‘Salem’s Lot: An Homage to a Horror Classic

I discovered Stephen King in seventh grade. My junior high school library had a library-bound copy of his classic first novel Carrie. I grabbed the book on impulse and checked it out with a handful of other titles – all but forgotten now in the nuclear pulse and afterburn of Stephen King’s terrifying tale of adolescent angst.

The book had left an impression on me: a gangly geek, a hapless lightweight in the heavy-hitting piranha pond of puberty. So heavy was this impression that I asked for, and received, almost nothing but Stephen King paperbacks for the following Christmas. Among them was ‘Salem’s Lot.

My parents had told me a great deal about the mad for television movie based on the novel, but I was only six in 1979 and had missed out on seeing it first-hand. This was a time before the home video explosion, so if you didn’t get to see something the first time it was out then you might not see it again. After hearing them recount the movie’s scariest parts over and over again, it had become almost mythic in my mind.

I had a few friends who had seen it, and they too attested to the film’s horrifying reputation. They told me about the vampire boy at the window pleading to be let in, and the rat-like horror of the vampire itself. They might have added a few things, too. That was the other thing about the time before VHS: movies became mythology, and over time the stories about the movies sometimes became more interesting than the movies themselves. It wouldn’t be until years later that I saw the movie, but until then I had the book.

The book: A young man moves to a new town with old secrets. There’s a bad house – a house with a history of horror within its walls: murder, suicides, more – and now vampires. It started with one, though. It arrived by crate: a horror from the old world. Soon that one vampire became two, became four became more. More became most, as in most of the town became vampires. A desperate group of friends. Stakes in loved ones’ chests. An apocalyptic epilogue that promises anything but a happy ending. The book sapped away my sleeping hours, leaving me as drained and woozily enthralled as if I had been visited by a vampire as horrifying as the one in the book. What was this? It was a book like nothing I had ever read. Then.

Later, I read Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of HIll House. H.P. Lovecraft’s tales of storied Arkham. Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. I saw threads of their DNA in ‘Salem’s Lot. There was cross-breeding here, but this was no mutt. King had taken bits and pieces of these wonderful works and run them through his own wildly imaginative mind, producing a new monster all its own. He was like a jazz musician of horror, riffing and jamming through all of the hot chords and backbeats of his fellow musicians and adding his own spin. This wasn’t the case of an author “borrowing” things from his predecessors: this was the work of a pro, and these were call-outs to his personal influences. My appreciation for his work grew. And grew. And grew.

I read everything King wrote: Pet Sematary, The Shining, The Stand, Cujo, It, Christine. Dozens more, it seems like. I loved the guy, and eventually I started reading his nonfiction too. Danse Macabre changed my understanding of horror forever, and I don’t mean just his horror – I mean all horror. I started passing on his paperbacks to friends – some of them the same ones who had “narrated” his movies to me not too many years before. I even started seeing Stephen King references in the music I listened to (anyone old enough to remember Anthrax and their album “Among the Living”?) and other books that I read. I was single-handedly responsible for a Stephen King mini-boom in my school.

The VCR age rolled around, and soon I got to catch up on those movies. Some of them were great, some not so. ‘Salem’s Lot was one of the former. The rat-faced vampire? The “spooky kid” with the monster models? I loved it, and it definitely lived up to most of the stories. But was it as good as the book? Not by a longshot. I won’t bother you with the old cliche – theater of the mind beats the local cinema and all that – but I think that there’s something special about King’s work that can only rarely be duplicated in film. He gets you into the head of his characters without bogging down the story. There are all the little details, too. Nobody can get them all. The books are unforgettable. I mean that literally: I remember some of those books better than I do my own memories. It’s like I lived them.

‘Salem’s Lot was reprinted last week, and I can’t recommend it enough if you haven’t read it. It’s no exaggeration that King made horror fiction industry what it is today. I’ve known plenty of good horror writers – successful ones – who will readily tell you the same. Salem’s Lot is one of his best, and creepiest, early novels. If you’re looking for a good story about vampires that don’t sparkle, this is a good one.