Old-Earthers and Theistic Evolutionists: Are You Prepared to Call God Incompetent or a Deceiver?

There’s lots of debate among Christians and theologians these days as to whether the Bible teaches a young or old Earth, and whether the early chapters of Genesis are literal history or symbolism/allegory. To me, the text of Genesis is clearly literal history that clearly teaches a young Earth. And it is a fact that most Christian scholars and thinkers through the centuries affirmed the Scriptural support for a young earth.

Something else, however, that people need to consider in this debate but usually don’t: What does it say about God if the opening chapters of Genesis are merely symbolic or allegorical but God nonetheless let his people carry on for thousands of years thinking that they were literal? And what does it say about God if He used long ages and evolutionary processes to create, yet let his people believe, for thousands of years, that the opposite was true?

It would mean one of two things: God is incompetent, or He’s a deceiver. If God created us using long ages and evolution, but couldn’t create us in such a way that we could understand those truths from the very beginning of our existence—straightforwardly and without symbolism—He’s not the all-powerful God the Bible says He is. And if God created us using long ages and evolution and WAS able to make us understand those truths from the beginning but simply didn’t—instead letting us go on blathering about 6 days and special creation and looking like fools—then He’s a deceiver and not very nice.

So long-agers and theistic evolutionists, etc., need to ask themselves: Do I believe that God is incompetent? Do I believe that God is a deceiver? To me, the answer is a clear and emphatic, “No, God is neither,” and the implications of that answer are also clear: God is powerful enough to not only create us, but to create us as intelligent beings capable of understanding truth in a straightforward manner, from the very beginning of our existence; and He loves us enough to not deceive us, and to not mislead us and make fools of us.

Obama knows BS

Very classy, Mr. President, calling Mitt Romney a BSer. Especially since you’re pretty adept at BSing your way through life.

Lots of liberals don’t want to believe this, but Mr. Obama has spent pretty much his entire existence making it up as he goes.

• He’s never lived in a black neighborhood, never lived among the poor people he was supposedly helping, never got his hands dirty with them, never became a true part of their community … but he says he was a community organizer.
• By his own admission in his memoir, and as corroborated by people who knew him at the time, he drifted through prep school and a largely unknown college in a druggie haze, turning out unspectacular academic performances … but somehow got into Columbia and Harvard.
• He never wrote an article for the Harvard Law Review … but somehow became its editor.
• He likes to say he was a constitutional law professor, but the truth is that he was a lecturer … which is several steps below professor.
• During his time as a lecturer, he “did the minimal amount of work to get through. No one remembers him. He was not a participant in luncheons or workshops. He was here and gone,” according to former University of Chicago Law School colleague Richard Epstein.
• He spent nearly two decades under the pastorship of racist venom-spewer Jeremiah Wright … yet insists he never once heard Wright say anything inflammatory.
• Despite a decided lack of writing experience, he received a $125,000 advance to write a book about race relations … which he didn’t write, but spent all the money anyway (on a vacation to Bali for him and his wife) … so he begged for another chance, and he received another advance—this one for $40,000—to write what became not a book on race relations, but a memoir called Dreams From My Father … the style of which was strikingly similar to that of his terrorist friend William Ayers, spurring many (legitimate) accusations of plagiarism.
• Mr. Obama’s 2008 campaign made a big point of Sarah Palin’s “lack of experience” (despite her experience as a mayor and a governor) … but after a mere 143 days as a U.S. Senator (and zero executive experience, business or political), he decided he was fit to be president.

Yeah, he sounds reeeeeaaal fit to be president. But he does deserve accolades for pulling off one of the biggest con jobs in the history of the world.

Of course, it’s pretty easy to con even large numbers of people when many of those people don’t bother checking out your background. All of this information was public in 2008, and remains so. Wake up, America.

The Obama You Didn’t Know … Until Now

EDITOR’S NOTE: I don’t hate liberals; let’s just get that straight right up front. I often disagree with them, and I dislike quite a few of them, but hate is something I feel towards no human being. And though I’m a registered Republican, I’m not a blind-faith GOP apologist; I’m no fan of Romney, I was underwhelmed with John McCain, and even though I like W, he did some things I opposed, such as the bailouts.

So my purpose in writing this is not to be a party hack showering hate on President Obama (or, by extension, other liberals); my purpose is to explain why I, as a conservative American citizen, dislike and disagree with Mr. Obama and his politics. I’m not trying to be a conspiracy theorist; as much as I might like to imagine that a sinister Democratic cabal groomed Mr. Obama from birth to be a not-so-stealth communist Soviet spy masquerading as a caring individual, I don’t believe that to be true. I do, however, believe that Mr. Obama’s worldview and politics have no place in our society, least of all in the White House, and I intend to show why.

(All quoted passages below, unless otherwise noted, are from a fantastic Washington Examiner expose, “The Obama You Don’t Know,” published at http://washingtonexaminer.com/obama.)

In response to recent reports featuring 10-year-old audio of Mr. Obama saying he favors redistribution, one Obama supporter stated that what Mr. Obama did or said 10 years ago doesn’t matter. This is reflective of what I see as a general—and disturbing—facet of his fan base: many of them don’t know or—worse—don’t care about his past, whether it’s his communist, West-hating upbringing; his training in the Saul Alinsky/Chicago-thug-intimidation style of politics; his unsavory political connections; or his mysterious (and undeservingly fast) trek to the top. Before going through these one by one, I’ll start by saying that I find it ridiculous and irresponsible that people wouldn’t care about a person’s track record.

I’m a Christian, so I believe in forgiveness, in giving people second, third, and even twentieth chances, but I also believe in discernment, and in wisdom, so if a person has what I consider a bad track record and has shown no signs of changing his tune, I’m not going to hand him the reigns of power. That would just be irresponsible. Unfortunately, though, this is what the majority did with Mr. Obama in 2008, and is prepared to do again. The first time around, it seemed to me, the voting public displayed a remarkable amount of willful ignorance concerning his past; a fair amount of that ignorance is evident this time as well, but from what I see, this trip also features a heaping helping of “I know what this guy’s about, and I’m fine with it.”

Really? You’re fine with a president who has never condemned the hatred for America and the West that his birth parents espoused? Not only has Mr. Obama not condemned this enmity, he’s embraced it, as evidenced in his book Dreams From My Father. Yes, America has committed sins, and I don’t defend those, but America is not the Great Satan, a loathsome creature devoid of redeeming qualities that has never done anything good for the world and its people. Yet this was how Mr. Obama’s father viewed America, and his dream was to see the U.S. become just another country. President Obama took up the mantle of this dream, carrying on his father’s legacy … and the United States is well on its way to becoming another Greece—that is, just another country.

When President Obama was a boy, his father chose for him a mentor. Mentoring, formal or informal, can be a great thing, as responsible adults can make a big, positive impact on impressionable children, adolescents, and teens, teaching them responsibility, accountability, and compassion, and to be kind and generous to others. Or, a mentor could be like Frank Marshall Davis, the Western-capitalist-hating member of the Communist Party USA who, at Barack Obama Sr.’s request, served as mentor to young Barack Obama Jr. Yes, our president, from his childhood, was taught that capitalism is a bad thing (except, as I’ll soon show you, when it benefits yourself and your buddies), that the right thing to do is take more than a fair share from people who’ve worked hard for what they have, and give more than a fair share to people who’ve hardly worked.

Listen, there’s nothing wrong with safety nets, and one of the biggest political lies today is that conservatives don’t care about people and don’t want to help the less fortunate. The opposite is true, evidenced by the fact that conservatives give far more to charity than liberals do. We conservatives are 100% in support of helping those who are truly in need—giving them financial and other types of assistance to help them through the tough times and get back on their feet (or, in those cases when people are rendered permanently disabled, providing them with a reasonable, respectable means of living for the rest of their lives).

Communism/socialism/redistribution, however, is a whole other kettle of fish: taking more from those who earn more, simply because they earn more, and constructing a system that encourages people to forsake temporary help and an eventual return to self-sufficiency in exchange for permanent reliance on the government (that is, reliance on those of us who are putting in honest work and paying taxes). It’s bad enough that we have a “progressive” tax system, which taxes wealthier folks at a higher percentage; even if everyone paid taxes at the same rate—say, 10%—the rich would already be paying a lot more (because 10% of a millionaire’s million is a lot more than 10% of my $40k), but so-called “progressives” are unhappy even with the wealthiest Americans paying taxes at the rate of “only” 35%. I’m nowhere close to being wealthy, but I would like to be, and if I’m ever that fortunate, I won’t want a tax bill that’s that steep. In fact, I’d be hunting down every legal tax shelter I could find.

Our president, however, is cool with extracting several extra pounds of flesh from our most financially successful citizens, simply because they’re successful. Thus, the American dream is no longer to get where you want through hard work, but to get there (or as close to there as possible) while doing as little as possible, letting others do most of the work for you.

In fact, if you go by that radio interview from about 10 years ago (and I see no reason not to), Mr. Obama believes that the Founding Fathers were a failure for not addressing redistribution, and that the black civil-rights movement was a “tragedy” for not addressing redistribution. From the transcript:

 “You know, if you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples, so that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order, and as long as I could pay for it I would be okay. But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society.

And, to that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted. And the Warren Court interpreted it the same way; that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. It says what the states can’t do to you. It says what the federal government can’t do to you. But it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasn’t shifted.

And, one of the, I think, the tragedies of the civil-rights movement was, because the civil-rights movement became so court-focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change. And in some ways we still suffer from that.”

So our president believes that Martin Luther King Jr. and his compatriots were wrong for focusing on, you know, actual rights, like voting and desegregation, instead of dystopian wishes like redistribution; and he believes that the Founding Fathers were wrong for focusing on freedom—freedom from governmental tyranny, which is what Mr. Obama is busy trying to revive with his socialist, big-government policies.

Are you okay with having a president who has this type of mentality? Sorry, Mr. President (not really), but the revolutionaries of Washington’s time and the revolutionaries of King’s time didn’t give up their fortunes, their reputations, and their very lives so that some people would have the “privilege” of being forced to give up an unreasonable amount of their hard-earned wealth for the sake of the leeches riding on their backs.

But if you’re okay with Mr. Obama’s economic ideas, I presume you’re also okay with some of his closest advisors being holdovers from the corrupt administration of former Chicago mayor William Daley, such as Valerie Jarrett and Martin Nesbitt. You probably also have no questions or qualms about Mr. Obama’s meteoric rise to the top despite having done almost nothing to merit such progress. And I’m not being hyperbolic. It’s easy to be impressed by a superficial look at his resume, but his list of actual accomplishments is thin.

Remember when you were about to enter the “real world” for the first time, and you had to become acquainted with resumes, but you didn’t really have much to put on the resume (because what kid does?), so you started reaching and stretching for things? You know, like how you included in your resume “management experience” because you ran a lemonade stand outside your parents’ home when you were 15? I also think of people who say they’re part of, like, 9 national organizations but all they do is receive the quarterly newsletter and make no contributions, financially or otherwise.

That’s Mr. Obama. He did this and he did that—only he didn’t actually do anything. He was a community organizer … but he never lived among the people he was supposedly helping, never got his hands dirty with them, never became a true part of their community.

Tellingly, Obama has never lived in a black neighborhood. Maraniss reported in his book that when leftist activist Jerry Kellman interviewed Obama for a community organizing job in Chicago, he asked Obama how he felt about living and working in the black community for the first time in his life.

Obama accepted the job but chose not to live among those he would be organizing. Instead, he commuted 90 minutes each way daily from his apartment in Chicago’s famous Hyde Park to the Altgeld Gardens housing project where he worked.

It was an early instance of Obama presenting himself one way while acting in quite a different way.

But he’s a community organizer.

He was also editor of the Harvard Law Review … even though he never wrote an article for the publication before becoming its editor. Let me tell you—speaking here as someone who’s spent most of his working life in the media industry—I don’t know how that’s possible outside of some patronage shenanigans. I’ve had good editors, and I’ve had editors who should never have been given that opportunity—but at least the bad editors, like the good ones, worked their way up through the ranks, usually starting as lowly beat writers, then getting better assignments, then taking on some lower-rung editorship (features, maybe, or copy editor), before finally, after many years, becoming executive editor.

Not Obama, who went from noncontributor to editor in one fell swoop. Maybe the folks in charge of the Review just knew, somehow, that he’d be a great editor. Kinda like how the Nobel folks just knew that Obama would bring peace to the whole world (he’s still working on that one).

Of course, how Obama became editor of the Review isn’t the only mystery surrounding his Harvard days. There’s also the small matter of how he did in class. Because, you know, he’s never released his full college transcripts. What’s he hiding? If he got good grades, he should be proud to show them off. I can only presume, therefore, that there’s something there he doesn’t want us to know about, such as bad grades. But how could he earn a degree with bad grades? I’m only speculating here, but perhaps it’s something worse. Something like, oh, incompletes. Either scenario would fit his pattern of unearned accomplishments—Poof! You’re an editor. Poof! You’re a Nobel laureate. … Poof! You have a law degree, the validity of which we can’t verify!

Interesting, too, what Mr. Obama says about his law background. He likes to say he was a constitutional law professor, but the truth is that he was a lecturer, which is several steps below professor. And though he began his time at the University of Chicago Law School as a popular lecturer, the honeymoon ended quickly:

In 1999, only 23 percent of the students said they would repeat Obama’s racism class. He was the third-lowest-ranked lecturer at the law school that year. And in 2003, only a third of the student evaluators recommended his classes.

His classes were small. A spring 1994 class attracted 14 out of a student body of 600; a spring 1996 class drew 13. In 1997, he had the largest class of his tenure with 49 students. But by then, his student rating had fallen to 7.75. Twenty-two of 40 faculty members ranked higher than Obama.

Not only were his classes nothing to write home about, but his work ethic left a lot to be desired:

Some former faculty colleagues today describe Obama as disengaged, doing only what was minimally required and almost never participating in faculty activities.

And, unlike others on the Chicago Law School faculty who published numerous articles in legal journals, Obama’s byline did not appear in a single legal journal while he taught there.

By comparison, more prominent legal scholars on the Chicago faculty wrote frequently. Federal Judge Richard Posner published 132 legal articles from 1993 to 2004, and federal Judge Frank Easterbrook published 32 legal articles from 1992 to 2004.

Obama, disengaged? You mean, like, aloof? No! I never would’ve guessed! And did you notice that part about “doing only what was minimally required”? Sound familiar?

Obama was elevated to senior lecturer status in 1996, no doubt due entirely to the fact that he was elected that year to the Illinois legislature. As the Examiner reports, senior lecturers were expected to participate in university activities, but—surprise, surprise—Obama didn’t. Said Chicago Law School senior lecturer Richard Epstein:

Obama “did the minimal amount of work to get through. No one remembers him. He was not a participant in luncheons or workshops. He was here and gone.”

Here and gone. Hmm. Sounds like yet another instance of doing just enough to pad his resume without actually accomplishing anything.

But wait, there’s more:

The pattern of minimal performance at the Chicago campus was not an exception to the rule for Obama. In the state Senate during the same years he was lecturing, Obama voted “present” nearly 130 times, the most of any legislator in the chamber.

When then-Sen. Hillary Clinton made Obama’s state Senate voting record an issue in their Democratic presidential primary contest in 2007, The New York Times said it found at least 36 instances when Obama was the lone “present” vote or was one of six or fewer lawmakers casting that vote.

And during his lone term as a U.S. senator, according to GovTrack.us: “From Jan 2005 to Oct 2008, Obama missed 314 of 1300 recorded or roll call votes, which is 24.0%. This is worse than the median of 2.4%.

Much worse. Ten times worse, to be exact. I’m uncomfortable with a leader who is barely even present, much less disengaged. How about you?

He also likes to say (along with his wife) that he came from a poor background. Well, his family was poor for the first few years of his life … until his mom married a prominent member of Indonesia’s largest national oil company. From that point on it was all gravy for young Barry: a home in the most exclusive neighborhood in Jakarta, Indonesia; the finest private prep school Hawaii had to offer; the swankiest social circles; a Chicago pad so sweet that he refused to live in the community he was “organizing”; Harvard Law. And you think conservatives are the ones who are out of touch with the common man?

With all these strikes against him—the socialist mindset, the unearned accomplishments, the lies—we still haven’t reached what’s perhaps the most despicable aspect of Mr. Obama: he’s heartless, and he tries to convince you otherwise.

To wit: Mr. Obama has spoken much about being a friend to the poor, but (per the Examiner) Mr. Obama, during his time as part of the Chicago political machine, helped engineer a scheme in which numerous poor apartment residents were first subjected to a month without heat in the Chicago winter, then booted out so Obama’s buddies could score rich contracts in putting up a new building. And were the former residents even offered spots in the new building? No. Not even. Mr. Obama and his pals have no idea what happened to those folks they threw out onto the cold Chicago streets, nor do they care.

This is the sad tale of Barack Hussein Obama, the man who would be king of the world but barely has the resume to be court jester.

Shocker: Obama Doesn’t Like People

I’m sure this won’t come as a surprise to any of his opponents, but hopefully it helps a few independents wake up before the election (via The Weekly Standard):

Neera Tanden, a former aide to both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, had this to say about the relationship of the two presidents:

Clinton, being Clinton, had plenty of advice in mind and was desperate to impart it. But for the first two years of Obama’s term, the phone calls Clinton kept expecting rarely came. “People say the reason Obama wouldn’t call Clinton is because he doesn’t like him,” observes Tanden. “The truth is, Obama doesn’t call anyone, and he’s not close to almost anyone. It’s stunning that he’s in politics, because he really doesn’t like people. My analogy is that it’s like becoming Bill Gates without liking computers.”

Good grief. I know of lizards that are more likeable than this guy.

Dems Drop ‘God’ From Platform

This isn’t shocking, or surprising, but is nonetheless noteworthy (per CBN’s David Brody):

Guess what? God’s name has been removed from the Democratic National Committee platform.

This is the paragraph that was in the 2008 platform:

“We need a government that stands up for the hopes, values, and interests of working people, and gives everyone willing to work hard the chance to make the most of their God-given potential.”

Now the words “God-given” have been removed. The paragraph has been restructured to say this:

“We gather to reclaim the basic bargain that built the largest middle class and the most prosperous nation on Earth – the simple principle that in America, hard work should pay off, responsibility should be rewarded, and each one of us should be able to go as far as our talent and drive take us.”

The best part of the article:

The Brody File has calls into DNC to explain why God’s name has been dropped from the platform. Some critics will suggest that when you have planks in your platform that support abortion rights and gay marriage then it’s no wonder that God’s name would be dropped as well.

Want to know more? Read the entire article.

CMI Rebuts Nye

Creation Ministries International has produced a video in response to Bill Nye’s somewhat-incoherent, anti-creationist blubbering. Something that struck me about Nye’s video is how unprepared he seems, as though he just plunked himself down in front of a camera on the spur of the moment without any prior thought as to what he was going to say. Then again, I’d think that someone who calls himself “The Science Guy” and has lots of TV experience should be able to rattle off an informed little speech anytime, but I guess not—perhaps because his position is indefensible?

Bill Nye ‘The Fake-Science Guy’

Former children’s show host Bill Nye, known popularly as “The Science Guy,” has apparently had it up to his bowtie with us creationist types, posting a video clip on Big Think via YouTube pleading with us dumb hicks to leave the kids out of it. Too bad for him, though, that all of his major points are off the mark.

According to this Yahoo! News/ABC News story, Nye praises the United States for its technological innovation, and says that instead of evolution deniers, “We need engineers that can build stuff, solve problems.” Well, here’s the thing: Engineering, and technological innovation, and “building stuff,” have nothing, zero, nada, to do with evolution. These things have entirely to do with observational science, which, unlike evolutionary theory, involves experimentation that gives clear, repeatable results right before your very eyes.

Some call this “hard” science: you design and build a machine, or a bridge, or a road, and you test it, and it either works or it doesn’t—if it does, great; if not, you go back and try to figure out what went wrong. There’s theorizing involved, but no philosophizing—if something works, it works, if it doesn’t, it doesn’t, and the results have nothing to do with what you believe about people and the universe and our origins. “Soft” science, on the other hand, is not so conclusive, instead involving a lot of guesswork and conjecture. This is also called historical science, because it deals with things that happened in the past, which means we can’t observe them today, only speculate based on any physical evidence left behind. This type of science, which includes the study of origins, is very much dependent on the worldview you bring to the table—and yes, each of us has a worldview, whether creationist or evolutionist, theistic or atheistic, and it can be difficult to look at things outside the lens of your worldview, but we must all try; we must look at the evidence, not at philosophies, and then determine what theory/worldview/outcome the evidence best fits and points to (more on this below).

Mr. Nye further manifests his confusion over the two types of science when he says, “Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science, in all of biology. It’s like, it’s very much analogous to, trying to do geology without believing in tectonic plates.” Again, here’s the thing: We can see tectonic plates, and we can observe them moving, whereas evolution, even if true, would be unobservable during the relatively short lifespan of humankind—a fact I’ve always found convenient for evolutionists: “Trust us! It does happen!” Sounds like faith, not science.

Some other thoughts:

• If evolution is so fundamental to all of life science, then why was there so much true scientific progress before Darwin popularized evolution? And how could podunk creationists since Darwin’s time have made scientific discoveries and advances? Louis Pasteur, for example, was a creationist, and his denial of evolution didn’t stop him from being a great scientist. There are also a good deal of eminently qualified physicists, biologists, etc., today who hold to creationism.
• Nye also says that “the idea of deep time, of this billions of years, explains so much of the world around us. If you try to ignore that, your worldview just becomes crazy, just untenable, itself inconsistent.” The idea of deep time, however, is nothing more than a grown-up’s fantasy that enables the evolutionist to believe in his god: “Give it enough time, and anything can happen!” Actually, no, that’s not the case. Even given the evolutionism-supplied age of the universe of 12-15 billion years, there still would not have been enough time for all the mutations necessary to transition from single-celled organisms to humans, or anything even close to humans. And I fail to see how my belief in divine creationism is crazy, untenable, or inconsistent—it doesn’t cause me to have trouble functioning in my day-to-day life, and I see nothing in the natural world that conclusively demonstrates the evolutionary worldview; in fact, what I observe (not what I postulate) confirms the Biblical account: well-ordered systems (biological, molecular, solar, etc.); each animal kind fully formed and reproducing more of its kind without any major changes; a fossil record and geological strata consistent with a global, catastrophic flood. What, precisely, is crazy, untenable, or inconsistent about any of that? Such characterizations require evidence … but I guess I shouldn’t expect an evolutionist to deal in empirical proof.
• Said Nye: “You know, in another couple of centuries that worldview (creationism), I’m sure, will be, it just won’t exist. There’s no evidence for it.” Sure, and atheists thought God would be dead and gone by now. As for evidence, check out Creation.com and Answersingenesis.org, which contain thousands of articles from highly trained and qualified scientists that lend plenty of fuel to the creationism fire.

Best. Obama. Pic. Ever.

Yes. That’s more like it.

The man we know as Barack Hussein Obama is really nothing more than a teleprompter screen written over by a lifelong series of radical leftist handlers who made him the one they wanted him to be. He really isn’t his own person.

Book Review: ‘Jubal Sackett’ a Solid, if Unspectacular, Tale ♦ ♦ ♦ ◊ ◊

The fourth volume in Louis L’Amour’s Sackett series.

My march through Sackett history continues with the fourth volume in the series, this one featuring the title character, who’s one of the sons of Sackett patriarch Barnabas, and the first to head into the wild, unexplored American West.

This book will likely be of interest to anyone curious about the Sackett saga, and though I didn’t find it to be ultra exciting, it’s nonetheless solid—sort of like the Sacketts themselves. This book is longer than most of L’Amour’s, making it of average novel length, and doesn’t contain much, if any, of the excessive description characteristic of many bestselling novelists. L’Amour simply tells you a story—one containing a healthy amount of adventure—and lets the reader’s imagination fill in a lot of the details. At this point in the series, the stories still aren’t what I would call “westerns”—they’re more like wilderness adventures—but the series is heading in that direction.

Rating: ♦ ♦ ♦ ◊ ◊

Book Review: Finding Fear in ‘Salem’s Lot ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

‘Salem’s Lot: another small Maine town with a big secret, courtesy of Stephen King. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is the ninth Stephen King book I’ve read (after The Shining, Cujo, On Writing, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, Blaze, Rose Madder, Under the Dome, and The Eyes of the Dragon), and I rank it as the best piece of fiction in that group (On Writing is nonfiction, and is the best book about writing I’ve ever read).

To be fair, it’s been probably 15 years since I read Cujo and The Shining, and that was before I realized how good a writer King is, before I became a big fan of his work, so I should probably go back and read those two again. Nonetheless, ‘Salem’s Lot is a wonderfully suspenseful piece of writing, a novel about vampires before such a thing was in vogue—written 40 years ago, but way better than Twilight.

I won’t say much about the plot, since you can easily find synopses elsewhere, except to say that King expounds on some themes common to his work—small Maine towns hiding big secrets (but not for long)—while tackling a modern rendition of a literary classic (Dracula). He does so with great success, beginning the book with a scene from near the end of the story to jack up the intrigue level, then going back and artfully setting the scene—characters, places, and a healthy number of well-placed hints at the bad stuff that’s going down (or about to go down).

The pacing in this book is great—it slows a bit after the beginning vignette, but not too much, then King ramps up the action at the right pace, letting out just enough rope at each turn to keep you satisfied while pulling you deeper into the story.

There’s a bit of gore, but it’s necessary, and not overdone. And be warned: King has no problem killing off key characters. Speaking of characters, King’s development of them is spot-on; being a small-town native myself, I’m familiar with rural life, and King’s portraits of small-town people and places are right on the money, not to mention that the personalities he creates here are engaging.

A friend of mine kept looking over his shoulder as he read this book–at night, with all the lights out–and though I didn’t experience that same level of fright, the story held me in its suspenseful grip throughout. If you like a good scare, take a trip to that quaint little Maine town of ‘Salem’s Lot.

Rating: ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦