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This is a 17-hour audiobook and I enjoyed every minute of it. I kept catching myself making excuses to take long drives so I could listen to more of it, or finding household chores I could do while listening. McLarty’s narration is great, with unobtrusive but well-done different voices for various characters. He also really brings out the humor. I nearly had hysterics at his rendition of the word “E-vap,” the foaming cleaner Father Callahan uses in a hungover attempt to remove liquor stains on the rug.
In the introduction (read by King), he discusses his childhood reading of Dracula, trashy novels, and pulp horror comics about vampires whose victims shriek things like “Eeeeegaaaah!” After he wrote Carrie, he mentioned to his wife Tabitha that if Dracula had survived into modern times, he wouldn’t settle in a city, but in a small town like the European ones he’d come from. Like the ones King knew in Maine…
‘Salem’s Lot was written long before the current flood of vampire novels, let alone sexy vampire novels, and draws on older tropes. Some aspects of it have appeared a lot since then, but many have not. For me it had the perfect blend of originality and familiar tropes done extremely well.
It begins with an unsettling prologue involving two unnamed survivors of Jerusalem’s Lot, a man and a boy, and a lengthy newspaper article explaining that it’s now a ghost town for unknown reasons.
It then goes back in time to the arrival of Ben Mears, a writer who lived in Jerusalem’s Lot as a boy and has returned as a widower, intending to write a book about the Marsten House, an abandoned house with a bad history where he may have seen a ghost as a boy. But the house has just been bought by a mysterious man from Europe, Mr. Barlow, who no one has met and who seems to communicate solely through his creepy agent, Mr. Straker. Ben wanders around the town and has a sweet meet-cute with Susan, a fan of his books.
King then proceeds to a long, bravura sequence in which he introduces us to a huge number of the inhabitants of the town, hour by hour in the course of a single day from midnight to midnight. By the end of it, you feel like you’ve lived in the town yourself. It also puts you about a quarter or third of the way through the book with no clear signs of vampire activity. If you were reading the book with no idea what it was about, you would know something sinister was afoot but not what.
The town is an incredibly vivid character in its own right. There’s rot beneath the surface, but goodness as well. The Marsten House is imbued with evil, but Jerusalem’s Lot is just a small town like many others, with child abusers and bullies and wife-beaters, but also dedicated teachers and doctors and random people who manage to rise to a situation requiring extraordinary courage. You get the sense that the group that ends up going after the vampires contained some special people, but not that they were the only ones. Had some of them chosen to confide in a different set of people, there were probably others in the town who would have stepped up.
I have no idea how I missed reading this before, because it’s King’s second novel and a quite famous one. However, I was almost entirely unspoiled for it, other than knowing that it’s about vampires and that one character survives as he appears in another King book I’d read. It’s a purely enjoyable read on every level, with good writing with some very beautiful passages, very atmospheric with a fantastic sense of place, a compelling story well-told, and a whole bunch of memorable set-piece scenes.
( Read more... )
'Salem's Lot
In the introduction (read by King), he discusses his childhood reading of Dracula, trashy novels, and pulp horror comics about vampires whose victims shriek things like “Eeeeegaaaah!” After he wrote Carrie, he mentioned to his wife Tabitha that if Dracula had survived into modern times, he wouldn’t settle in a city, but in a small town like the European ones he’d come from. Like the ones King knew in Maine…
‘Salem’s Lot was written long before the current flood of vampire novels, let alone sexy vampire novels, and draws on older tropes. Some aspects of it have appeared a lot since then, but many have not. For me it had the perfect blend of originality and familiar tropes done extremely well.
It begins with an unsettling prologue involving two unnamed survivors of Jerusalem’s Lot, a man and a boy, and a lengthy newspaper article explaining that it’s now a ghost town for unknown reasons.
It then goes back in time to the arrival of Ben Mears, a writer who lived in Jerusalem’s Lot as a boy and has returned as a widower, intending to write a book about the Marsten House, an abandoned house with a bad history where he may have seen a ghost as a boy. But the house has just been bought by a mysterious man from Europe, Mr. Barlow, who no one has met and who seems to communicate solely through his creepy agent, Mr. Straker. Ben wanders around the town and has a sweet meet-cute with Susan, a fan of his books.
King then proceeds to a long, bravura sequence in which he introduces us to a huge number of the inhabitants of the town, hour by hour in the course of a single day from midnight to midnight. By the end of it, you feel like you’ve lived in the town yourself. It also puts you about a quarter or third of the way through the book with no clear signs of vampire activity. If you were reading the book with no idea what it was about, you would know something sinister was afoot but not what.
The town is an incredibly vivid character in its own right. There’s rot beneath the surface, but goodness as well. The Marsten House is imbued with evil, but Jerusalem’s Lot is just a small town like many others, with child abusers and bullies and wife-beaters, but also dedicated teachers and doctors and random people who manage to rise to a situation requiring extraordinary courage. You get the sense that the group that ends up going after the vampires contained some special people, but not that they were the only ones. Had some of them chosen to confide in a different set of people, there were probably others in the town who would have stepped up.
I have no idea how I missed reading this before, because it’s King’s second novel and a quite famous one. However, I was almost entirely unspoiled for it, other than knowing that it’s about vampires and that one character survives as he appears in another King book I’d read. It’s a purely enjoyable read on every level, with good writing with some very beautiful passages, very atmospheric with a fantastic sense of place, a compelling story well-told, and a whole bunch of memorable set-piece scenes.
( Read more... )
'Salem's Lot