30 day book challenge – #8 Book that scares you

I’ve been told that Stephen King really is the king when it comes to freaking you out. The problem with trying to prove this theory myself is that I don’t usually like reading scary books.

But there is something about Stephen King that appeals to so many people and that intrigues me. As a literature student I want to investigate his story telling techniques to see how his writing style allows the reader to become so scared, how he is able to manipulate the reader’s imagination, scaring people who may think themselves immune.

I have started my Stephen King journey with ”Salem’s Lot’, first published in 1975. I’m a chronological reader and apparently there are arguments as to whether ‘Carrie’ is King’s first novel, but as I couldn’t find a copy of ‘Carrie’ on the bookshelf, I’m content to read ”Salem’s Lot’ first. This novel is what you could call a quintessential horror. It’s about a vampire turning up to an empty house in a declining town and turning everyone into the undead. So perhaps not the best induction into Stephen King’s genius, but then it was written in the 1970s and could be described as a novel “of it’s time”.

The story begins at the end. A great literary device for piquing the reader’s interest. The reader is introduced to a man and a boy, no names, something has already happened to them, something has brought them together and keeps them on the move. The reader can guess that it has something to do with a sleepy town called Jerusalem’s Lot, but must read on to find out what exactly happened there. This technique is often used in horror novels, allowing the story to be told by someone who was there and lived to tell the tale, but it is a device that compromises the suspense. The reader knows that a man and a boy survive, so when we are introduced to the main adult male character and the boy, we follow their story through all the scary moments, but we know that they survive. They survive and have to keep on fighting the evil, but do they ever really win the fight? There’s the suspense.

The pace of the novel did remind me a lot of Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’. The tempo is quite somnambulistic and a lot of the early scary events do befall people as they are trying to sleep, which gives the characters the excuse that they are imagining the strange noises and strange behaviours. And isn’t this how we would react? The main characters are very rational about what is happening in their town, they can’t believe it is anything supernatural. But rationality doesn’t win against a vampire, you have to believe they exist in order to defeat them. That is King’s skill, to scare you he has to make you believe that this could happen, and what better way than by allying you, the reader, with a regular Joe, who thinks like you do and who doesn’t believe in vampires, until he meets one.

A cover that shows you exactly what you are getting yourself into. It’s a Stephen King horror. Enough said really.