I Read Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot’.
I grabbed this book with excitement off of the shelf of a used book store. I loved that it looked old and obliterated and creased to death. This is how I like my books: aged and weathered and underlined and deformed. Drag it through the bath. Smash it in the sand. Stamp it in the road. And in finally getting to read this novel, I’ve realized that this book is nearly fifty years old. What other kind of relic could be this dragged, this smashed, this stamped? This is a paperback copy from 1976. Who else has brought this with them in their bag, on the subway, in the bus? Left it on their floor beside their bed? Stephen King is a master at crafting stories with just this kind of history, just this kind of homesteading. Because while this is a horror book, a book which talks about vampires and fear and bloodlust… it’s really a book about a town, about home and homes, about how people stand for the places they live against the evil and strange.
The biggest proof of this is that for nearly the first half of the book, many of the details of this book are kept on the outskirts. Building to a boil, sure, simmering in the light heat. But far from the spotlight. We’re introduced to the main characters of the story and where they fit into Jerusalem’s Lot, a place all but sequestered from the rest of the surrounding area. It’s a quiet little place which serves itself, feeds itself, knows its denizens. The rumor mill is tepid, but active. Everyone knows one another, from the grown folk to their spawn to their youngest. Every family has a history and a space to fill. Everyone knows the priest. The sheriff. The man who kills the rats and runs the dump. The haunted mansion on the hill. Until Ben Mears, former local author, arrives, everything runs on the same gears that their forefathers set into place. The tedium is shaken by all that’s new. And in less than 200 pages, King does a great job setting up what it means to be The New Person in a place so set in its own perpetuity that any sort of new ingredient can forever ruin the stew.
Talking with a couple of other people who have read this book before me, they were mentioning that it was disappointing for a Stephen King book to “not have anything going on” or to be this abjectly “vague”. I disagree on some level. I think the easy route would be to start talking about the nightmare that’s about to come by introducing it early on. To know how this village was able to be overrun by an ancient evil is to know its complacence. The trust that they have for one another to operate within the sallow extremes of their daily lives is exactly why when things start to turn south, the easiest scapegoat is the new arrival. Who’s ever going to believe that this person is bent on saving the town when it’s the very person who has come in and flipped the table on itself? While I’ll agree that the story doesn’t move in a direction that had me eager to get deeper into it, having finished it, I do understand why King went so long winded in his establishing stroke.
After all, the entire town is the main character.
The way that in the chapters entitled The Lot (I-IV) he bounces around between lovers, between the police, the doctors, the hospital, the chapel, the parking lots. Everyone is given a face. Everyone is given a motive and a handful of pints of blood to spill. In the opening scenes, we learn what it means for these people to die and to kill and to invite each other in.
Once we enter Vampire Territory, the book becomes a little fun at times and a little campy at times. I like the ragtag group of heroes that comes together to vanquish ancient evil. There’s a lot at stake for each of them and in something of a buddy 80s movie (think Ghostbusters), their personalities each stand out as pillars of their small party (the kid, the stoic, the medic, the professor, the catholic) and it gives the engine of the book a bit more fuel. Things shift from a dark and ruined Rockwell painting to a more sinister modern Van Helsing tale. I love the way that King takes so much of the mythology associated with vampires and tests the waters, seeing what’s practical, what works. What it sounds like in conversation. I feel like so much of this book establishes the pacing of what would later become the way that small parties would talk about zombies in a post-The Walking Dead landscape. A lot is cast in this book in terms of what religion ‘means’, what faith represents, what it means to believe and what it means to doubt. It talks to the strength of one’s purity of hope and one’s creeping doubt.
I recommend this book, but with a reminder that this is the book that sort of began his prime, but doesn’t quite see him creating within the heart of it. There are a few passages that really smacked me (Part 30 of The Lot IV reminded me of how incredible a writer he can be) but overall, it’s just a great story that is told with a pace that resolves nicely and some cool new mythology within vampire lore. I like that you don’t truly find out many specifics about The Big Bad or the origin story of what kind of darkness that giant Marsten House represented. I also think that the pro- and epilogues have some sort of bleakness to them, like people who have experienced the truly awful and have lived to talk about it. Cool book overall, and I wish I hadn’t taken time off of reading so I could have had it done before the end of October! Definitely an easy spooky season read.
