The First Stephen King Novel I Ever Read
It’s 1978.
Starsky and Hutch and Charlie’s Angels are fighting crime on the telly, wearing cool threads and looking foxy while doing it.
Queen and ABBA are belting out bangers on the radio, wearing tight satin pants and looking funky.
The world is full of mullets, shag cuts and perms. So annoying when your hair won’t curl like Farrah Fawcett-Majors’ does. She makes it look easy.
I’m 13. I’m in my first year of high school and a new writer has just come into my life. His name is Stephen King.
I can’t remember exactly how ‘Salem’s Lot ended up in my hands. But I do remember it was the first Stephen King novel I ever read.
“Almost everyone thought the man and the boy were father and son.” Stephen King, Salem’s Lot (first sentence).
I’d always been a reader, so it’s not as if I hadn’t read plenty of books before this one. It wasn’t even my first horror novel. But this book…man…just…out of sight, man!
“Far out,” I thought, in the 70s equivalent of OMG. “Writers can actually do this?”
‘Salem’s Lot was the first novel that made me think about the writing and the writer behind the words. This dude, that I’d never met, was talking to me. Just me. He was telling me this really cool story, in normal words, about ordinary people being forced to do extraordinary things in a town that felt like the town next door.
I didn’t know writing could be like this. Like a chat between friends.
SK used words that I understood. The good guys weren’t ‘beautiful people’. They had flaws and cared about more than just themselves. The bad guys scared me because they seemed so real. They could be living in the spooky house just around the corner from me.
Jerusalem’s Lot could have been any small town anywhere.
I lived in Australia but the town SK was telling me about had that vibe that small towns everywhere have. Maybe it was because we watched a lot of American television shows in the 70s, much as we do now, that it felt so familiar.
I wanted friends like Ben, Matt, Susan, Mark, Jimmy. Friends with normal names who looked after each other and were willing to die for each other. And Father Callahan. A priest who questioned his faith? Since when did priests question their beliefs? This was a new concept to me: people who were defined by something but who questioned that very same thing.
I loved the fact that Ben was a writer and that Mark was a kid. They weren’t even related but they became family. Writers and kids went on to become common characters in many later SK novels.
“In the small clearing overlooking the power lines, the fire in the brush began to burn more strongly, urged by the autumn wind that blew from the west.” Stephen King, Salem’s Lot (last sentence).
I remember feeling quite down when I finished the book. It felt like I’d lost a personal connection to SK. He’d finished his story and moved on. I’d gone back to my normal boring life. The only consolation was that he’d gone home to think up a new story for me.
I knew he’d be back.
‘Salem’s Lot was the cause of my lifelong addiction to SK books.
Before I’d even finished ‘Salem’s Lot, I’d bought Carrie and The Shining, the only other SK novels available to me at the time. From then on it seemed like my life could be measured as periods between reading a new SK and waiting for the next one. While I waited, I reread and reread the ones I had.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve read ‘Salem’s Lot, The Stand, The Dead Zone, and Firestarter. They’re all yellowed with age and worn, held together with sticky tape and hope. Occasionally pages fall out, but they’ve followed me from house to house, even weathered a tornado with me. They’re still some of my favourite books.
Years later, and many SK books down the track, I was reading Lawrence Block’s Telling Lies for Fun & Profit and he had some advice for aspiring writers that said something along the lines of: find a story where you think ‘I could have written that’.
I didn’t realise it at the time but, on reflection, ‘Salem’s Lot was the book that made me think I could do this. I could write because it’s just like sitting down and shooting the breeze with a friend.
This is what’s drawn me to SK’s novels. The feeling that I could have written that.
Stephen King made it look so easy he made me want to be a writer. And here I am, writing.
And it all started with one purple book about vampires: ‘Salem’s Lot.
