Salem's Lot, 'Salem's Lot and Jerusalem's Lot

So I've finished the novel 'Salem's Lot. It's kind of weird having read a bunch of later King without ever getting through some of the early novels. He has a pattern of doing a whole bunch of character development and 'setting up' before he ever gets to anything of real interest plot wise. But that's the awesome thing about his work, it's all about those early pages. Getting to know the characters and their situations is the juice of most of his stories. This is where he does his best work as the storyteller, he reveals things about human nature that can only be reached with this level of probing into the lives of his characters.

Now, in the later works, after all of that character development and 'probing', he just hits us with a cool ending and wraps it up. But in the early, truly horror novels he is building towards the scary parts at the end. The reason that we are so scared for the characters is that they've spent two thirds of the novel doing totally mundane things that we have done. Then, all of a sudden, the town is overrun by vampires. That's awesome, and scary.

I've also started to read King's first collection of short stories, Night Shift, the first of which is "Jerusalem's Lot". I don't really see it being a prequel to the novel. None of the events in this story, which takes place in the 1800s and deals loosely with the same fictional town and a house that is inherently evil, are mentioned much in the novel. I think this was just a jumping off point to the bigger ideas that he made it to with the full book. It also pays huge homage to Bram Stoker's vampire story by being written in the form of letters and journal entries. That's cool.

I'v also started to watch the original miniseries based on 'Salem's Lot. It's all 70s and small town. It's directed by Tobe Hooper, the director of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and made for TV. This combo I think actually works to the film's advantage. With the longer runtime and the limitations of television in the 70s/early 80s, they have the time and inclination to make sure to get into the characters. This is a common factor in all the good King adaptations. I just watched the first half, but since that's my favorite part of the book, it'll probably be the best part of the movie. We haven't even seen the vampire, Barlow, yet. In this version Hooper and his team have paid homage to another great vampire tale (also based on Dracula), Nosferatu, by making the villain look like the old school design of that movie.