Father Brown will have to wait a little more, because I continued with my dive into Stephen King's bibliography - as I already noted earlier, his novels were filmed so many times that I had impression that I am familiar with them, where in fact I actually had not really read them. So right after "Carrie" I turned my attention to his second best-selling book, but where during "Carrie" I couldn't get Sissy Spacek out of my head, this time around everything was new to me since I don't remember movie at all.
It is a vampire novel - not bad, but kind of mildly interesting, since frames of vampire stories are strictly set in stone since days of Bram Stoker and we are already well informed about the whole garlic/cross/mirror rules of the genre. So there is not a real horror here as it all borders of fantasy and supernatural nocturnal things flying around - what Stephen King cleverly does is, he presents real enemies not as some hidden bad forces (although there is a vampire master & servant couple that arrives in town and is responsible for vampirism) but the way friends and family turn into blood-sucking killers. I guess the whole intention was to portrait horror coming from familiar faces, when one is opening doors and inviting murderer in the house. As the story progress, the whole fictional town of Salem's Lot becomes infected with vampirism and yesterday's neighbors are today's killers - even though it's clear that King enjoyed toying with citizens of Salem's Lot and describing them as they were in every day's life before nightmare occurred, I found a beginning of the novel surprisingly slow as he insisted on putting so many characters in that at certain point I truly lost the count of who's who. Yes, there is a small group of brave people who are fighting vampires and ten thousand others who are described only on one page never to turn up again. So this was kind of bummer, because I desperately tried to remember who is who. It did keep my interest, though, so I shouldn't complain - its just that the whole genre is kind of overused and I am a bit tired of the garlic/cross saga. Besides, Anne Rice is the only one who really polished this kind of stories to perfection and even she became tired of it. I know this is supposed to be a horror story and it is Stephen King we are talking about (the guy who enjoys shocking and grossing out his readers) but there were some scenes I wish he didn't put on the paper - abusing mothers who are beating their little babies, this was just too much for me and I hated it, in fact could slap Stephen King over the head right now this moment when I think about it. It did not matter at all in the concept of the novel and it could have easily been left out.
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