Second paragraph of third chapter (a long ‘un):

4:00 AM
The Griffen boys – Hal, eighteen, and Jack, fourteen – and the two hired hands had begun the milking. The barn was a marvel of cleanliness, whitewashed and gleaming. Down the center, between the spotless runways which fronted the stalls on both sides, a cement drinking trough ran. Hal turned on the water at the far end by flicking a switch and opening a valve. The electric pump that pulled water up from one of the two artesian wells that served the place hummed into smooth operation. He was a sullen boy, not bright, and especially irked on this day. He and his father had had it out the night before. Hal wanted to quit school. He hated school. He hated its boredom, its insistence that you sit still for great fifty-minute chunks of time, and he hated all his subjects with the exceptions of Woodshop and Graphic Arts. English was maddening, history was stupid, business math was incomprehensible. And none of it mattered, that was the hell of it. Cows didn’t care if you said ain’t or mixed your tenses, they didn’t care who was the Commander in Chief of the goddamn Army of the Potomac during the goddamn Civil War, and as for math, his own for chrissakes father couldn’t add two-fifths and one half if it meant the firing squad. That’s why he had an accountant. And look at that guy! College-educated and still working for a dummy like his old man. His father had told him many times that book learning wasn’t the secret of running a successful business (and dairy farming was a business like any other); knowing people was the secret of that. His father was a great one to sling all that bullshit about the wonders of education, him and his sixth-grade education. He never read anything but Reader’s Digest and the farm was making $16,000 a year. Know people. Be able to shake their hands and ask after their wives by name. Well, Hal knew people. There were two kinds: those you could push around and those you couldn’t. The former outnumbered the latter ten to one.

This is the top book published in 1975 as rated by Goodreads users and owned by LibraryThing users – the second place goes to Tuck Everlasting, by Natalie Babbitt, of which I confess I know nothing.

This was King’s second book, after Carrie, and like Carrie it is tremendous. It leans on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, not so heavily as to be ripping it off, but enough that you can see the footprints. It also lays the ground for many future vampire stories, and in particular it sets up a lot of the lore for Buffy, which can only be a good thing.

Of course, what makes it a great novel is the combination of 1) the detailed mapping of the people of a small Maine town, with the arrivals of the struggling writer who is the main viewpoint character and of the sinister strangers who, spoiler, turn out to be vampires, and; and 2) the delicious ramping up of tension and then release, as we know that something horrible is going to happen and then it does. At the other end of New England, H.P. Lovecraft at his best was a master of this sort of thing, and King clearly drank from the same wells.

It has its problems; there is only one significant female character, and I didn’t like the way her storyline ended; and the means and motivation of the vampires are not quite as internally consistent as I would have liked. But I really enjoyed the book as a whole, and sometimes I had to just pause for a moment and admire the writing.

The telephone wires make an odd humming on clear, cool days, almost as if vibrating with the gossip that is transmitted through them, and it is a sound like no other – the lonely sound of voices flying over space. The telephone poles are gray and splintery, and the freezes and thaws of winter have heaved them into leaning postures that are casual. They are not businesslike and military, like phone poles anchored in concrete. Their bases are black with tar if they are beside paved roads, and floured with dust if beside the back roads. Old weathered cleat marks show on their surfaces where linemen have climbed to fix something in 1946 or 1952 or 1969. Birds – crows, sparrows, robins, starlings – roost on the humming wires and sit in hunched silence, and perhaps they hear the foreign human sounds through their taloned feet. If so, their beady eyes give no sign. The town has a sense, not of history, but of time, and the telephone poles seem to know this. If you lay your hand against one, you can feel the vibration from the wires deep in the wood, as if souls had been imprisoned in there and were struggling to get out.

My Kindle copy came with an Afterword written twenty-five years later, in 1999, and also with two short stories, “One for the Road” which is a post-epilogue postscript for the novel, and King’s early story “Jerusalem’s Lot”, which is set in the 1850s and about witchcraft rather than vampires (and leans a bit more heavily on Lovecraft). It also includes a number of deleted or edited scenes from the book, most of which I found rather good, though I agree with King and his editors that the final text of the book was better without them. So that’s a nice bit of extra value.

You can get ’Salem’s Lot here.

This was the top unread sf book on my shelves, and the top book I acquired this year. Having recently inherited some of my father’s library, the next two on those piles respectively are East of Eden, by John Steinbeck, and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, by Italo Calvino.