Review: ‘Salem’s Lot

KING, Stephen, ‘Salem’s Lot, New English Library/Hodder and Stoughton Ltd., London, 1976.

Reprint: octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine titles; 439 pp. Mild wear; some spotting to the text block edges and top edge dusted; mild spotting to the preliminaries. Dustwrapper lightly rubbed and edgeworn. Very Good.

Do I think Stephen King is a good writer or a bad one? I’m not sure. It seems to me that he has claimed the horror genre as blue-collar territory, an anti-intellectual property, and I’m not happy with that. I don’t like to pigeon-hole writing sight-unseen: it’s either entertaining or it’s not. Some fairly ordinary writing survives because people are amused and distracted by it; some very worthy writing falls by the wayside because, while its literary qualities are undoubted, it’s just boring. There are many people out there who have read War and Peace because they felt they “ought to”, who might well have had a better time with The da Vinci Code. There are people who enjoyed reading Fifty Shades of Grey; there are people who are stup-, er, “non-discerning”: they don’t necessarily occupy the same intersecting sweet spot in a Venn diagram, but it’s certainly a way of reading the terrain.

In English-speaking countries, novels get separated into genre fiction and literary fiction and heaven help you if your work falls into the former category. King champions this underdog relegation and yet his output seems increasingly to be trying to squirm his way out of the box (Spookily, his new book - Sleeping Beauties - written with his son Owen, is the same book that his other son, Joe Hill, has just published, The Fireman – am I wrong to think that the premises of both these novels are eerily similar?). My personal theory is that King’s work survives because people feel that it’s entertaining and, as long as people continue to be entertained, it will hang around.

Stephen King’s writing moves through two fairly distinct phases – the early horror writing and the vague, go-nowhere meanderings of his dark-fantasy influenced later oeuvre. Enjoyment of his body of work seems to depend on when you first picked up one of his books: those who enjoyed Carrie probably don’t quite ‘get’ "The Langoliers", and those who like Pet Sematary probably don’t think much of Thinner. To my mind, there are diminishing returns on investment with King as his career has progressed: his later works are not as good as his early ones.

It’s not as if King’s works are homogeneous. There’s variety – which is a good thing – and he accommodates readers who are into dark fantasy (The Dark Tower) as well as those who prefer short stories (Night Shift). In fact, with efforts like 11-22-63 he seems to be moving further away from straight horror writing and into something more like science fiction. It seems as if, whilst championing the genre fiction camp, King is trying to work away from the notion of being a single-genre writer.

As a personal preference, I stick to Stephen King’s straight horror material, the stuff that allowed him to first hit the big-time in terms of sales, like this vehicle, ‘Salem’s Lot. This book came out in 1975 – the year in which it is set – and was King’s second successful novel after Carrie. I like to think that it sprang from King accepting some kind of dare: “no-one wants to read about vampires – that stuff’s dumber than dirt”. Challenge accepted! Yes, if you didn’t already know it, this is a vampire story – take that, Bella and Edward!

As with much of King’s material, the setting is a bucolic New England struggle-town, with colourful characters and a homey, Yankee neighbourliness. The town of Jerusalem’s Lot (‘Salem’s Lot for short) is a sleepy little place on the way from Somewhere to Somewhere Else, a sleepy flyspeck on a well-worn road map of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it forgetability. Our protagonist, Ben Mears, a moderately successful novelist, comes home to the ‘Lot to face his childhood fears concerning an abandoned house which overlooks the township. As a child, on a dare, he entered the house and saw the hanging corpse of the previous tenant, and the nasty image has stayed with him into adulthood. Taking up residence among the quirky types in a local guesthouse, he embarks upon a new novel and an affair with a wholesome local girl. Unfortunately, his period of occupancy coincides with the arrival of a vampire, summoned to the old Marston mansion by the devil-worshipping activities of its past owners.

Anyone versed in vampiric lore will see what happens next coming, but that’s exactly how this book works. The leeches invade under cover of night and blend in; they then start to pick off the town’s residents one by one, in a slaking of bloodlust that snowballs rapidly out of control. The impact of this novel comes not from the blood-letting monsters, but from the townsfolk and their reaction to the creatures. The juxtaposition of modern individuals with the vampire legend of ancient times is what makes the work tick along.

That’s not to say that it all falls neatly into place: there are some clunky moments. Our small band of heroes, assembled about our hero Ben, mirrors a bit too neatly the heroes of Stoker’s work, gathered about the driven Abraham van Helsing. It’s a bit too pat; too neat a call back to the classic vampire novel. Also, the willingness, or not, of the characters to accept the presence of vampires in their community is not totally convincing. There’s a lot of talk along the lines of “this can’t be so – not in a modern society such as ours - there must be some rational explanation”, but it’s a bit limp and liable to be swept aside once the bloodsuckers emerge. Once you’ve seen a vampire, you can’t really pretend you didn’t, can you? These characters spend a lot of time trying to do just that.

As well, there’s a bit of Hollywood morality going on with this book and it’s not good. Ben starts going out with Susan Norton (against her mother’s wishes) and – inevitably – they have sex. It’s noteworthy that Susan insists that it takes place, against Ben’s notion that maybe they should wait in deference to her mother, and that it happens in a covert and sneaky kind of way. Later, after Ben tells her that vampires have infested the town, the first thing she does is to go up to the mansion to confront the villains and get to the bottom of things. Bam! Instant vampire on a one-way trip to a stake-out. There’s no way to avoid reading this trajectory as that of the “bad girl” in a slasher flick who goes down on her boyfriend in the first scene. Yes, it hearkens back to Dracula again, and the notion of the Fallen Woman and her cabal of Rescuers a la Mina Harker; but, as with the van Helsing mimicry mentioned above, it’s just too neat.

The strength of this novel is when it collides the old and the new and comes up with fresh variations. There are scenes of incredible tension, such as when the removalist guys pick up the vampire’s crate and ship it to ‘Salem’s Lot from the waterside warehouse where it was stowed. The fright that these guys get in doing this is palpable. So, too, is the scene where Susan enters the Marston mansion in search of a rational explanation. There are many scenes where the tawdry lives of the townspeople shatter under the vampiric cruelty and these are moments of breath-catching scariness.

In summation, this is worth a read, especially if you’re about to go and see the latest incarnation of King’s It onscreen. The comfortable community background of King’s New England territory is a hallmark of both novels, although the premise of It suffers from King’s tendency to be obscure and abstruse rather than springing from a coherent catalyst like this (it exists on the King timeline right at the point where my eyes start to glaze over). Where it partakes too much of Stoker it suffers; but where it focuses on the things King knows how to write about, it’s pure genius.

Four Tentacled Horrors.