Salem's Lot - Hardcover

King, Stephen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385007515 ISBN 13: 9780385007511

Publisher: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, 1990

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

Stephen King's second book, 'Salem's Lot--about the slow takeover of an insular hamlet called Jerusalem's Lot by a vampire patterned after Bram Stoker's Dracula--has two elements that he also uses to good effect in later novels: a small American town, usually in Maine, where people are disconnected from each other, quietly nursing their potential for evil; and a mixed bag of rational, goodhearted people, including a writer, who band together to fight that evil.

Simply taken as a contemporary vampire novel, 'Salem's Lotis great fun to read, and has been very influential in the horror genre. But it's also a sly piece of social commentary. As King said in 1983, "In 'Salem's Lot, the thing that really scared me was not vampires, but the town in the daytime, the town that was empty, knowing that there were things in closets, that there were people tucked under beds, under the concrete pilings of all those trailers. And all the time I was writing that, the Watergate hearings were pouring out of the TV.... Howard Baker kept asking, 'What I want to know is, what did you know and when did you know it?' That line haunts me, it stays in my mind.... During that time I was thinking about secrets, things that have been hidden and were being dragged out into the light." Sounds quite a bit like the idea behind his 1998 novel of a Maine hamlet haunted by unsightly secrets, Bag of Bones. --Fiona Webster

Review:

"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)

About this edition

• Publisher: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0385007515
• ISBN 13: 9780385007511
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 464