Title: 'Salem's Lot Pdf
Author: Stephen King
Published Date: 2011
Page: 653
*Starred Review* Before vampires became sympathetic characters with their own alternate worlds, complete with vampire coffee shops and vampire politics, they used to be bad guys, scary not sexy, and they preferred wreaking havoc in horror novels rather than exuding tortured sensitivity in YA coming-of-age fiction. Fortunately, we don’t need to go all the way back to Dracula and Boris Karloff to remember those halcyon days: we have Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot, from 1975. Oddly, it’s not the vampires that make ’Salem’s Lot great popular fiction. Mr. Barlow, our lead vampire, is no Dracula. He doesn’t even appear until the story is nearly half over, and he is perhaps the most one-dimensional figure in the book (but that single dimension is enough: unadulterated evil). The real main character isn’t a person at all, human or vampire: it’s the seemingly idyllic New England town of Jerusalem’s Lot. King once said that in ’Salem’s Lot, he set out to create “a fictional town with enough prosaic reality about it to offset the comic-book menace of a bunch of vampires.” He did just that by drawing on our universal fear of outsiders, and nowhere is that fear more recognizable than in our traditional image of the New England small town, where insularity itself becomes a defense against incursion by strangers. The stereotypical Yankee, befuddling outsiders with a series of cryptic yups and nopes, may be a comic character from folklore, but he is also a soldier defending his Maginot Line against potential blitzkrieg. And behind the crotchety Yankee’s seeming impregnability, there is the constant fear that one day a stranger will come to town who won’t take nope for an answer. That juxtaposition of prosaic reality against outlandish terror has always been central to King’s technique for scaring his readers. In ’Salem’s Lot, he does it by looking beneath the surface of idyllic New England. We see the pastoral beauty, the close-knit community, and the unpretentious lifestyle, yet from the beginning, we also see the harbinger of something else, something other. The novel begins with a stranger, not Barlow but a writer, Ben Mears, returning to the Lot, where he’d lived briefly as a boy. Mears has come home again not to reclaim his innocence but to expunge his demons—the memory of the body of a man dead for decades, still hanging in the closet of the Marsten House. Mears believes he hallucinated this horrible scene, but he wants to explore why it happened, why this house prompted him to imagine evil. What Mears finds when he returns to the Lot is that the Marsten House is now occupied by another stranger, our Mr. Barlow. As the known gives way to the unknown, King shows how the small-town insistence on maintaining the illusion of tranquility makes easy pickings for a vampire intent on fomenting a little evil. If ’Salem’s Lot were just another old-fashioned vampire novel, it would portray a straightforward struggle between good (people) and bad (vampires). It would not portray the arrival of vampires in the Lot as a kind of supernatural manifestation of the town’s distorted sense of itself. King feels both affection for and anger toward his small town. A part of him wants to see ’Salem’s Lot get its comeuppance, and this part gives the novel a degree of frisson that most vampire stories lack. And yet, in the end, the vampires don’t win, at least not exactly. Yes, Ben Mears pounds a stake in Barlow’s heart, but that isn’t enough. The evil continues to thrive. The town needs its own stake. Writers of every kind—from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Grace Metalious to John Updike to Carolyn Chute—have wrestled with their mixed feelings about the small towns of New England. But it took Stephen King to burn one down. --Bill Ott "Spine-tingling fiction at its best." --Grand Rapids Press"A master storyteller." --The Los Angeles Times"An unabashed chiller." --Austin American Statesman“[The] most wonderfully gruesome man on the planet.” —USA Today “A super exorcism...tremendous.” —Kirkus Reviews “A novel of chilling, unspeakable evil.” —Chattanooga Times “[King is] . . . the guy who probably knows more about scary goings-on in confined, isolated places than anybody since Edgar Allan Poe.” —Entertainment Weekly “Stephen King has built a literary genre of putting ordinary people in the most terrifying situations. . . . he’s the author who can always make the improbable so scary you'll feel compelled to check the locks on the front door.” —The Boston Globe “Peerless imagination.” —The Observer (London)
Ben Mears has returned to Jerusalem's Lot in the hopes that living in an old mansion, long the subject of town lore, will help him cast out his own devils and provide inspiration for his new book. But when two young boys venture into the woods and only one comes out alive, Mears begins to realize that there may be something sinister at work and that his hometown is under siege by forces of darkness far beyond his control.
Five Stars giftThree Reasons Why Salems Lot is a Must Read I read this book as a kid and it scared the beejesus out of me. I read it again recently as an adult and it was a different experience alltogether. If you arent a King fan or are, if horror is your thing or its not, here are 3 reasons why this is still a great bookk:1. Its not what you might expect. Yes, its about vampires visiting a small town and good vs Evil (capital "E"), but Salems lot is a soap opra, with vivid characters only King can create and vignettes of life in a small town that will make you feel nostalgic and disgusted at the same time. They beat their children, cheat on their husbands, drink and bully. Yet its hard to pin them on a good vs bad board, there are shades of grey with everyone you meet. This town is Anytown USA, more a charcter than a setting and you realize the evil man can do is more destructive to society than a thousand year old vampire.2. It is King at his finest - the writing, the transitions and use of the third person narrative makes the story come alive - its a slow build I admit but by the time the bodies start dropping King makes you care in a way most horror novels dont bother to. You feel for the Glicks, you root for the alcoholic priest trying to reclaim enough faith to battle the dark one and you are happy for Dud in his new life. King will do this again in the Stand and in It, but once you read SL you realize hes sampling from his earlier works and no other book will make you laugh cry and turn on the lights like this one will. The genuis of starting the book with the tall man and boy in Mexico is you kind of know whats going to happen (much like a Columbo episode where you see the murder up front), but it raises so many questions you simply have to hang on.3. Its the best kind of horror story - it follows the rules and tells classic tale. Straker and Barlow may be the villans but they arent blood thirsty monsters either - they are true to their nature. A vampire kils and a watchdog protects. In one seen where Straker does something awful, King takes the time to tell us about the look on his face which enlightens the reader about his motivation. They follow all the vampire rules - sunlight and crosses and of course the need for an invitation (in fact they were invited to the town by Marsten). They arent invincible foes but they are formidable ones. And its the townspeople that drive the action and turn SL into an apocalypse.This is a rich story full of great themes about society, the power of faith, men vs boys (my favorite chapter is the inner monologue Mark Petrie has after a close call where he muses about how adult fears are nothing compared to what a child dels with under the bed at night) and even love and salvation. Read it and decide for yourself if this is a horror novel or a novel about the horrorz of man.Everything the Seller said it was. The Best.
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