'Salems Lot-Stephen King

As a writer, every Stephen King novel that I read is like a day pass at Cedar Point to roam around inside the mind of a genius. His writing is that damn good.

In terms of storytelling, I would say he weaves his tales in a category (on a scale of 1-10) at around 7.5-8.0. In all honesty, I would have to admit that I enjoy horror films over novellas, and his stories aren't as intriguing to me as Cormac McCarthy, Bret Easton Ellis, or Hubert Selby, but still pack quite the punch.

At times he can be a bit overly descriptive and there are certain points of books like It that I feel as if could have been sliced for pacing (the description of how to make a dam) or left out entirely because they didn't make any sense (the orgy scene in the sewer). But these are only petty criticism's, and in the writers world you are damned if you give in to compromise and if there is anything King is not guilty of, it is bending his integrity to appease the masses.

Salems Lot marks the seventh full length novel that I have read of Kings. This is not counting the dozen or so short stories that I have read as well. King's brilliance, in my opinion, comes not in the character development, story line, or climax—which are very good, mind you—but within the small bridges that connect these elements together. His attention to the tiniest nuances that we all have in common and brush aside so haphazardly is second to none.

Two instances I can think of off the top of my head are, first, from Needful Things, Alan Pangborn's inability to shut out the voice in his head that persistently reminds him of the fact that his wife is dead. I think everyone likes to pretend that the voices that haunt us the most—that we can't seem to defeat—are unique mental blemishes that we would rather hide from the world. Here, King brings these voices to the surface, which lays truth to the fact that we have much more in common than we would like to believe. The second is in Salems Lot when Susan Norton is pulling away from the house of her parents after another familial dispute. His description of how families lean on the crutch of time to naturally mend wounds inflicted from spur of the moment barbs was written with such deftness that I could only sit back and read it over and over again, allowing the perfectly placed words to soak into my brain like a fine red blend exploring every inch of my palate.

Then there are his poetic descriptions of autumn: "In the fall, night comes like this in the Lot: The sun loses its thin grip on the air first, turning it cold, making it remember that winter is coming and winter will be long. Thin clouds form, and the shadows lengthen out. They have no breadth, as summer shadows have; there are no leaves on the trees or fat clouds in the sky to make them thick. They are gaunt, mean shadows that bite the ground like teeth. As the sun nears the horizon, its benevolent yellow begins to deepen, to become infected, until it glares an angry inflamed orange. It throws a variegated glow over the horizon - a cloud-congested caul that is alternately red, orange, vermilion, purple. Sometimes the clouds break apart in great, slow rafts, letting through beams of innocent yellow sunlight that are bitterly nostalgic for the summer that has gone by."

His mastery of cultivating these essential elements into shards of gold is not only a pleasure as a reader, but a privilege as a writer. To see unbridled passion flow from the pen of someone who has mastered a craft I am still trying to figure out is a real treat.

So far as the story goes, it is quintessential King.

I am able to flirt along the lines of depraved writing and project some pretty disturbing imagery, but I don't like the bulk of my stories to center around these elements. With King it seems to be the natural destination around every bend. And that is fine. You write what you know, what speaks to you. And in his case he loves to paint a bleak picture with disturbing imagery and trauma-inducing events and he is damn good at doing it.

The blood flows pretty heavily between these pages and you can almost feel the pain when Mark Petrie's parents' heads ring and when Jimmy falls to his demise. But the real treat of Salems Lot is King's ability to paint a realistic picture of what would happen if Dracula came to a small town in modern day America. That is where his talent shines the brightest. When he takes an inconceivable possibility and turns it into a conceivable probability. Much like the writers of Alien were able to do.

Like slim domino's standing on sandy foundations, one by one the townsfolk give in to Kurt Barlow and his henchman Richard Straker's tactics and bloodlust spreads like a plague. And it's up to four mortals to attempt to reverse a curse that stretches back to ancient times.

I suspected that a lot of the complicity of the real estate agent and Sheriff who act as pawns to help Barlow achieve his devious goal to have been based upon political figures of that era (or even of today), and was happy to see that I was correct in this assumption.

While I may reside on the other end of the spectrum—in terms of political opinion—than King. There is no doubting his ability as a writer. It is just simply amazing.

Grade: B+

Verdict: Read