Three Fine Horror Writers - King, Simmons and Holland
Salem's Lot (1975) The Stand (1990 Revision of 1978 Edition) Night Shift (2008 collection of stories from the 1970s) Stephen King Song of Kali (1985) Carrion Comfort (1989) Dan Simmons Supping with Panthers (1996) Deliver Us From Evil (1997) Tom Holland Salem's Lot was Stephen King's second novel. It has the feel of a man who wants to make his mark with a best seller. What he does is to take Bram Stoker's 'Dracula', rethink it from top to bottom and position it within contemporary (1975) American culture. In the edition I have (2006) this is made clear in a useful short Afterword where King (still in his twenties when he wrote the book) also refers back to his childhood reading of EC comics. The book is replete with references to the horror canon from Poe-like cellars to graveyard whippoorwills. He seems to have two alter agos in the book which recur throughout his career in a sort of dialectic: Ben Mears, the writer, and Mark Petrie, a young