by Stephen King
Overall: I don’t read a ton of horror books. The ones I do read tend to be classics or what I describe as horror-adjacent (heavy on suspense not gore). There are occasional exceptions, though. I love vampire books, especially Dracula, and so I decided I should probably try Salem’s Lot. I’ve only read one other book by Stephen King. The Shining was an assigned text in an English class on gothic literature and while I liked it, I was still afraid to pick up any other books by the master of horror. I am happy to report that Salem’s Lot had far less gore than I imagined and just the right amount of raise-the-hair-on-your-arms scariness without causing me nightmares. I enjoyed it a lot more than I anticipated!
Likes: As an update on the classic Dracula story, with a structure that similarly takes on multiple viewpoints, I thought this book really succeeded. As in Dracula, we get an unlikely alliance of characters, this time in rural Maine rather than in Transylvania and London. The doubting priest, the writer with a mysterious past, the boy obsessed with horror, the local GP, and the sympathetic high school teacher are all interesting, flawed characters doing their best to combat a situation that defies comprehension. The spookiness builds incrementally, with classic gothic tropes like the haunted house appearing early, and the scare factor ratchets up as people in the small town of Jerusalem’s Lot start disappearing. The portrait of the community is one of the book’s strengths, as vignettes with many different characters from all walks of life illustrate what life was like in the rural Northeast in the 1970s. The ending is more open and unsettling than Dracula in a way that I really liked, suggesting that the fight against darkness never ends.
Dislikes: There’s almost no diversity (understandable since the book was published in 1975 and is set in rural Maine, but still disappointing). And there’s only one female character, unlike Dracula, where there are two, and she isn’t an integral part of the alliance against evil like Mina’s character in Dracula.
FYI: violence, murder, animal murder, child abuse, abusive relationships.
Liz Helfrich 