How Salem's Lot by Stephen King affected me in 1976

I'm now in the process of re-reading Salem's Lot by Stephen King, and I'm enjoying it as much this time around as I did thirty-five years ago.

I was working in a used bookstore on the coast of North Carolina when Salem's Lot came out in paperback. We'd already gotten in a ton of Carrie paperbacks traded in the previous year, but Salem's Lot was very slow in coming into the store. People seemed to be re-reading it, or passing it on to their friends. In fact, one of my friends, John, who loved a good horror novel as much as I did, asked me if I'd read Salem's Lot yet, and I told him no...that I was waiting for a copy to get traded into the store. He told me to go down to the newstand on the other side of town after I got off from work and to buy a copy of it new. He said if I didn't like it, he'd give me the money for the book. Well, that got me even more interested because I was till buying new paperbacks and occasionally a hardcover (John D. MacDonald, Robert Ludlum, John Le Carre, Adam Hall, Trevanian, and a few others)when my favorite authors turned out a new novel.

So, I paid a visit to our competitor that night, purchased a copy of Salem's Lot and read it in two days. I immediately got a hardcover edition of The Shining, which was out then. I also read that in two days, and then was at a lost of what to do with myself. I had just read two of the best horror novels in the world, and I was hungry for more Stephen King books, but would have to wait two years before The Stand finally came out. In between The Shining and The Stand was King's first anthology, Night Shift. That book contained the best short stories I'd ever read.

Before I read King, I'd read some of H.P. Lovecraft's books, Edgar Allan Poe, Julies Verne, H.G. Wells, Shirley Jackson, Richard Matheson, Thomas Tryon, William Peter Blatty and Ira Levin. King, however, brought horror into the living room and made it real in a way no other author had been able to do. I started telling the customers at the store about Salem's Lot and The Shining. Unfortunately, it would be several years before I would finally read Carrie. The paperback versions of Carrie and Salem's Lot were already hitting the bestseller lists around the country, and The Shining eventually reached The New York Times Bestseller List. I, and my customers were jonesing for a King novel. When The Stand came out we all just about went crazy with joy. Not only was it a new Stephen King novel, it was eight hundred pages long. Holy Shit! I think I read that in four days. After that it was another year before The Dead Zone came out. By then there was Ghost Story by Peter Straub and Baal by Robert McCammon. They helped to fill the void between King novels.

I can say that Salem's Lot changed my life from that point on. It was then I knew I wanted to be a writer, but that was still years down the road. It would be ten years before I sold my first short story, and over thirty years before I slowly starting writing with more seriousness. I knew, however, that I wanted to write something half as good as Salem's Lot or The Shining. I instinctively knew I'd never be as good as King when it came to the written word. This author was a one-of-a-kind who occasionally appears in every profession once two or three lifetimes. Maybe even longer. King is a genius with the written word. I know that critics have often slashed his writing with a red magic marker, but critics seldom know what the general populace loves to read. They're stuck in their own little world with their heads up their butts, trying to appear smart and selective, but the works of Stephen King will be around long after they're gone and their bones have turned to ash.

Even today at sixty years of age, I start acting like a little boy whenever I learn of a new Stephen King novel coming out. I mean this November, he has another thousand-word book being published--1963, about a man who goes back in time to try and save John F. Kennedy. Now, for my generation, that is definitely a "must-buy" novel. For me, even more so because the Maestro wrote it. I'm getting goose flesh just thinking about it.

Yes, Salem's Lot was definitely the turning point in my life with regards to reading. There are very few authors, if any, I have stuck with for three-and-a-half decades. Salem's Lot is a novel of pure magic in that King literally sucks you into the story before you even realize what is happening. He made vampires realistic and believable. He scared the living shit out of me with that book, and then with The Shining. If ever there was a man who was born to write, it's Stephen King. I haven't been the same since reading his second published novel. My friends think I've gone a little crazy, but so have millions and millions of other fans of this great author. He has warped an entire generation of people. We all now look at the world slightly crossed eyes.

Even now as I pass the 168 page mark in Salem's Lot, I find myself amazed that a young man of King's age was such a damn good author, surpassing many of the top selling authors of that time. As my momma used to say, talent, like cream, always rises to the top. Salem's Lot. Re-reading it is like returning home to a different time period when I had so much hope for the future, and as we know, hope is a good thing, perhaps the best of things.

(Excuse any misspellings or errors. I'm in the office of my apartment complex, using their computer, and people are now waiting for me to get off of it so they can do their thing.)