“’Salem’s Lot”, by Stephen King

 

405 pages, Doubleday & Co., Inc., ISBN-13: 978-0965772419

I first became aware of Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot when I saw the 1979 miniseries starring David Soul, the recently deceased Lance Kerwin, Bonnie Bedelia (mmmmm…Bonnie Bedelia), James Mason and, can’t forget, Reggie Nalder as Barlow, the scariest vampire there ever was. I thought the series rocked and it scared the bejesus out of me – of course, it was made at a time when vampires were still thought as being evil, undead things that wanted to suck your blood and kill in order to survive, not as a bunch of pussified emos who whined about everything and were as scary as a hamster. No, these were real vampires, and so while in the midst of my high school Stephen King kick I read ’Salem’s Lot in order to compare it with what I already knew.

Mostly, the book is as good as the series, although there are numerous differences between the two – especially the character of Barlow (or Kurt Barlow, if you really want to know). In the series he’s scary AF, with grey skin, evil red eyes and incisor fangs (rather than canines) which were weird and scary and…well, just damn. Kurt Barlow from the book, however, is rather more mundane, a prototypical vampire who dresses well, is urbane and well-spoken and not nearly as frightening – or interesting, truth be told. I guess it just shows what an impact the series made on me that I can find a vampire to be so pedestrian; if I had read the book first then maybe my disappointment would be reversed and I’d be let down by a monstrous Barlow.

The rest of the characters in the book are fleshed out and given personalities so that, when they are turned, their loss actually feels real (those instances when they speak as vampires are surreal). For ’Salem’s Lot is vintage early King, one of the books that cemented his reputation as a master of modern horror. There are chills and frights and gore and blood aplenty, but it is the characterizations that set him apart in that he invests the time needed to make his characters real people so that, if and when something awful happens to them, it hits you the reader that much harder. My experience with King petered out sometime in the 90s, so I don’t know if he kept this up, but its there for all to see here in ’Salem’s Lot.

And, damnit, ’Salem’s Lot is a horror book about vampires as they’re meant to be, as I said in my screed above. While once human, they are something else now and just don’t continue on living – er, make that “living” – as if nothing happened, or as if their new vampirism is just a lifestyle choice. The idea that we would want to become one of them should be absurd, if not downright evil. All of which is obvious as one reads this book, for the one thing that is made clear is not only are vampires a mockery of the living, they also no longer have any free agency, seeing as they are now pawns of Barlow and must follow his dictates. This, then, is perhaps the evil at the heart of ’Salem’s Lot: the reduction of people to drones.

I haven’t picked up a Stephen King book in an age, but after having read ’Salem’s Lot that’s all I need to know as to how good a writer he is (or at least, was).