When I first began reading Salem’s Lot I don’t know why but I thought it was about the famous witch trials that took place in Salem in the 17th century, but this is not the case. This book tells us the story of Ben Mears, a writer that decides to go back to his childhood hometown called Jerusalem’s Lot after many years with the purpose of writing a book about a spooky strange mansion called by everybody Marsten House. Ben will soon learn that his trip there will take a totally different turn and that mysterious things happens over and over again, just like when he was a little boy. I will not write spoilers here, but let’s just say that nothing is what it looks like in the beginning. I think that the beginning of the book looks more like a crime story, but at the end it turns into a fantasy.
I absolutely love Stephen King and many of his books, he is one of the greatest authors of our time, but one thing that I didn’t enjoy so much about this particular book is that there are so many details in the description of the characters, and so many characters, that you somehow are distracted from the main plot of the book. But, I also have to say that one thing that is typical of King’s writing is the amazing way in which he describes everything, and often, in many of his books, the descriptions are mostly in the first part of the book, and only at the end we have the final plot twist. Stephen King himself says in the introduction of the novel that the reading should be indulgent reading the book, because he was only 23 years old when he wrote it and he already had a wife that had a typewriter and loved his stories.
This horror novel is actually the second published book of Stephen King, written in 1975, so it reflects the way of writing King had in his first works.