from the Lot, you went out Route 12 to Falmouth and then got on Number 1. Time had marched on.

Stop that shit.

But it was hard to stop. It was hard to stop when--

A big BSA cycle with jacked handlebars suddenly roared past him in the passing lane, a kid in a T-shirt driving, a girl in a red cloth jacket and huge mirror-lensed sunglasses riding pillion behind him. They cut in a little too quickly and he overreacted, jamming on his brakes and laying both hands on the horn. The BSA sped up, belching blue smoke from its exhaust, and the girl jabbed her middle finger back at him.

He resumed speed, wishing for a cigarette. His hands were trembling slightly. The BSA was almost out of sight now, moving fast. The kids. The goddamned kids. Memories tried to crowd in on him, memories of a more recent vintage. He pushed them away. He hadn't been on a motorcycle in two years. He planned never to ride on one again.

A flash of red caught his eye off to the left, and when he glanced that way, he felt a burst of pleasure and recognition. A large red barn stood on a hill far across a rising field of timothy and clover, a barn with a cupola painted white--even at this distance he could see the sun gleam on the weather vane atop that cupola. It had been there then and was still here now. It looked exactly the same. Maybe it was going to be all right after all. Then the trees blotted it out.

As the turnpike entered Cumberland, more and more things began to seem familiar. He passed over the Royal River, where they had fished for steelies and pickerel as boys. Past a brief, flickering view of Cumberland Village through the trees. In the distance the Cumberland water tower with its huge slogan painted across the side: "Keep Maine Green." Aunt Cindy had always said someone should print "Bring Money" underneath that.

His original sense of excitement grew and he began to speed up, watching for the sign. It came twinkling up out of the distance in reflectorized green five miles later:

ROUTE 12 JERUSALEM'S LOT
CUMBERLAND CUMBERLAND CTR

A sudden blackness came over him, dousing his good spirits like sand on fire. He had been subject to these since (his mind tried to speak Miranda's name and he would not let it) the bad time and was used to fending them off, but this one swept over him with a savage power that was dismaying.

What was he doing, coming back to a town where he had lived for four years as a boy, trying to recapture something that was irrevocably lost? What magic could he expect to recapture by walking roads that he had once walked as a boy and were probably asphalted and straightened and logged off and littered with tourist beer cans? The magic was gone, both white and black. It had all gone down the chutes on that night when the motorcycle had gone out of control and then there was the yellow moving van, growing and growing, his wife Miranda's scream, cut off with sudden finality when--

The exit came up on his right, and for a moment he considered driving right past it, continuing on to Chamberlain or Lewiston, stopping for lunch, and then turning around and going back. But back where? Home? That was a laugh. If there was a home, it had been here. Even if it had only been four years, it was his.

He signaled, slowed the Citroën, and went up the ramp. Toward the top, where the turnpike ramp joined Route 12 (which became Jointner Avenue closer to town), he glanced up toward the horizon. What he saw there made him jam the brakes on with both feet. The Citro‘n shuddered to a stop and stalled.

The trees, mostly pine and spruce, rose in gentle slopes toward the east, seeming to almost crowd against the sky at the limit of vision. From here the town was not visible. Only the trees, and in the distance, where those trees rose against the sky, the peaked, gabled roof of the Marsten House.

He gazed at it, fascinated. Warring emotions crossed his face with kaleidoscopic swiftness.

"Still here," he murmured aloud. "By God."

He looked down at his arms. They had broken out in goose flesh.

TWO

He deliberately skirted town, crossing into Cumberland and then coming back into 'salem's Lot from the west, taking the Burns Road. He was amazed by how little things had changed out here. There were a few new houses he didn't remember, there was a tavern called Dell's just over the town line, and a pair of fresh gravel quarries. A good deal of the hardwood had been pulped over. But the old tin sign pointing the way to the town dump was still there, and the road itself was still unpaved, full of chuckholes and washboards, and he could see Schoolyard Hill through the slash in the trees where the Central Maine Power pylons ran on a northwest to southeast line. The Griffen farm was still there, although the barn had been enlarged. He wondered if they still bottled and sold their own milk. The logo had been a smiling cow under the name brand: "Sunshine Milk from the Griffen Farms!" He smiled. He had splashed a lot of that milk on his corn flakes at Aunt Cindy's house.

He turned left onto the Brooks Road, passed the wrought-iron gates and the low fieldstone wall surrounding Harmony Hill Cemetery, and then went down the steep grade and started up the far side--the side known as Marsten's Hill.

At the top, the trees fell away on both sides of the road. On the right, you could look right down into the town proper--Ben's first view of it. On the left, the Marsten House. He pulled over and got out of the car.

It was just the same. There was no difference, not at all. He might have last seen it yesterday.

The witch grass grew wild and tall in the front yard, obscuring the old, frost-heaved flagstones that led to the porch. Chirring crickets sang in it, and he could see grasshoppers jumping in erratic parabolas.

The house itself looked toward town. It was huge and rambling and sagging, its windows haphazardly boarded shut, giving it that sinister look of all old houses that have been empty for a long time. The paint had been weathered away, giving the house a uniform gray look. Windstorms had ripped many of the shingles off, and a heavy snowfall had punched in the west corner of the main roof, giving it a slumped, hunched look. A tattered no-trespassing sign was nailed to the right-hand newel post.

He felt a strong urge to walk up that overgrown path, past the crickets and hoppers that would jump around his shoes, climb the porch, peek between the haphazard boards into the hallway or the front room. Perhaps try the front door. If it was unlocked, go in.

He swallowed and stared up at the house, almost hypnotized. It stared back at him with idiot indifference.

You walked down the hall, smelling wet plaster and rotting wallpaper, and mice would skitter in the walls. There would still be a lot of junk lying around, and you might pick something up, a paperweight maybe, and put it in your pocket. Then, at the end of the hall, instead of going through into the kitchen, you could turn left and go up the stairs, your feet gritting in the plaster dust which had sifted down from the ceiling over the years. There were fourteen steps, exactly fourteen. But the top one was smaller, out of proportion, as if it had been added to avoid the evil number. At the top of the stairs you stand on the landing, looking down the hall toward a closed door. And if you walk down the hall toward it, watching as if from outside yourself as the door gets closer and larger, you can reach out your hand and put it on the tarnished silver knob--

He turned away from the house, a straw-dry whistle of air slipping from his mouth. Not yet. Later, perhaps, but not yet. For now it was enough to know that all of that was still here. It had waited for him. He put his hands on the hood of his car and looked out over the town. He could find out down there who was handling the Marsten House, and perhaps lease it. The kitchen would make an adequate writing room and he could bunk down in the front parlor. But he wouldn't allow himself to go upstairs.

Not unless it had to be done.

He got in his car, started it, and drove down the hill to Jerusalem's Lot.

Chapter Two

Susan (I)

He was sitting on a bench in the park when he observed the girl watching him. She was a very pretty girl, and there was a silk scarf tied over her light blond hair. She was currently reading a book, but there was a sketch pad and what looked like a charcoal pencil beside her. It was Tuesday, September 16, the first day of school, and the park had magically emptied of the rowdier element. What was left was a scattering of mothers with infants, a few old men sitting by the war memorial, and this girl sitting in the dappled shade of a gnarled old elm.

She looked up and saw him. An expression of startlement crossed her face. She looked down at her book; looked up at him again and started to rise; almost thought better of it; did rise; sat down again.

He got up and walked over, holding his own book, which was a paperback Western. "Hello," he said agreeably. "Do we know each other?"

"No," she said. "That is . . . you're Benjaman Mears, right?"

"Right." He raised his eyebrows.
She laughed nervously, not looking in his eyes except in a quick flash, to try to read the barometer of his intentions. She was quite obviously a girl not accustomed to speaking to strange men in the park.

"I thought I was seeing a ghost." She held up the book in her lap. He saw fleetingly that "Jerusalem's Lot Public Library" was stamped on the thickness of pages between covers. The book was Air Dance, his second novel. She showed him the photograph of himself on the back jacket, a photo that was four years old now. The face looked boyish and frighteningly serious--the eyes were black diamonds.

"Of such inconsequential beginnings dynasties are begun," he said, and although it was a joking throwaway remark, it hung oddly in the air, like prophecy spoken in jest. Behind them, a number of toddlers were splashing happily in the wading pool and a mother was telling Roddy not to push his sister so high. The sister went soaring up on her swing regardless, dress flying, trying for the sky. It was a moment he remembered for years after, as though a special small slice had been cut from the cake of time. If nothing fires between two people, such an instant simply falls back into the general wrack of memory.

Then she laughed and offered him the book. "Will you autograph it?"

"A library book?"

"I'll buy it from them and replace it."

He found a mechanical pencil in his sweater pocket, opened the book to the flyleaf, and asked, "What's your name?"

"Susan Norton."

He wrote quickly, without thinking: For Susan Norton, the prettiest girl in the park. Warm regards, Ben Mears. He added the date below his signature in slashed notation.

"Now you'll have to steal it," he said, handing it back. "Air Dance is out of print, alas."

"I'll get a copy from one of those book finders in New York." She hesitated, and this time her glance at his eyes was a little longer. "It's an awfully good book."

"Thanks. When I take it down and look at it, I wonder how it ever got published."

"Do you take it down often?"

"Yeah, but I'm trying to quit."

She grinned at him and they both laughed and that made things more natural. Later he would have a chance to think how easily this had happened, how smoothly. The thought was never a comfortable one. It conjured up an image of fate, not blind at all but equipped with sentient 20/20 vision and intent on grinding helpless mortals between the great millstones of the universe to make some unknown bread.

"I read Conway's Daughter, too. I loved that. I suppose you hear that all the time."

"Remarkably little," he said honestly. Miranda had also loved Conway's Daughter, but most of his coffeehouse friends had been noncommittal and most of the critics had clobbered it. Well, that was critics for you. Plot was out, masturbation in.

"Well, I did."

"Have you read the new one?"

"Billy Said Keep Going? Not yet. Miss Coogan at the drugstore says it's pretty racy."

"Hell, it's almost puritanical," Ben said. "The language is rough, but when you're writing about uneducated country boys, you can't . . . look, can I buy you an ice-cream soda or something? I was just getting a hanker on for one."

She checked his eyes a third time. Then smiled, warmly. "Sure. I'd love one. They're great in Spencer's."

That was the beginning of it. --This text refers to the mass_market edition.

Review

Grand Rapids PressSpine-tingling fiction at its best.

Chattanooga TimesA novel of chilling, unspeakable evil.

Kirkus ReviewsA super exorcism...tremendous. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Review

“A master storyteller.” —The Los Angeles Times

“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)

“An unabashed chiller.” —Austin American Statesman

“[The] most wonderfully gruesome man on the planet.” —USA Today

“[King is] the guy who probably knows more about scary goings-on in confined, isolated places than anybody since Edgar Allan Poe.” —Entertainment Weekly

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

“A super exorcism. . . . Tremendous.” —Kirkus Reviews

“A novel of chilling, unspeakable evil.” —Chattanooga Times
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From AudioFile

A dark wind is blowing into Jerusalem's Lot, Maine, in the guise of antique furniture dealers R.T. Straker and Kurt Barlow. Novelist Benjamin Mears has returned to the village near Portland to exorcise his childhood demons. Immediately, townspeople begin suffering from strange flu symptoms, or disappearing altogether. Mears and local high school teacher Matt Burke understand the peril the town faces. Soon they're joined by an artist, a doctor, an alcoholic priest, and an 11-year old boy, forming a modern-day team of vampire hunters. Ron McLarty goes straight for the jugular as he reads Stephen King's second novel. His voice is gently welcoming as he portrays the townspeople, giving them authentic rural Maine accents. But he also commands a menacing tone that will have listeners checking over their shoulders and under their beds. S.E.S. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Amazon.com Review

Stephen King's second book, 'Salem's Lot (1975)--about the slow takeover of an insular hamlet called Jerusalem's Lot by a vampire patterned after Bram Stoker's Dracula--has two elements that he also uses to good effect in later novels: a small American town, usually in Maine, where people are disconnected from each other, quietly nursing their potential for evil; and a mixed bag of rational, goodhearted people, including a writer, who band together to fight that evil.

Simply taken as a contemporary vampire novel, 'Salem's Lot is great fun to read, and has been very influential in the horror genre. But it's also a sly piece of social commentary. As King said in 1983, "In 'Salem's Lot, the thing that really scared me was not vampires, but the town in the daytime, the town that was empty, knowing that there were things in closets, that there were people tucked under beds, under the concrete pilings of all those trailers. And all the time I was writing that, the Watergate hearings were pouring out of the TV.... Howard Baker kept asking, 'What I want to know is, what did you know and when did you know it?' That line haunts me, it stays in my mind.... During that time I was thinking about secrets, things that have been hidden and were being dragged out into the light." Sounds quite a bit like the idea behind his 1998 novel of a Maine hamlet haunted by unsightly secrets, Bag of Bones. --Fiona Webster

--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Amazon.com

Scarcely three decades old, the enduring appeal of novelist Stephen King's horror oeuvre has already begun to foster remakes of the films and TV productions already based on his most popular works. This cable TV redux of King's 1975 tale of a small hamlet beset by vampires features an ominous, brooding orchestral and choral score that's a winning collaboration between newcomer Christopher Gordon and former Dead Can Dance mainstay cum film scorer Lisa Gerrard. The gothic seasoning she imparted to her previous collaborations with Hans Zimmer (most notably Gladiator) comes to the forefront on this score's haunting title aria (composed by Gerrard and partner Patrick Cassidy) and tracks like "Bloody Pirates" and "Free in Spirit." But it's the music of newcomer Gordon (Master and Commander) whose sheer scale and ambition belie the small screen format it was written for at nearly every turn. While the individual musical elements that Gordon uses to evoke suspense and horror may be familiar (spanning everything from jarring passages of 20th century modernism that evoke a feverish jam session between Ligeti and Penderecki to dashes of minimalism and spare, haunting passages for piano) the innovative ways in which he combines them make this a score a horror-score lover's creepy delight. --Jerry McCulley --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0019LV31E
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Anchor; Reprint edition (May 6, 2008)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 6, 2008
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 3060 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 668 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #13,775 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #32 in U.S. Horror Fiction
- #53 in Horror Suspense
- #252 in Psychological Fiction (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.6 21,749 ratings

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Stephen King

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Stephen King is the author of more than fifty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His first crime thriller featuring Bill Hodges, MR MERCEDES, won the Edgar Award for best novel and was shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award. Both MR MERCEDES and END OF WATCH received the Goodreads Choice Award for the Best Mystery and Thriller of 2014 and 2016 respectively.

King co-wrote the bestselling novel Sleeping Beauties with his son Owen King, and many of King's books have been turned into celebrated films and television series including The Shawshank Redemption, Gerald's Game and It.

King was the recipient of America's prestigious 2014 National Medal of Arts and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for distinguished contribution to American Letters. In 2007 he also won the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. He lives with his wife Tabitha King in Maine.

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G Cantabene

King’s Best

Reviewed in the United States on April 7, 2024

Verified Purchase

Even thought this was Stephen King’s 2nd book, it is and always will be his best to me. I’d say it’s one of the best books ever written. His flair for words and his dark, haunting imagery make this one of the scariest books I’ve ever read even though very little of the violence is described in graphic detail. In the end, it is not really a story about vampires; it is a story about a small town and its people. In the end the reader realizes that there was evil in ‘Salem’s lot before the vampire ever got there. It just took the arrival of the vampire to finish it off and one good man and little boy to fight to keep it alive. Their tactics may not seem heroic but they are far, far braver than the average person’s. Perhaps that is what this country needs to keep it from dying out - a few brave, good people willing to swallow their fears and fight.

3 people found this helpful

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Jim Lee

Classic King. Lots of suspense detailed. Excellent read!

Reviewed in the United States on April 18, 2024

Verified Purchase

King is the man!
Detailed descriptions to each chapter really locks in the reader's mind how "The Lot" was laid out. Satisfying ending that does leave one to wonder "Will there be a sequel" but almost 50 years later haven't seen one!

2 people found this helpful

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Derek B.

A Solid Vampire Story

Reviewed in the United States on October 24, 2022

Verified Purchase

A gripping sense of atmosphere, characters that felt alarmingly real, and a spooky story that escalates slowly to a chaotic climax all made this an enjoyable read. There were some stylistic things about King's prose (or perhaps just the audio narration) that threw me off a tiny bit, but overall, I really liked SALEM'S LOT and am glad to have finally read something by this famous author.

CHARACTERS
One aspect of King's writing that I did not expect to live up to the hype was how he handles his characters. I have heard time and time again how real his characters feel, almost to a point where I've wanted to roll my eyes. So, imagine my surprise at how King makes creating authentic-feeling characters in a short amount of time look so effortless. I don't know if all of King's stories feature large casts, but this one definitely did, so I was especially blown away that even the most insignificant of side characters felt so life-like. It was interesting that even some of the main characters like Ben, Mark, Jimmy, and Father Callahan were so deeply flawed in many ways. For some reason though, I will say that I didn't feel especially attached to anyone regardless of whether their role was big or small. They all interested me, but they didn't necessarily make me feel anything and I think that made some of the more dramatic deaths and/or perilous situations feel a little flat for me. Again, I can't really pinpoint what it was, maybe I just prefer characters that are larger than life than those that are especially life-like.

SETTING/WORLD
Another thing I hear repeatedly is how iconic some of the settings are in King's books. Again, I must agree, that the fictional town of Jerusalem's Lot (referred to as Salem's Lot), Maine, is a fully realized and deeply memorable place. Partly because of all the townspeople we get to meet, but also because of the strategically minimal descriptions of the town itself, there is is a living and breathing feeling to this town. The spooky atmosphere and distinctly New England vibe were two things I really connected with and this really did seem like the type of place that an ancient vampire might pick to settle down in.

Due to the era in which the story is set, I felt like this had a distinctly old-timey feel to it. I could never quite figure out if I liked or disliked this aspect of the book, but I don't think a story like this would have worked in the age of cell phones and social media, so I think it was a fitting choice overall. There are definitely a couple choice words used that some might not appreciate, but I felt like they were accurately employed for this decade.

PLOT/TONE
For some reason, I went in thinking that things would get weird and gruesome a lot faster than they did. Even though I'd never read King before, I'd somehow come to associate him with faster-paced and more gruesome fiction. While there are definitely some pretty gnarly moments in SALEM'S LOT, I found this to be much more of a suspenseful story that slowly builds up over time. I didn't feel fear in the same way that I might in a scary movie or game, it was more about an ever-present sense of dread and a tension over the unknown. That said, some of the vampiric elements to the story were a lot more typical and predictable than I thought they were going to be. While King is very open about how heavily he was inspired by Bram Stoker's Dracula as well as some other vampire stories, I'd expected him to do a little more to distinguish his vampire from those that came before. That's not to say that King's vampire is entirely unoriginal or anything, I was just expecting to be more surprised than I was.

THE AUDIOBOOK
Reading this on Audiobook was a pretty good experience. The narrator was good and provided some nice dramatization for the different characters, but I felt like he also may have been part of the reason that I felt like the book was a little bit on the slower side. Had I read this physically or on eBook, I do wonder if I would have felt a greater sense of urgency and intensity, but reading it on audio did allow me to squeeze this into my current reading plans when I might not have had time for it otherwise. I thought King reading out the Forward himself was also a nice touch.

CONCLUSION
If you are like me and enjoy a good, spooky vampire story, then I think SALEM'S LOT will satisfy that, especially as a fall read. While there's nothing crazy here in terms of evolving vampire lore, I feel like King saw something that wasn't broken and decided he didn't need to fix it, so I respect that. This book isn't among my all time favorites and it didn't do anything to make we want to rip through King's entire catalog, but I did have a really good time with it and will likely give something else by him a try at some point in the future.

(+) Amazing setting and atmosphere
(+) Life-like characters
(+) Vampire elements were well done
(+) More suspenseful than horrifying/grotesque
(-) I didn't feel as invested in the characters as I wanted to for some reason
(-) Some of the twists and turns related to the vampires were somewhat expected

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Christopher A. Roberts

King’s Scariest

Reviewed in the United States on November 30, 2023

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I first read this many years ago when I was in high school (mid to late 80s). I had. Been given a set of Stephen King novels as a Christmas gift…I think it had 4 books: Salems Lot, The Dead Zone, Firestarter and Night Shift. My Dad gave this one a try and said it started slow and then took off…and it was scary. By that point, I had read Christine and the Dead Zone. Both were creepy, neither was scary, and I did not think any King novel would actually scare me.

Then I read Salems Lot. The first hundred pages or so ARE slow, but also a perfect example of what King does best. He inhabits the town with people that feel real. They have little quirks and things that make them feel like people you know. At 15, I didn’t understand the genius in the way the story builds so that when the plot starts to speed up you feel the horror of what is happening. Like several of the characters, you know that this is just a made up story but it is happening to people that by this point feel like your neighbors.

When things take off, King never takes his foot off the gas. You feel a sense of dread and you start to realize that many of the characters in the book are not going to survive the story. I won’t spoil any specifics for those that haven’t read it.

I just finished re-reading and the book still scares me - not like it did at 15, when I would freak out at noises in thhe house while I was reading, but in a deeper way — you feel claustrophobic as you realize just how hopeless things become for the town. There are other King novels that are “better”, but much like that favorite album that made you love your favorite band, this is the book that really made me a fan of King’s books.

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Ryan

Came perfect condition

Reviewed in the United States on April 27, 2024

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MJ

Haven’t started reading yet 🧐

Reviewed in Canada on January 13, 2024

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So super fast delivery. Very happy with how the book looks. No damage. I hate the sleeve but they are annoying. Nice illustration though. Cannot wait to get into it.

Porfirio

Muy bueno

Reviewed in Mexico on December 14, 2023

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Es un libro algo cómodo para llevarlo de viaje, la verdad lo compre para no dejar de practicar el inglés ya que regularmente no lo hago, la trama es muy bueno.

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WT

An early classic1

Reviewed in Germany on December 9, 2023

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King's first great novel. Carrie was a good start, but Salem's Lot feels like his first complete novel. Great characters and an early example for his description of small town life in America. He has such a talent to even make minor characters feel authentic. Even the unbelievable love story of two main characters is not enough to dampen my mood. Great book, easily passing the test of time.

david canford

A Stephen King novel which isn't overly long

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 7, 2023

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I read this in October. When Halloween approaches I usually read a ‘horror’. This is a good one.
My main complaint with other Stephen King novels which I have read is that they are way too long - a thousand pages plus. This one is less than five hundred.
It’s the author’s take on Dracula set in a small town in Maine. The book takes some while to get into. He introduces so many characters that it’s difficult to keep up with who’s who. Once the novel gets going, it’s gripping and the writing is very good.
At the end, is a ‘prequel’ done in Bram Stoker’s style of letter and journal entries. It didn’t work for me. There’s also some deleted scenes which I didn’t read - it was becoming like those movie dvds with too many ‘bonus’ features. However, the final part describing getting ‘Dracula’ from the local library when he was a boy and his journey to writing 'Salem’s Lot' is interesting. He talks of the mid seventies when he wrote the book as ‘a metaphor for everything that was wrong with the society around [him], where the rich got richer and the poor got welfare …if they were lucky’, a trend that has accelerated since then.

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Confessions of a Shopaholic

Can you ever go wrong with Stephen King?

Reviewed in India on September 16, 2023

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I have read more than half and hence the condition might look a bit off but it came in a brilliant condition and the story is just ❤️

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