Today's entry into the Halloween countdown of scary books is from an author who I will admit up front, is not a favorite of mine. I admire many things about Stephen King and I love reading his non-fiction, but I have always felt that his horror stuff was much in need of a good editor. The one major exception to this would be Salem's Lot.
King's foray into the world of vampires provided me with more than a few sleepless nights when I was a kid. The idea of this small town in Maine (a foreign world to a Florida kid) cut off from the rest of the world and being overrun with vamps was just terrifying to me. I've re-read King's classic through the years and I still think it holds up pretty well. In no other book does King use the isolation of a small town to such effect. Also, his vamps were scary vamps. I'd read Dracula and a few other vamp books by this point and one of my first childhood crushes was on the wonderful Dark Shadows vamp, Barnabas Collins, but King was the first writer who made vamps less sexy, more evil.
My feelings about this book were only enhanced by the 1979 production of a miniseries based on Salem's Lot. The series followed the book very closely and thanks to images like this one:
provided me with even more sleepless nights. Yikes! Baby vamps! So freaking scary! So, if you have some free time this pre-Halloween weekend, and you're looking for something to get you in the proper moods for All Hallows, maybe it is time that you revisit The Lot.
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