Find A Hora Do Vampiro Presented By Stephen King Available As Volume
dont know what all I had to say about this book, Numerous people are losing their review, I just wanted to say UPDATE:,on kindle US today
The movie creeped me out as a kid!
Mel I am so nostalgically looking back to a better time when certain fantasy creatures were still true monsters and not twinkling, soft, freaking feeling emo snobs.
Somehow the Lovecraftian, subtle, rising horror aspect King was so strong at the beginning of his career diminished over the years and there was not much of it left in the newer books Ive read.
Characterization, descriptions, action scenes, suspense, everything great as usual in the new works, but this special meta cosmic existential horror vibe and feeling of the first few and the drug fueled King years went missing afterward.
Especially his first short story collections show this, they are epic, gothic horror masterpieces, while his new ones are much more dealing with human related meta topics dipped in some mystery and horror ghost magic.
I love all, fanboy for life, jay, but somehow this old school style was more unique, especially because it sadly isnt manufactured anymore nowadays, shame on you, damn mainstream ruining everything.
Some soft spoilers ahead, but nothing too specific worth mentioning, just meta,
So enjoy it even more if its the first time, look at all the red herrings, McGuffins, and Chekhovs King is throwing around to mix them with symbolism and innuendos, enjoy how the pathetic, weak humans stagger towards perdition, laugh whenever evil scores the next bloody goal, and be a happy witness of the moment when the legend of the greatest horror writer of all times starts unfolding by using the ancient trope of rabies symptoms made folk tales.
Google that, by the way, its so cool, the time until someone infected with rabies dies, how they behave to smell and light, what happens to their brains and libido, nature is amazing.
It must have been so much fun to be locked up during long, cold, mountain winters with no change to escape, knowing that a few of the citizens and families may turn into real, freaking vampires.
Mommy is eating daddy, I fear she'll come for us when she is hungry again, “ Thanks to stupid rabies vaccination and general scientific, social, and medical progress, these amazing massive real life zombie vampire role playing games are now sadly just a reminiscence of the past, but at least literature can let one undergo it again.
Did I read Dracula I am not sure, but the pop culture reference potential of both the original and this darker retelling is immense and how King let it escalate seems to be much more entertaining than what I know about the original.
Sorry, classic literature, King just owns you, This idea of whatever evil coming to town, or always being in town and waking up again, becoming more and more extreme in its manifestations is one of the core elements of both Kings work and humankind itself.
Could also be seen as an allegory about a snowball effect, tiny origin, huge massacre style, Or, how appropriate and contemporary, a virus,
Its kind of making me twinkle in anger when I think about how true, hard topics have been mainstream flanderized
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until nothing of the cool, original content was left to fit to appeal to the teeny target audience, Shame on you, americanization and disneyfication, you murdered evil, torturing monsters to turn them into sensible, romantic love interests that freaking understand woman, whats wrong with you Thats so sick and disgusting, I will possible once unsubscribe my Disney account in a beer ridden anger act of defiance.
Just joking, they have Marvel and Star Wars too, Wait, my long time memory is just telling me in one of its rare appearances that I dont watch TV anymore, Damn.
Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:
sitelink org/pmwiki/pmwiki. ph City folk have a distinct misconception about small towns, We tend to believe that they are tranquil and innocent, That the denizens are wholesome and full of family values, But, we don't see the hidden rot that lurks beneath the sleepy facade,
Stephen King does a lot to shatter that myth with 'Salem's Lot, This a horror novel about a vampire who destroys a town from the inside out, This is a horror story about the darkness that we don't see clearly or maybe we ignore about our friends, families, and neighbors,
What was the most horrific part of this book for me You're going to guess wrong, It wasn't the horror of the vampires, It was seeing a woman punch her ten month old baby in the face because he was crying, Yes, that bothered me more than any of the actual supernatural horror, I say to Mr. King that you know what fears lurk in our hearts, The dark is full of potential evil that can possess us, take over our bodies, and turn us into monsters, But, the truest monsters are the human ones, With this novel, Mr. King showed me both kinds of monsters,
Do you believe that there are no true secrets in a small town You'd be right if you said yes, You'd be equally right if you said no, The townspeople of 'Salem's Lot know a lot more than they want to know about their neighbors, but they overlook it, ignore it, sweep the sins under the rug until the rug starts to bulge in the middle, and it won't hold those secrets back.
For example, 'Salem's Lot harbored an exmobster who had a penchant for devil worship, He lived in a scary house on the top of a hill, the Marsten House, It was a house that haunted Ben Mears after he went there as a nine year old on a dare, He went there, and saw something that was from his worst nightmares, but he believed even in his adulthood to be true, The evil that Hubie Marsten brought into existence never died, The house held it as a battery holds a charge, It was the perfect place for a vampire and his evil minion to set up shop in this little town,
I read the introduction to this story with interest, I love knowing how an author came to craft his or her story, Mr. King was a fan of Bram Stoker's Dracula, and he wrote 'Salem's Lot as an unofficial homage to that classic vampire novel, In my inexpert opinion, I think he did a great job, I feel that Mr. Stoker would probably nod in approval, even if he didn't get all the modern references, Mr. King wrote his idea of a vampire story, and it holds his individual stamp on it, Yet, the aspects that make Dracula such an excellent vampire novel, at least to this vampire aficionado, are clearly represented, Mr. Barlow could give Count Dracula a real run for his money as far as being a completely evil, despicable, and formidable being, His minion, Straker, could give Renfield some lessons in evil, And Matt, Ben, Jimmy, Susan, Father Callahan, and Mark could compare notes with Van Helsing, Harker, Mina, Holmwood, and Quincy, But, if Mr. Stoker would forgive me, I think that Mr, King ramped up the fear level significantly, because his world is not sentimental and endowed with as many basically 'good' people, His world is full of flawed humanity who have really nasty proclivities, although I still feared for their safety and didn't want them to succumb to the evil of the vampire that infected this town.
In this story, we learn about the heights and depths of the human condition, How a person can bounce back from despair, face his/her worst fears, and quite possibly wrap his mind around events that cannot be real to an empirical mind.
We learn about what a person's limits are, Can you go into that house and do what needs to be done Do you have the nerve Or will you turn away and pretend it's not happening, as some members of this town do, for their own sanity Can a thirteen yearold boy show the bravery that a seventyyearold man in the twilight of his life lacks Can a nonbeliever trust in the symbols of a faith that held no relevance to him, in the face of an evil that defies scientific explanation All these questions are explored in this story, with answers that might surprise you.
I deliberately read 'Salem's Lot during the day, because it is quite, quite scary, Even still, I thought about a pair of red eyes haunting me in the night, Feared for the scratching of a lost loved one against my window pane as I tried to sleep at night, Some part of me hoped that I had not inadvertently invited the wrong person into my home, If that is what makes a successful vampire novel, I'd say Stephen King has succeeded in a big way, “Thin clouds form, and the shadows lengthen out, They have no breadth, as summer shadows have there are no leaves on the trees or fat clouds in the sky to make them thick.
They are gaunt, mean shadows that bite the ground like teeth, As the sun nears the horizon, its benevolent yellow begins to deepen, to become infected, until it glares an angry inflamed orange, It throws a variegated glow over the horizon, ”
Salems Lot is the story of a small town being overtaken by vampires, and a brave band of people who come together to fight an ancient evil.
The story centers around Ben Mears, Ben has returned to Salems Lot in hopes that exploring the history of the Marsten House, an old mansion long the subject of rumor and speculation, will help him cast out his personal devils and provide inspiration for his new book.
But when two young boys venture into the woods, and only one returns alive, Ben begins to realise that something sinister is at work, in fact, his hometown is under siege from forces of darkness far beyond his imagination.
And only he, with a small group of allies, can hope to contain the evil that is growing within the borders of this small and fragile town.
Salems Lot builds slowly and this is where Stephen King uses his time to do what he does best, build great characters and create fascinating back stories.
The town of Salems lot feels like a soap opera with characters that will make you feel nostalgic and disgusted at the same time.
They beat their children, cheat on their husbands, drink and bully, Yet its hard to pin them on a good vs bad board, there are shades of grey with everyone you meet,
Once this entire foundation has been laid Stephen King ups the ante and unveils the full horror of the vampires and it unravels like a dream!
Salems Lot is a brilliant work of vampire/horror fiction.
It is genuinely scary at times, it has the ability to raise the hairs on your arms and neck and gives you a genuine sense of foreboding.
This town is more a charcter than a setting and you realise the evil man can do is more destructive to society than a thousand year old vampire.
Its the townspeople that drive the action and turn Salems Lot into an apocalypse,
This is a rich story full of great themes about society, the power of faith, men vs boys and even love and salvation.
It was an absolute dream to read!
I Highly recommend The town kept its secrets, and the Marsten House brooded over it like a ruined king.
Stephen King is a master of weaving together the narrative of a community with the aesthetics of horror, Its part of what makes him so truly frightening: his horrors lurk in every day realities and often the community at large is just as threatening as the monsters that infiltrate in secret.
Wed all be scared if we knew what was swept under the carpet of each others minds, King writes in Salems Lot, and in this tale of good vs evil the ways the everyday folks of the town silently allow their neighbors traumas to brood and boil over onto each other becomes just as unsettling as the vampires drawn to the bad vibes.
The watching eyes of a predator is just as eerie be it an undead monster or the judgemental gaze from a neighbors window,
Its a perfect setup of small town scaries that tap into the real fears of small towns quite literally dying out, a topic that fueled a lot of political discourse in rural areas in the last few decades ofth century in the US.
A factory would close or an industry would dry up and suddenly the infrastructure of a town would cave in on itself with no jobs and no future prospects.
Kids would flee the moment they could to avoid being pulled under with it, So begins Salems Lot, with the flight from a small town in Maine seeming like another victim of a collapsed local economy on the surface, but with a darker secret bruising within.
The town knew about darkness, King writes, it knew about the darkness that comes on the land when rotation hides the land from the sun, and about the darkness of the human soul.
The bad behavoirs of the town, with the abusers, affairs, and general selfish fuckery have opened an opportunity for far worse predators to nestle in and take control.
Which brings us to the title and name of the town, Jerusalem's Lot. This may be a stretch but King does frequently play with biblical elements, and the shortened version, Salems Lot sure feels adjacent to Sodom and Gomorrah as well as Lot from Genesis one could also argue Salem where the witch trials occurred, seeing as a religiously tinged “purifying by fire” plays into the ending but more on that later.
In reality, the town is based on Durham, Maine where King explored the real Marsten House an abandoned home of the same name there as a kid.
But the story of Sodom and Gomorrah involves a town being destroyed because ofaccording to Isaiah and Jeremiahgreed, adultery, inhospitality, and lies, In Ezekial:it is written: Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned they did not help the poor and needy.
The larger context here is that Jerusalem is as bad, if not worse, than Sodom, Ive had people also tell me the “real” reason is lack of remnant, basically failure of the church, which is sort of happening here as well though Father Callahan does some ass kicking later on.
So here we are in Jerusalem's Lot, where pretty much everyone is lying, cheating, and inhospitable, Bam, vampire time. I do love a good vampire time and as vampires are often written as some lusty folks, SO DO THEY,
This is a genuinely creepy novel that maintains a growing tension of terrors through its hefty length, King is an author that can thrill and chill in the moment of reading but, like the monsters lurking out of sight, the lingering terror always strikes from your mind later on when you realize how you too could have walked right into the frights that occur in his books.
Like I wrote about for sitelinkPet Sematary, the scariest bits are dropped into normal, mundane reality, Each October I love to over indulge in horror novels, I love the genre, it really works for me, and I always think “why dont I read more like this all year” But then something will happen, my imagination will run wild and Ill swear off horror novels until the wheel of seasons rolls around again.
This year I didnt really have that moment and was just blissfully downing scary stories, thrilled to keep going into November while reading this book along with Nataliya read here sitelinkexcellent review here.
I had to feed my neighbors cat last weekend, and their electronic door lock isnt working so getting it to unlock and lock was a bit of a hassle.
It was late in the evening as I was walking down into
the darkness of their basement where the cat dish is when suddenly my mind decided to pelt the intrusive thought “dont think about the Marsten House” at me like a brick.
Well, fuck, now Im hoping I dont turn around for Marstens dead ass chasing after me down the stairs, I did my chore SO fast and as Im trying to lock the door, which isnt cooperating, the windy night is creating a draft that makes it feel like the door is trying to be pulled back open from the inside.
The basis of all human fears, King says here, a closed door, slightly ajar, YUP. So you got me King, that was my memorable imaginationrunwild fright of,
Small towns have long memories and pass their horrors down ceremonially from generation to generation,
I love the atmosphere of this novel, Its a small town vibe that reminds me of the small towns in Michigans upper peninsula where I would spend my summers as a kid.
The town itself is creepy and oppressive though, Everyone knows everyone elses business a bit too much, everyone is kind of a shit, and generational trauma is running rampant, It becomes sort of a question of were the people being shits the reason the town became evil or was the town being evil the reason the people are shits.
Once the vampires get someone they sort of become the worst version of themselves, which is rather in keeping with the first vampire novel: sitelinkThe Vampyre by sitelinkJohn William Polidori.
In it, anyone who is drawn to the enigmatic vampire is met with ruin and becomes terrible versions of themselves on their descent, The vampire was based on sitelinkLord Byron and this whole road to ruin was pretty expected for anyone who decided to buddy themselves with him.
There is a lot of standard vampire lore in this book that sort of lets the readers predisposition towards vampire knowledge fill in a lot of gaps, though the use of it is all a bit muddy.
Its Kings early work and it shows, The writing is great but some of the book exists without much clarifications because, well, thats just what makes the plot work, The crucifix is a key tool for fighting vampires because thats just how fighting vampires works, There is a lot of symbolism around the church, though Barlow does inform us the Catholic Church is not the oldest of my opponents.
It just happens to be a tradition that is also an effective weapon against him, It is less that it is a tool from God, but, as Ben observes, a direct pipeline to the days when werewolves and incubi and witches were an accepted part of the outer darkness and the church the only beacon of light.
It also opens the opportunity for some great moments with Mark getting vampire murdering down with a toy cross, King always does utilize childhood innocence in a great way, something that is very characteristic of a lot of his works, A very 'suffer the little children' vibe juxtaposed with the power of their innocence,
In the vibes of a small town dying out, there is a large theme about the part and reclaiming memory, Marsten House is largely a symbol for the traumas of Bens past that he has come to revisit, Why He did it for literature see also: profittapping into the atmosphereto write a book scary enough to make me a million dollars Ben wants to dig into his past and write a good book, but also because he wants to reclaim the magic of time now gone.
What was he doing, coming back to a town where he had lives for four years as a boy, trying to recapture something that was irrevocably lost What magic could he expect to recapture by walking roads that he had once walked as a boy and were probably asphalted and straightened and logged off and littered with tourist beer cans
This resonates with the ideas of dying towns and wanting to reclaim the past, or where people hold to a golden age nostalgia to resist change or progress.
You cant reclaim the past though, and memory is often much rosier than the reality, The house becomes the general base for the vampiric plot, but its also convenient to the plot because Ben can center all the evils into one idea: Marsten House.
If a fear cannot be articulated, it cant be conquered, King writes I love this line, and have written frequently elsewhere about how naming a thing takes away its power or gives you power over it as seen in fairy tales and theres almost a metafictional aspect of articulating all the evil into Marsten House in a book about writing a book about evil.
Its King winking at us seeing if we catch the references to fairy tale theory more or less,
Purification should count for something,
Okay, we gotta talk about the ending, Or nonending really. I mean, this book hits some HIGHS that are truly terrifying those teeth, ahhhhh! but, as is the complaint about King so common they spoofed on it in the new film remake of sitelinkIt, King often struggles to stick the landing.
While Im into the On that note, sitelinkNight Shift also contains the story Jerusalems Lot, written as an homage to sitelinkH, P. Lovecraft and connects the town to the Cthulhu mythology it was written before the novel but appeared in print after, But I would have been into the book abruptly ending when Ben says Ill be back like hes Vampire Terminator, Imagine him riding out of town on a motorcycle if you want, Ive always been into Kings tongueincheek warning going into the end of Dark Tower, and with many of his books you can probably quit and write your own final few pages and hed be into that.
Salems Lot is a wild ride of frights and fun that is worth the hefty size of the narrative, Its early King and a few parts read as clunky Bens interactions with women are a bit awkward too but its a well told story that is worth the price of admission.
There's a lot to talk about here and I do really appreciate the efforts made here to make horror into a work of literature by having a lot of symbolism and references that give some good depth to it.
So enter, if you dare,
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