Rating - ⭐⭐1/2
"'Salem's Lot is a small New England town with white clapboard houses, tree-lined streets, and solid church steeples. That summer in 'Salem's Lot was a summer of homecoming and return; spring burned out and the land lying dry, crackling underfoot. Late that summer, Ben Mears returned to 'Salem's Lot hoping to cast out his own devils and found instead a new, unspeakable horror.
A stranger had also come to the Lot, a stranger with a secret as old as evil, a secret that would wreak irreparable harm on those he touched and in turn on those they loved.
All would be changed forever—Susan, whose love for Ben could not protect her; Father Callahan, the bad priest who put his eroded faith to one last test; and Mark, a young boy who sees his fantasy world become reality and ironically proves the best equipped to handle the relentless nightmare of 'Salem's Lot."
'Salem's Lot is a standalone horror novel by Stephen King, the king of horror (heh).
Oh boy did this book ever turn me off from wanting to pick up any more Stephen King books. I decided to pick this up as my first King read because, well, it has vampires. Unfortunately for me, the few and far apart mentions of vampires were not nearly enough to save this book.
First of all, as just mentioned, there was a severe lack of vampires in this book which was surprising. It focused more on the lives of the people in town which I did not care for at all. Some of the perspectives that King chose to include were rather jarring (and I mean in the 'I didn't need to read that and this needs some trigger warnings' kind of jarring).
The trigger warning I am talking about is for child abuse, which is not something you really want to read about in this first place, but the way it was incorporated into the story made it worse. It would just come absolutely out of nowhere and then two seconds later it would move on to a different perspective like nothing happened.
Overall, this book was just a slog to get through. With the constantly shifting perspectives about people I could care less about, to how hard it was to actually find motivation to sit down at read this. Usually, I could speed through 100 pages in no time, but I could barely get myself to read 50 pages before I had enough.
Not a good first King book at all.
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