This one is on the list!? I would have read this book even if it wasn't, Stephen King is an awesome writer, I have enjoyed all of the books by him that I have read, and this one is no exception
This book was about a small town called Salem's Lot that a vampire comes to feed in. The characters in the story eventually realize something is wrong and try to stop the vampire. The characters consist of Ben, a writer who returned home to use an old haunted mansion as inspiration, Susan, Ben's recently acquired girlfriend, Mark, a kid obsessed with monsters, Father Callahan, a drunken priest, and Mike, an English teacher.
Other characters are introduced, but mainly they just turn out to be vampire food. None of them play a major role in the story.
The story begins rather slowly as the vampire moves in and establishes his cover and takes in his first few victims. At that point nobody realizes what is happening, but slowly the pace picks up as several people have unexplained deaths (and become vampires) and the main characters get suspicious. Then accelerates more as the number of vampires practically doubles each night.
Towards the end of the story the characters do battle with the original vampire, named Barlow (and who claims to be older than the church, and thus has a over sized ego. A vampire's age is an indicator of superiority and power, that's not said in the book, that is just me having read so many vampire books that I am pretty much the ultimate authority on them. The same goes for most monsters in books, but I digress).
I won't spoil the outcome of the battle(s), nor will I say what the fates of each character was.
All things considered, I'm not sure what to reflect on here, it seemed to me that this was just a very good vampire novel, and it isn't even the original vampire novel (even though it is good enough, but Dracula is probably the first popular vampire themed novel, and legends of vampires go back so far before books that determining the original source of the legends is impossible.
I guess I will end now and allow comment questions to provoke deeper thought about this one, but I can't think of what they will be.
So good night, don't let the vampires bite. *insert evil laugh here*
Caleb,
ReplyDeleteYou are not the ultimate expert on vampires. Do you hear yourself? How much older than the church are you to have amassed your ego? An ultimate expert would be able to tell us that legends of vampires go back nearly a thousand years and that the first reference to vampire was in 1047.
For the record, you do not need to use this blog to make yourself seem like the most knowledgeable, well-educated 15 year old that has ever-lived. If that were the goal, watching your grammar would be a much more likely to accomplish that goal. I want you to not only respond to this comment but I want you to edit this blog. I will be asking you to edit all future blogs with blatant errors.
This book was meant to be a softball. To show that even good reads can be analyzed and interpreted.
Having read Dracula can you compare and contrast the similarities between the vampires? Since vampires are fictional creatures can a writer alter aspects of the criteria and still be believable or is so much accepted as fact about vampires that a writer cannot deviate from past images? Is Dracula any better a story because it was the original?
What is the town like in this story? Are the residents having town-wide park days after church on sundays or do you feel that even without the vampire arrival this place is dark and creepy? (Town-wide picnics after church can be their own kind of creepy, but that's obviously not what I was talking about.)
How are the characters inner struggles addressed? Is it possible the author was commenting on the state of the church by making the priest a drunkard? Is the secrecy in this book reflective of the secrecy exposed in the government during the Watergate Scandal, a major news headline during the time this book was written?
What is it about Vampires that are making our society obsessed with them? Between TruBlood, HBO series adapted from a series of books, and Twilight, many novelists have spied an opportunity to cash in on the fad and added numerous books to the vampire genre. What makes this so enticing?