A Whole Lot of Nothing

Over the years, I've read a few of Stephen King's novels. I decide to give him a chance to show me what the fuss is all about. I usually walk away still uncertain, and then don't try another Stephen King book for a few years.

My best experience with King was reading The Dark Tower series. Though book 1 felt like the longest short book I ever read, book 3 was a tedious slog, and book 5 was entirely too built around referencing King's other books and appealing to fans, I quite liked books 2, 4, and 6. And most importantly, I thought the concluding book 7 actually managed to wrap it all up in a satisfying ending.

But when I tried Misery? Meh. The Dead Zone? Meh. It? Meh, the mini-series was better. The Stand? "Wow, this book is really goo--- what the hell kind of ending is THAT?"

Well, it's been a few years since my last King experience, so I decided I was due. And this time, I decided to ask a friend of mine -- who has read (nearly?) everything King has published -- "what King book would you recommend I read?"

His answer: Salem's Lot.

This was Stephen King's second published novel, and it is an homage to Bram Stoker's Dracula. A powerful vampire in the truly classical, old school model comes to a tiny Maine town in the "modern day" (the mid 1970s of the book's original publication). A group of disparate townsfolk must band together to defeat the monster.

It took me two months of on-and-off reading to finish reading the book. Granted, Skyrim was responsible for a lot of the time I didn't feel like reading. But the book certainly did little to pull me along. Having finally finished it, I suspect two key reasons for my friend's recommendation here:

First, this friend knows that I've read The Dark Tower, and if you're going to read just one Stephen King book to provide greater context for the material in the later Dark Tower books, Salem's Lot is the one. One of the characters crosses over from Lot into the epic series, and I agree that his "redemption" is more meaningful when you fully understand why he needed to be redeemed.

Secondly, the ending of Salem's Lot is not bad. At least, it's decent by King standards. There's a pointless epilogue that steals from the melancholy note the book would otherwise have concluded on, but ultimately the novel does deliver on all the amped-up vampire slayage you came to read.

But it is certainly not the Stephen King book I would have recommended to me. In fact, of all the stand-alone novels of his that I've read, it's certainly the one I've liked least. King wrote it as a young writer clearly infatuated with Bram Stoker. I've read Dracula, and it's a ploddingly slow, truly boring novel. It is structured as a series of newspaper clippings, diary entries, and so forth, forming a jigsaw puzzle of a tale that is more concerned with the trappings of the story than the story itself.

And Salem's Lot is the most complete homage to that format I could imagine. Nothing of any real consequence happens in the first third of the novel. A hundred pages and more are spent just setting up the Maine town of the title, and its community. Like, every person in the community. You get the perspective of a kid fighting a playground bully, a town drunk beating on his wife, a tourist writer (King always seems to put a damn writer in his books), a country doctor, a proper young college girl, a... zzzzzzzzz....... Weren't there supposed to be vampires in this book?

Occasionally, King gets into a groove and paints an interesting picture of one of these myriad characters. But he's no George R.R. Martin when it comes to crafting a distinct character amid a cast of dozens. King will just manage to start something interesting with one character, and then whisk you away to another you simply don't care about.

If you're lucky. The most aggravating thing about the novel is that sometimes, King writes from the perspective of the town itself. There's a 5-page passage that opens the worst chapter of the novel, in which King simply writes on about the typical weather patterns in rural Maine in September and October. No plot, no character. It's a glorified poem from a man that really should have just gone out and written some poetry, if that's where his muse was taking him.

Once things finally do get rolling, the book does get rather interesting. But in that two month period of trying to finish the book, I read the last half in the final three days. It took the whole rest of the time to reach the point where it felt like the novel even actually got started.

If you're a fan of Dracula, I would imagine I couldn't recommend this book highly enough. It is a loving tribute to the style of the classic novel. But I certainly wasn't entertained enough by it to recommend it outside that context. I'd grade it a D+. Maybe it might have reached C-, if the siren pull of Skyrim hadn't kept me from soldiering through it earlier.