10 November 2024
Masterful Foreshadowing: Salem’s Lot by Stephen King
So I read this one because I saw that there was a new Salem’s Lot movie coming out on HBO Max—and I couldn’t stomach watching the film without first reading the book. King was my first writing instructor, after all, as I read all his classics starting in 6th grade. We go way back.
This book is engaging, as all of King’s are, but I can see right away why I began reading it at about age 12 but set it down never to return: it has far too many characters to keep track, and the town’s history, although interesting to me now at age 44, was a bit of a slog when I was young. It was his fast-paced shorter books that captured and kept me, then.
Salem’s Lot is written in past tense in a close third-person PoV with lots of head-hopping. I’ve seen newer writers attempt to accomplish this head-hopping unsuccessfully, but somehow King does it without creating confusion. For the most part, he hops heads at the start of each chapter, delineating each character’s thoughts distinctly. However, there are a few chapters where he’ll head-hop mid-chapter—which fascinated me. Sometimes I wonder if he even realizes he’s doing it. Of course he does, right?
Most of this story’s tension and mystery lies not in unknown backstory/motives but in the question what will they do? Indeed, King provides backstories immediately as we encounter each character, so there’s no real mystery there. The most deeply developed mystery of the story is why do they go back? And here is where King weaves in the long-standing undercurrent/theme of the fire that incinerated the city in the 1950s. There are, almost curiously, numerous mentions of this town fire throughout the story…so perhaps I should’ve recognized its significance. Subtle! I love the way he planted that seed early on and then brought it full circle in the ending. It gives a satisfaction that I’d like to give my own readers. So we’ll see if there’s a way I can accomplish this.
Overall, it was an enjoyable (if simple, again) read. King adheres to standard novel-writing expectations, such as dialogue mores, italicization of thoughts, paragraphing, chapter length, etc. The main characters worked well for the plot, even if they were underdeveloped (to my taste). I did notice that in the HBO Max version (which was awful, by the way, don’t bother watching), the producers replaced Jimmy Cody’s character with a black woman. This made me reflect upon the too-few female protagonists in King’s cast of characters. Quite valid. It did annoy me that Susan fell so early—but at least her character wasn’t flat.
While there are some universal themes woven throughout this text, mostly it was an enjoyable diversion. To my taste, far better than smut. For that reason, I’ve now picked up Misery. Can’t wait.
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