(Welcome to Audio Books in Review, a new feature here at ReadersRoom.com. In this feature we will be reviewing the latest releases in the Audio Book world. At this point, I would like to thank Audible.com for providing the audio books for these reviews. You can find a link to their fine site at the top of this page, and if you are a fan of audio books, you will want to check them out. Not only is their service and selection the best on the Internet, but their pricing system is the most competitive going.)
SALEM'S LOT (unabridged - 17 hours, 31 minutes)
By Stephen King
AudioWorks - Simon and Schuster Audio
2004
Read by Ron McLarty
Reviewed by Rob Holden
Christmas Eve day of 1976, I was at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia along with about three million other people, waiting for a train to take me home from college for the holidays. After standing in what I still consider to be the slowest line in the history of the world to buy my ticket, I realized that I'd forgotten to bring a book for the trip (God forbid, of course, that I would have brought reading material in any way related to my education!). I walked over to the newsstand and perused the selection of paperbacks. I was struck by one with a jet black cover on which only the dim outline of a little girl could be seen with a single drop of red blood at the right corner of her mouth. The novel was Salem's Lot -- the second novel by the then still relatively unknown Stephen King - and I still have that NAL paperback. It was my introduction to the mind of Stephen King -- a place where I have spent a lot of hours, none of them wasted. When I was looking through Audible.com's extensive offering of new audio releases for a book to launch this feature with and found that there was a new, unabridged recording of Salem's Lot available -- well, I couldn't resist.
Originally published in 1975 (one year before the world first met Louis and Lestat in Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire) Salem's Lot is a vampire story which has at its core the almost quintessential battle between good and evil that King has returned to again and again in his career. Unlike those in Ms. Rice's novels -- and the slew of mostly dreadful erotic and romantic vampire tales they have inspired -- King's vampire is purely evil, with no redeeming qualities, no minor spark of humanity, and no soul. The reader doesn't wish to know him, or sleep with him, or get bitten by him in the hope of achieving some psycho-sexual Nirvana of eternal life -- the reader is with those few residents of The Lot who see him for what he is and are looking to drive an ash stake through his heart. Pure and simple, this is a novel where there is a crystal clear delineation between good and evil, and the reader wants to see good triumph.
Of course, the novel is 30 years old, and so you would have to expect it to sound a bit dated -- but it isn't as dated as you might imagine it would be. There are no computers, of course -- no CDs, or cable TV, or cell phones or digital anything. Walter Cronkite is doing the news every night, there is still a Soviet Union, and :::shudders::: the Internet isn't even yet a twinkle in anybody's eye. But there is a timelessness about this story which has stood the passage of years well -- and what was scary 30 years ago remains scary today.
Adding to the general feeling of doom and disaster that runs through this book starting on page one is the wonderful performance given by the reader, Ron McLarty. McLarty's slightly gravelly voice, and the even, measured cadence of his reading compliments King's prose remarkably well. For the most part, his presentation is laid back and conversational, just as King's writing is, and his sparing use of accents though out the reading makes those places where he does use them (as when performing dialogue as Barlow, the vampire) all the more effective. During scenes in which multiple characters appear, the subtle changes McLarty brings to each voice in the scene allows the reader to keep who is saying what straight without effort, and concentrate on the story. In those scenes in which the characters are experiencing strong emotions (most often, as one would expect, fear) McLarty effortlessly transitions from the panic heard in the character's voice to the emotionless omnipotence of the third person narration surrounding the fevered dialogue. Through out this reading, it is the story that dictates the direction of McLarty's performance, and not McLarty who tries to bend the story to his talents. This was, in this reviewer's opinion, an almost flawless performance.
The production quality of the recording, as one would expect from Simon and Schuster Audio, is top notch. As a bonus to this particular recording, there is a fairly lengthy introduction read by Stephen King himself which does not appear in the original book. This introduction outlines a bit of how he came to write Salem's Lot, as well as giving a few insights into his fascination with horror stories, starting in his childhood.
If, like me, it has been almost 30 years since you've traveled to Salem's Lot, or if you perhaps discovered King later in his career and have never gotten around to reading his earlier novels, this recording is well worth a listen, and will not fail to satisfy. I am pleased to give it my highest recommendation.
Copyright 2004 by ReadersRoom, LLC. All rights reserved.
