rachelmanija | 'Salem's Lot, by Stephen King (Unabridged Audiobook, read by Ron McLarty)

This is a 17-hour audiobook and I enjoyed every minute of it. I kept catching myself making excuses to take long drives so I could listen to more of it, or finding household chores I could do while listening. McLarty’s narration is great, with unobtrusive but well-done different voices for various characters. He also really brings out the humor. I nearly had hysterics at his rendition of the word “E-vap,” the foaming cleaner Father Callahan uses in a hungover attempt to remove liquor stains on the rug.

In the introduction (read by King), he discusses his childhood reading of Dracula, trashy novels, and pulp horror comics about vampires whose victims shriek things like “Eeeeegaaaah!” After he wrote Carrie, he mentioned to his wife Tabitha that if Dracula had survived into modern times, he wouldn’t settle in a city, but in a small town like the European ones he’d come from. Like the ones King knew in Maine…

‘Salem’s Lot was written long before the current flood of vampire novels, let alone sexy vampire novels, and draws on older tropes. Some aspects of it have appeared a lot since then, but many have not. For me it had the perfect blend of originality and familiar tropes done extremely well.

It begins with an unsettling prologue involving two unnamed survivors of Jerusalem’s Lot, a man and a boy, and a lengthy newspaper article explaining that it’s now a ghost town for unknown reasons.

It then goes back in time to the arrival of Ben Mears, a writer who lived in Jerusalem’s Lot as a boy and has returned as a widower, intending to write a book about the Marsten House, an abandoned house with a bad history where he may have seen a ghost as a boy. But the house has just been bought by a mysterious man from Europe, Mr. Barlow, who no one has met and who seems to communicate solely through his creepy agent, Mr. Straker. Ben wanders around the town and has a sweet meet-cute with Susan, a fan of his books.

King then proceeds to a long, bravura sequence in which he introduces us to a huge number of the inhabitants of the town, hour by hour in the course of a single day from midnight to midnight. By the end of it, you feel like you’ve lived in the town yourself. It also puts you about a quarter or third of the way through the book with no clear signs of vampire activity. If you were reading the book with no idea what it was about, you would know something sinister was afoot but not what.

The town is an incredibly vivid character in its own right. There’s rot beneath the surface, but goodness as well. The Marsten House is imbued with evil, but Jerusalem’s Lot is just a small town like many others, with child abusers and bullies and wife-beaters, but also dedicated teachers and doctors and random people who manage to rise to a situation requiring extraordinary courage. You get the sense that the group that ends up going after the vampires contained some special people, but not that they were the only ones. Had some of them chosen to confide in a different set of people, there were probably others in the town who would have stepped up.

I have no idea how I missed reading this before, because it’s King’s second novel and a quite famous one. However, I was almost entirely unspoiled for it, other than knowing that it’s about vampires and that one character survives as he appears in another King book I’d read. It’s a purely enjoyable read on every level, with good writing with some very beautiful passages, very atmospheric with a fantastic sense of place, a compelling story well-told, and a whole bunch of memorable set-piece scenes.

This book has a scary reputation. It deserves it. I nearly screamed when Danny Glick appears at Mark Petrie’s window. Thank God I finished it before I making a five-hour drive to Mariposa, which was the entire reason I checked it out on audio in the first place, because if I’d heard that in the dark I might have driven off a cliff.

I read Dark Tower before ’Salem’s Lot. Consequently, Mark Petrie reminded me a bit of Jake Chambers, I already knew that brave women named Susan tend to meet with heroic and tragic untimely deaths, and I was expecting Father Callahan to be a main character much earlier than he turned out to be.

The group that goes after the vampires formed later than I expected; in fact, they form too late to save the town, which is also not what I expected after the prologue. I had assumed the town was destroyed in a cataclysmic battle that takes out the vampires, but that’s not what happens at all. The ad-hoc vampire hunters (the ka-tet, so to speak) do kill Straker and destroy Barlow, but by the time they do so, the town is already overrun and most of the non-vamped townspeople, including all but two of the original group, are either fled or dead. The town so carefully created in the first part of the book has been completely destroyed, as if King had built and then stomped on an epically elaborate sandcastle.

That sense of creative/destructive glee also comes through in the elaboration on tropes and folklore about what to do with vampires. The doctor suggests that garlic works because they’re allergic to it, the teacher researches anti-vampire rituals from every culture that believes in them, and the priest puts his faith in the rituals of Catholocism. The latter gets the most play, but it’s unclear whether Catholic objects and rituals work due to inherent power (the power of Christ compels them) or whether the vampires are repelled by faith itself and any faith would do. It seems like the latter with a touch of the former - Father Callahan’s cross stops working when he puts his faith in the cross as an object rather than in God (or, more precisely, his faith falters when he can't quite believe that God is in him), but holy water literally lights up for Ben and Mark, who aren’t even Catholic.

(My favorite riff on vampires vs. faith is still the bit in Chris Claremont’s X-Men when Kitty Pryde, who is Jewish, thrusts a cross in Dracula’s face, only to have him laugh at her and point out that the power is in belief, not the object itself, and she has no faith in the cross. Then he goes in to bite her and recoils, burned by the Star of David necklace she always wears.)

Related to this, I was struck by how difficult the characters find it to believe in the supernatural at all, let alone vampires, until they have no other option. King ties this into the demise of belief in general, in God and government and tradition, in the 70s in which it was written and is set. Only Mark Petrie, who loves monster movies, finds it easy. (He’s also a child who hasn’t been exposed to the general cultural disillusionment yet.) There’s a wonderful bit where Mark drives off a vampire with an action figure of a ghoul by a tomb bearing a cross; he knows from the movies that crosses repel vampires, and uses a movie trinket to do so. Does it work by the inherent property of the cross, or by his faith in movies?

The vampires thrive on the characters’ disbelief, and are driven off by both faith in general, and the belief that they exist. But that’s played for irony and general social commentary, not to make the point that a lack of faith is inherently bad. The small-scale tragedies and moral rot predate the 70s by quite a bit, as Hubert Marsten shows. And the character who provokes the single greatest moment of moral indignation is neither a vampire nor a disillusioned product of modern times, but Parkins Gillespie, the sheriff who abandons the town and its last two defenders to their fate, justifying his cowardice and “I got mine” attitude by saying that the whole country’s going to hell in a handbasket anyway and citing movie violence as proof.

Nowadays characters in horror fiction tend to believe in the supernatural more quickly, which is often attributed in-text to their exposure to horror movies but is likely also due to the possibility that modern readers will find a long awakening of belief frustrating, dull, or old-fashioned. I wonder if a writer could do a similar riff on belief in modern times by having the characters be so over-saturated with conspiracy theories, fake news, and the refusal to admit to actual reality that they refuse to believe in the very real vampires that are about to suck their blood?

'Salem's Lot