Stephen King

Every October since I turned fifteen, I’ve read Dracula. It’s one of my favorite books telling one of my favorite kinds of story: one where the good guys struggle and fight against an unapologetic and unambiguous evil, working as a team of loving friends to overcome the horror. I thought nothing would ever stop me from reading Dracula again and again; that I’d never tire of it. Until, one February several years ago, my father gave me a copy of ‘Salem’s Lot.

I read ‘Salem’s Lot that October (after I finished Dracula, of course) and fell in love with it to the point that I now alternate between it and Dracula. The book pulls you inside of it until you’re intimately familiar with it; it starts by introducing the characters to you and you know these people. You lived in this town, you visited it in the summer, you went to their fall festivals, you grew up right there in Everytown, USA. The people in the book are the people that are supposed to be found in this town, no one is out of place. Their arguments are the arguments you’ve had with your own mother and father, their gossips are the gossips you’ve swapped with your own neighbors. And so, when the monsters inevitably rise up, they’re not attacking characters in a made-up town in a book, they’re attacking you.

‘Salem’s Lot is an incredibly well-told story by a writer that I’m convinced will sit on the same bench as Twain and Shelley when he dies. He’s very much aptly named.