Name: Salem
Rating: 3.796052631578947 (380 reviews)
ISBN: 9782266029612

King (undifferentiated)

Salem

vinny<3

In the end you always crashed against the unspoken barricades of their love, like the walls of a padded cell. The truth of their love rendered further meaningful discussion impossible and made what had gone before empty of meaning.

Rose

There is no group therapy or psychiatry or community social services for the child who must cope with the thing under the bed or in the cellar every night, the thing which leers and capers and threatens just beyond the point where vision will reach. The same lonely battle must be fought night after night and the only cure is the eventual ossification of the imaginary faculties, and this is called adulthood. 

And all around them, the bestiality of the night rises on tenebrous wings. The vampire’s time has come.

Stephen King

Thousands of miles away from the small township of 'Salem's Lot, two terrified people, a man and a boy, still share the secrets of those clapboard houses and tree-lined streets. They must return to 'Salem's Lot for a final confrontation with the unspeakable evil that lives on in the town.

'Salem's Lot

Tim Pendry

This was Stephen King's second novel. It has the feel of a man who wants to make his mark with a best seller. What he does is to take Bram Stoker's 'Dracula', rethink it from top to bottom and position it within contemporary (1975) American culture. In the edition I have (2006), this is made clear in a useful short Afterword where King (still in his twenties when he wrote the book) also refers back to his childhood reading of EC comics. The book is replete with references to the horror canon from Poe-like cellars to graveyard whippoorwills. He seems to have two alter agos in the book which recur throughout his career in a sort of dialectic: Ben Mears, the writer, and Mark Petrie, a young boy. It is not a spoiler (since he tells us who survives in a preamble) that both survive. King survives, you might say, his own dark fantasy. All the markers are there for the King view of existence - the precariousness of small town life in the presence of evil, the very real existence of evil as a presence beyond humanity, death and putrefaction and an inherent pessimism about human weakness in the face of that evil. His heroes really are heroes because they go into battle against evil with very poor odds on their side and most of them do not survive. Those that do are marked for life by loss, memory and an awareness that the evil is never finally vanquished. Evil recurs in King's world. It is remorseless. My edition has a long 'deleted scenes' section which mostly tells you that he was right to delete what he did delete as self-indulgent, poorly drafted and almost private in places but they are still worth reading because they open up his preoccupations to more intimate view. In these 'deleted scenes' King has more visceral material. He will return to the visceral later in his career when he has more freedom from publishing constraints but this is a book that feels like a 'working out' of past anxieties and horrors that had a very visceral aspect to them. The parallels with 'Dracula' will be obvious enough but what is more interesting perhaps is the sociology of the book, written during a particularly gloomy period for the American middle classes. Vietnam is referenced more than once as cause of personal trauma but the rot goes deeper. The small town is pictured in very 'bourgeois' terms. The vampire hunters are not accidentally led by a writer supported by a doctor, a teacher and a troubled priest. It is not accidental that the local policeman scuttles or that the businessman is a corrupt agent of evil. Here, the creative, spiritual and professional middle class heroes are the ones trying to defend an unknowing population rarely presented in flattering terms. There are some decent families but equally we have a picture of an unpleasant under class. Indeed, King has a pessimistic and conservative world view with some of the ideology expressed by a depressed 'whisky priest' yearning for a traditionalist church with an awareness of good and evil rather than the social liberalism of evil emerging out of poor social conditions. Evil is inherent. These 'ordinary' people are without agency in the story whether as victims or as vampires. The elimination of the love interest (she shows exceptional stupidity) ensures that we are not bothered with a feminist element (a lack unthinkable today in popular culture). We are offered a form of analogical thinking in which the state of America is a state of evil that can only be fought by the educated and professional middle classes in order to protect an unwitting world of vulnerable communities abandoned by traditional state and church authority. Nearly fifty years on, this mind-set has returned amongst the East Coast intelligentsia faced with Trump, a political Vlad the Impaler. Perhaps we can say that King got their first and that he is authentically old school East Coast liberal American but with a visceral terror of social collapse. So is this book liberal or conservative? Well, both. Deeply conservative of hegemonic liberal values, the book is an exercise in both personal psychological and social exorcism with teacher and priest giving us short painless lectures on re-engaging with even deeper core conservative values. As to the book as enjoyment, I can broadly recommend it even if it is necessarily a little dated. No one can deny King's skills as a story-teller even if there are the necessary implausibilities. The characterisation of imaginative alter ego Mark Petrie (the boy) lacks all realism. We also have to assume that small towns in Maine (King's own origin point) in the 1970s really were so isolated that effective take-over by vampires would pass the higher authorities by (even Innsmouth got taken out eventually) and that hungry vampires would not travel for food. The characterisation is one of well-drawn stock characters but King is a master of dialogue and narrative flow. What he wrote was (in its time) new and fresh - and clearly influential on popular culture (especially cinema) as much as it was influenced by popular culture. My edition has an informative introduction by King (in addition to the Afterword) but also two additional stories set in Jerusalem's Lot, the setting of the novel (shortened to Salem's Lot), as well as some atmospheric photographic illustrations. The first story ('One for the Road') is a fine and sensitive piece of contemporary horror well worth reading but the second ('Jerusalem's Lot') is a piece of over-the-top Lovecraftian pastiche with dashes of Poe that gives us an irrelevant back story that we do not really need. As a book, I see this as quite a significant event not so much in literature as in popular culture. There is no doubt that a full reading requires one to understand not only writing but comics, film and even merchandising (in the reference to the Aurora models) It is still, after all these years, a good story with plenty for horror fans to get their teeth into as a transitional book in vampire lore between one era (the references to Hammer horror are self-evident) and the next (more cinematic still) when King himself has helped to rewrite the rules.

fun to read, spooky. my first stephen king which was probably a mistake as i don’t think it’s known as his best. everything was great but the epilogue went on for far too long and i got bored of the letters.

jacq bridge

This book is fine. Stephen King is fine at writing and fine at plots. But how did we let him write SO many books???? Did see Weapons while reading this though and it made me realize his influence on culture can't be denied.

Regan Martin

nice world building and likeable main characters but also reading this in 2025 was ehhhh cos the entire vampire trope has been done way too many times 

tanya 

While it took me a while to finish the book, it was worth it. I had read the short story by Stephen King near Halloween and it really set the mood. The short story was GREAT (10/10 if you ask me) and once I found out that there was a full book on it, I just had to read it. Watching the slow take over of the town by the vampires was interesting. I will say, I wasn't a fan of how most of the characters were written. The end wasn't bad and it lead to me want a second book about the characters that did survive.

trix

'Turn off the television - in fact, why don't you turn off all the lights except for the one over your favourite chair? - and we'll talk about vampires here in the dim. I think I can make you believe in them.' Stephen King, from the Introduction. 'Salem's Lot is a small New England town with the usual quota of gossips, drinkers, weirdos and respectable folk. Of course there are tales of strange happenings - but not more than in any other town its size. Ben Mears, a moderately successful writer, returns to the Lot to write a novel based on his early years, and to exorcise the terrors that have haunted him since childhood. The event he witnessed in the house now rented by a new resident. A newcomer with a strange allure. A man who causes Ben some unease as things start to happen: a child disappears, a dog is brutally killed - nothing unusual, except the list starts to grow. Soon surprise will turn to bewilderment, bewilderment to confusion and finally to terror . . .

This has been added to the list of my favourite King novels. I love a good vampire story but this really does go so much further than just a simple concept woah

Roman

Brennen muss Salem

Justin Staack

The town knew darkness ... and the awful, heavy silence of terrifying images grotesquely dancing in and out of the shadows ... and stark white faces, huge empty eyes and long gnarled hands that reached out with lustful insistence ... and the paralyzing fear of a diabolical corruption and a hideous peril more dreadful than death.

Colton Ray

I was pretty underwhelmed by this book. Apart from a handful of exciting scenes, I felt like there were much too many characters to keep track of or care about and the vampires really only pop up sporadically until the end. The climax was really fun and tense and kept me reading, only to have a completely anticlimactic ending that leaves things feeling muddled. Perhaps I'll have to give this one another chance in a few years, as its usually touted as Top Ten King, but about 75% of the time, I was just bored. Ah, well. You can't win them all. Now on to The Shining!

Tobias V. Langhoff

I read this book as an interlude before the fifth book in The Dark Tower series because a character appears in both stories. I’m glad I read it in any case, though. This is King’s second published novel, and his early work is good in a different way than his later work is. He is more literary as a young author. Less plot, perhaps, and more poetry. Less action and more philosophy. That’s not to say that there’s little plot and little action in this book, but it’s more brooding.

This is a modern vampire story set in 1970s rural New England, but it’s also old school. The mythology continues the tradition of Dracula. Incidentally, there’s a fairly new ensemble audiobook of that classic novel out, featuring Tim Curry who played Pennywise the clown in the TV miniseries based on King’s novel It. And like the latter book, this story is as much a supernatural horror story as it is a story about a small town; giving life to small, backwater communities is among the things King does best. (The article The Photographer Who Captured America’s Dark Side made me think of him.)

The story is also told somewhat like It, except that there, things happen to the main characters and nobody else, while here everybody else is affected but the main characters. Perhaps more like The Stand, then, and the spreading vampirism does remind me of the contagious disease Captain Trips.

Daniel Spruill

** spoiler alert **
           yeah… it’s a classic for a reason.

Wouldn’t know where to begin with my thoughts on this one quite honestly, but this is King at some of his most green, unfiltered, and brazen.

The patience in this novel is astounding and makes me yearn for the 70s and the era when we spent pages and pages with characters before the action started. Much of the first half is really just establishing the town and its inhabitants in a way that they instantly become palpable. I consciously took my time with this book to understand this cast of characters (and there’s a fuck ton) because to not do that would be a disservice to this story. So much of this novel hinges on the ~throwaway~ people mentioned only a few times and it’s so much more effective by the end if you take the time.

I think the imagery of this town is what will stick with me the longest. King established a dreamlike and eerie ubiquity that makes me desperate to live here.

The deserted business buildings with their false fronts seem to lean crepitatingly over the street. The rain, which had started around noon, fell softly and slowly, as if in mourning. The little park where he had met Susan Norton was empty and forlorn. The shades of the Municipal Building were drawn. A “Be back soon” sign hung in the window of Larry Crockett’s Insurance and Real Estate office with hollow jauntiness. And the only sound was soft rain.

This story overtook my life for two months and it was the best two months. Also, the way Midnight Mass was a loose adaption of Salem’s Lot brings me so much joy and is probably a factor in why it struck such a chord with me.

(Last note is that I still kinda wish the original title ‘The Second Coming’ had been the final title)

Kath

This is a slow burn - and that's how I like it. King gives a tour of the town first and will introduce you to the people who live in it. After all, you're just visiting. But the longer you stay, the more you get to know about the people who run these places. In the end, were they just so unlucky that their small town was chosen as the nesting ground of the darkest creature of the night, or did they summon evil themselves? If there's collective good, does collective evil exist on the other side of the spectrum?

"And in the dark, the town is yours and you are the town's and together you sleep like the dead."

some more thoughts in bullets because that's easier 🤣
• compared to Stoker's Dracula, this has more punch to it - it's scarier and that was sustained all through out; the ending was strong. But of course, it's always nice to keep in mind that Dracula is more of an allegory of the Victorian era and a satiric commentary on their society at that time. 'Salem's Lot is also pushing for that but I find that it delves in more on the theme of evil at large and not specifically on the evils that a particular society enshrouds itself with.
• i really really LOVE the narration style - the omniscient narrator gets blocked by the characters' louder train of thoughts mid paragraph a couple of times and I just bought all of that
• my favorite characters are Mark Petrie and Father Callahan
• disappointing how the one female character that's part of the vampire busters was killed
• basically yeah this novel is a classic vampiric tale with a scary as traditional vampire who made the town feed on itself. Also it makes you think how you see evil and how you process fear.

jess larry

Slow, too slow to my taste. Really tried to enjoy it but couldn't

Frida Kahlo

Lara Engle

Spooky, creepy, sometimes gory: exactly what you expect from a well-done King chiller.

Salem's Lot

Wynter

The story was very good. As a proof, I've read the entire book in two days! But I really expected it to be much scarier. Maybe I've read so much vampire fiction and saw so many movies on the topic that I became in a way immune to the fangs and creepy faces peering through the window? Great book nonetheless.

Joey Baker

>Be small town called Jerusalem
>Get taken over by a sneaky group of sharp nosed bloodsuckers

What did Mr. King mean by this? 


I did like the literary montages of all the characters in town, though it was hard to keep track of everyone. 
One thing that bothered me was when they discovered a few rando vampires; why the fuck didn't they just kill them as they found them? Mike was in a wooden crate, they could have just used some pieces of that to stake them.
And they just barely tried to drag the Mcdougalls out into the sun before giving up on it entirely? Retarded.

my literature of the gothic professor taught us that stephen king once dedicated something to shirley jackson and wrote that “she never had to raise her voice.” this self-aware praise sums up stephen king’s writing in this book perfectly. his voice is raised, he throws any and all ideas at the wall, some extreme, some basic, all heightened and loud. a lot of them don’t stick, a lot of them do. some scenes and images in this story will never leave me, and the world is as vivid as anything i’ve read, but i was often perplexed by what it was going for. regardless of some questionable material, this was a real page turner and i’ll be reading a lot more stephen king.

Mitch

Ryan LaFerney

Inspired in part by a high school classroom syllabus that had him simultaneously teaching Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Stephen King later described Salem's Lot as, “…a peculiar combination of Peyton Place and Dracula…” or, “vampires in Our Town.” And this is a true synopsis. Salem's Lot is about Jerusalem's Lot, a small town in Maine that has a bit of a vampire problem. It was King's second published novel, published in 1975 and you can both see his promise and his flaws as a writer clearly in this story. 

 The story involves a writer named Ben Mears who returns to the town of Jerusalem's Lot (or 'Salem's Lot for short) in Maine, where he had lived from the age of five through nine, only to discover that the residents are becoming vampires. 

Salem's Lot is more or less, an American re-telling of Dracula with a dose of Shirley Jackson thrown in for good measure. It's not only about the monsters of the night, but the monsters that are deep within us already, that live within the dark recesses of our soul. King is just as interested in exploring the mysteries of Salem's Lot and its inhabitants as he is in turn them into vampires. And this is one of the novel's flaws. The problem with Salem's Lot is the characters - they are one-dimensional. I never cared for a single one of them. 

‘Salem’s Lot takes a moment to really get started but once it does it is compulsively readable no matter how clumsy the writing sometimes is. The plot is pretty well done and is full of great action scenes and creepy moments. I just wish we were given a reason as to why Barlow, an evil vampire complete with European mannerisms and Straker, his familiar, take up residence in Salem’s Lot.

I wanted to like this novel more than I did. Sadlly, I found this novel to be lacking in original creativity and inspiration. Salem's Lot is a love letter to King's influences and that's OK. It was still a fun read though for a vampire fan!

Gayathri Jinesh

I blame myself for not getting scared. Watching too many movies(horror and others) has dulled my imagination into a stuporous state. I have reached a point where nothing, except jump-scares, can scare me. And that doesn't happen in books. I really loved this book, just so that I make up for giving it only 3 stars. Writing is excellent. Scary - not so much.

The buildup is fine, maybe tad excessive. For the first time in a book, I actually loved the author describing the sun and the wind and the darkness and such. It felt real, visceral.


  "The tongue of darkness seemed to lick hungrily at this kitchen, waiting for night to come so it could swallow it whole.."


Summary: A writer comes to his childhood town(Jerusalem's lot), to fight his childhood demons and hopefully make a book out of it. Only, worse demons await him. The fight of the few good people of the town, first against their own rational minds and then against these umm.. vampires.

"No one pronounced Jerusalem's Lot dead on the morning of Oct 6, no one new it was."
Post-apocalyptic vibes.

Rebecca Self 

I absolutely loved this book, and i could not put it down. I love books with fantasy characters, and this was the first vampire book that I have read that didn't have any sort of fun and whimsical-type elements. The vampires were EVIL - there was no part of them that was nice in any way. So, horror/suspense/thriller combined with some fantasy elements; I adored it.

I've heard it's patterned after Dracula, so if you enjoyed that, I'm sure you would enjoy this. I haven't read Dracula, but it is now definitely on my to-read list.

alina s

Eva Bailey

3.5 stars. Finally picked this up and spooky month is off to a good start. Some parts of this were downright terrifying, I really enjoyed it. The ending was a bit of a classic King climax - I was a little let down, but the horror throughout made up for it.

Celeste Richardson

Full review now posted!

If you’re looking for vampires with some bite, look no further.

There are few monsters as enduring as the vampire. For well over a thousand years, mankind has told itself stories of preternatural beings who look like us, and perhaps even used to be us, but who now live by draining the life from us. Sometimes, these are just campfire stories, meant to give us a chill and a thrill before we drown them out with reality. But other times, we can’t help but believe our own stories. 

In the past few decades, vampires have taken a big hit in pop culture. Yes, they’re still popular, perhaps even more popular than they’ve ever been before, but they’ve lost some of their power. Vampires were once terrifying entities, wielding their seductive beauty as a cobra does, to hypnotize and ensnare their victims. But in recent years, we as a society have defanged vampires, so to speak. We have rendered them harmless by giving them consciences and glittery skin, and making them into a metaphor for fighting the temptations of the flesh. 

That is not at all what you get when you visit ‘salem’s Lot.

This sleepy little community in Maine is Everytown, USA. There’s nothing really to do, and kids tend to leave as soon as humanly possible in search of a bigger life. This leaves the elderly, children, and people who weren’t able to escape and had to settle for keeping the town running. It’s a town that could fall off of the map with very few people ever noticing, and that’s exactly what happens. The building horror of what decimated the town, and how quickly and easily most of the townspeople gave into that destruction, is where King really shines. 

In one corner, we have a terrifyingly magnetic mastermind of a vampire, his disturbing and well-spoken henchman, and the townspeople that quickly succumb to their new master’s advances. Some of these newly turned are children, which made them all the more disturbing. No one can write children quite like King, be they brave and compelling or terrifying enough to make a person decide against reproduction. Child and adult alike march to the beat set out for them by their new master, who is everything a vampire should be. He, and his newly turned children, are everything vampires should be; they’re beautiful, but their beauty is a disturbing and deadly. They are mankind’s reproduction of a Venus Fly Trap, using their unearthly beauty to entice their prey into their hungry, tooth-lined maws. 

In the other corner, we have a motley crew of renegade townsfolk, rebelling against the force attacking their town and doing their best to save ‘salem’s Lot from utter annihilation. An author from out of town, the girl he hits it off with, an English teacher from a local high school, a doctor, a priest, and a child stand alone against an incomprehensible evil. Where the story goes from there is something you’ll have to read to find out.

There is one other central player in the story: the Marsten House. This house, the site of the town’s most disturbing history and allegedly haunted to boot, is what drew Ben, our writer, back to ‘salem’s Lot. It is a menacing presence hovering over the town, seemingly evil in spite of its inanimate state, which makes it the perfect abode for a monster. King did a great job of making the house itself super disturbing.

In recent years, I’ve grown to love reading horror novels during the month of October; they just get me excited for the changing seasons and cooler weather and Halloween. This book was just exactly what I was hoping it would be, atmospheric and scary in a purely intellectual way that didn’t hinder my sleep. King did a great job reclaiming vampires for the horror genre. Keep in mind that this book was originally published in 1975, long before we as a modern society decided that vampires should be lusted after instead of feared, but it was still refreshing to read a novel that gave the bloodsuckers back their throne of fear. If you’re in the mood for a good Halloween read, I heartily recommend this book. And if you’re just looking for a way to see vampires in all of their terrifying glory, I think you just found it. 

This was a buddy read with my wonderful friend Caleb!

Original review can be found at Booknest.

Salem

Reviews

Highlights