Odd to add a book quite so popular - 217, 737th person to rate the book! I'm adding the 4, 183rd review! This was the second Stephen King book I read, it came from the library as part of an omnibus edition with Carrie. I think it was borrowed by my sister, and I snuck in and read it in secret over some long hot summer days. This was also how I got into Famous Five. I never reread Carrie or 'Salem's Lot or The Shining, even though I spent most of my teenage years reading and rereading King, because I never owned copies. This is a very banal review so far, you'd think the momentous occasion of the 4,183rd review would merit something momentous. Sorry.

I stopped reading King around the time of Wizard And Glass or Insomnia, can't remember which, don't much care. I think I've read the odd story here and there but this is the first time I've picked up a King novel in jaysus, what, twenty years? Now I feel like a character in an Irish King novel reminiscing about time gone by and lost childhood enthusiasms. If you don't hear from me I've been eaten by a Leprechaun.

'Salem's Lot is really very good, isn't it? It actually has quite a literary style, otherwise a lot of the folksiness and philosophising and shifts in tone and voice wouldn't work anywhere near as well as they do. However, his eye for character, his sense of detail and evocation of small-town life would outstay its welcome if he didn't throw vampires at it.

A small band of heroes and one token girl must deal with an outbreak of vamipirism that only they notice. The main hero's a writer, by the way. He started early with that schtick, didn't he? There's a teacher who has Knowledge and a Professional who's Likeable But Doomed and a boy who is Preternaturally Calm and Knows His Genre. The girl Knows Her Own Mind and her mind wants the writer but she Can't Be Saved. Honestly, I can't remember if these are King Types, but they do ring bells.

Talk about readable, though, boy howdy whoopsy-doodle, as a King character's interior monologue would say with slightly annoying regularity. Nailed to the page with vampire teeth through my palms, which is the sort of blurb they really, really loved for King books of that era and all through the eighties. 'Triple H for Horror.' Thank you, The Sun. But no, it's a fantastic, top quality, high-brow, low down pot-boiler of blood and angst and death and undeath and creepiness. I shall be keeping an eye out for The Shining and Carrie next, you betcha oh shut up.