Salem's Lot review: Flawed ambition with added vampires

After the unprecedented success of his terrifying and tightly-woven first novel Carrie, you'd have forgiven the young writer Stephen King for knocking out a carbon copy for his next effort. But King shocked every critic with Salem's Lot, a far longer and more complex work, albeit equally thematically black hearted and full of gore. It was a stunningly ambitious book for such an inexperienced author, and while Salem's Lot isn't always successful it remains a tense and enjoyable read almost forty years on.

Ben Mears, a moderately successful writer, returns to his childhood home of the small Maine town Salem's Lot to begin a new novel. Of course, this calm and tranquil setting is far to good to be true, as Ben realises that the town is gradually being infiltrated by vampires.
While Carrie was remarkably and arrestingly original for a debut novel, Salem's Lot treads very familiar ground indeed. Clear influence is taken from stories such as the classic Dracula, with even direct references being regularly made. It's key themes too have been well explored in the past, with its principle vision of life in an American small town having inspired countless authors before King. It even makes no attempt to distort the classic cliché of the vampires themselves; King's bloodsuckers are as ancient as Dracula or Count Oarlock; susceptible to the usual suspects of crosses, holy water and a good stake through the heart.

So what makes Salem's Lot special, more than just another Nosferatu rehash or Dracula copycat? Primarily, it's the characters. King wields an impressive grasp over a cast of dozens, and while the sheer number of people is at times to vast to keep up with, the development of the principle characters is strong enough to forgive the inevitable cut-out minors. King gives up seemingly endless pages to creating connections between the reader and characters through developing an understanding of their psychologies and histories, leading to some of the most memorable figures of King's career, particularly the tragic and unstable Mears. However, as the author's first attempt at a long novel the character development becomes too prominent, making the book extremely slow and almost tedious during the early stages. It's inconsistently paced too, with relatively little rising action before an explosive crescendo of violence in the final hundred pages or so. While King's descriptions of small town life; the playground fight; the never-ending gossip and prejudice; are superb and undoubtedly drawn from personal experience, the story simply lacks enough real action to sustain interest until the end.

It's not quite as well written as Carrie, largely due to the increased number of characters to cope with and the unfortunate pacing (particularly noticeable because of how excellent Carrie's was), but King's style is still very much intact. Particularly towards the ending, there's sublime use of tension to keep you literally on the edge of your seat and moments of shocking, almost perverse violence. It's certainly no story for the faint of heart; skulls are cracked and hearts ruptured with a reckless abandon, but this does help to make up for the book's more monotonous sections.

It's unfortunate that such clear ambition is let down by issues which could have been easily averted with a good editor, but Salem's Lot is still brilliantly scary and generally entertaining. It's by no means a game changer, but its strong characters and brutal ultra-violence are a benchmark in the crowded vampire subgenre.

7/10