Salem's Lot -- Stephen King

SUCH A GOOD BOOK!! Okay, so admittedly everything Stephen King writes is consummate genius. But this is the one I've read most recently so I am the most enthusiastic about it. Plus, after Twilight, I had the campiest conception of vampires ever, and now I'm terrified of them again, so all is right with the world. King once again gives a horrible monster that seems unbeatable. The vampire has infected the town with rapidity that would impress Bernie Madoff, and it seems like even with divine intervention, the main characters Stephen King gave you about two hundred pages to fall in love with are totally screwed. This is the genius of King, he writes delightfully LONG books! He draws you in to a situation where you feel fairly comfortable and familiar, it seems normal enough but with a tinge of something strange, and then the tinge grows slowly over about 200 pages, and by the time everything is revealed the world King's created is shot to hell. That is the best way to terrify your reader. Make them feel at home, give them some nice characters (though never infallible, because King is, again, totally genius), draw them in so they will never leave, and proceed to destroy everything. Even if King destroys the monster at the end of the book (SPOILER, he does in this book, as he does in IT) you aren't willing to turn off your reading light. Especially delightful in Salem's Lot, not a tremendous amount of the gorey stuff. Although I love when King is willing to go there, and he will freak you out with his gore (aka teeth falling out in the alien book he wrote), it's far more comfortable to not have it in the book at all. Great, great thriller, fast action (a constant in King's work), excellent horror, great book.