It started out innocently enough. Being a newly-minted horror aficionado, I wanted to read more Stephen King. So I picked up one of his most famous (and his favorite, apparently) books, 'Salem's Lot (1975). I had always sort of loved vampires, I'd read Dracula when I was in high school, and it seemed like a good solid book to take with me on vacation. (Since I was about 13, I wasn't allowed to buy books at less than three or four hundred pages, because my mom said I read them too fast.) So I did.
I read 'Salem's Lot all through Israel, though less often than I would've thought. I loved it. I loved King's style of focused omniscience, changing with every chapter. I loved the chapters that were from The Town's perspective. But most of all, I loved that he didn't use the actual word "vampire" until at least page 300, but you knew what it was about from page 10. A master of storytelling and insinuation, that one. I had fallen in love again. So it seemed a simple enough continuation that for my July Eclectic Reader challenge I would choose Dracula The Undead by Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt, a sequel to the original. I didn't think much of it at the time.
Now, nearly two months later, I finished both novels, read the first installment of Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse books (on which HBO's blockbuster True Blood is based), re-read Dracula and have just picked up Anne Rice's Interview With A Vampire, which has been sitting on my shelf since my first intoxication with the undead.
So why the sudden spike?
I've always loved the undead, the concept of a different sort of life playing by different sort of rules, and I think I've become more in tune with that now, as a recent grad trying to navigate this world that apparently has no apparent rules that I'm familiar with. Trying to find a new job and a new purpose in a new era is really hard, so much easier to just sit and read about vampires who couldn't give a shit about any of that stuff.
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