Blog-o-ween 2024: Day 15

Lots of ‘Salem’s Lot

Part Two

Chapter 10: The Lot (III)

Sections 1-3

Sunrise: 6:58 AM

Sunset: 6:18 PM

The town’s secrets rise to the surface. One by one, we get a view of some of the people we have come to know and see them in a new and darker light.

Sandy McDougall has overslept. Her son Randy did not wake her with his cries for breakfast. Randy is no longer hungry…for solid food.

The Glicks are not dealing at all well with the losses of their sons. Marjorie finds solace in housework; Tony finds his in sleep. He awakes and finds Marjorie collapsed on the living room floor. The sunlight seems to be sapping her strength. After he pulls her into the shade, she tells Tony that in her dreams their son Danny comes to her breast again, like a hungry newborn baby.

“The town knew about darkness…”

This chapter, like the others entitled “The Lot,” gives us a wider look at the town and its people in a series of vignettes. Section One begins with a passage that I find to be one of the saddest, most heart-wrenching I’ve ever read. It is a description of the farming life, but an especially hard one. It is a look at the last good days of the simple life of earning one’s keep from the land. It is a life lived in debt — not just to the bank, the store, the car dealership, but to one’s kids and wife and the town and the land itself. It is a description of the meanness of small town life, the paucity of dreams, of hopes, of optimism. There is no way to get outside of the town. You are in it, and it is in you, and never the twain shall be separated. And it is this bitter symbiosis that allows the vampire to enter:

“Being in the town is prosaic, sensuous, alcoholic. And in the dark, the town is yours and you are the town’s and together you sleep like the dead, like the very stones in your north field. There is no life here but the slow death of days, and so when the evil falls on the town, its coming seems almost preordained, sweet and morphic. It is almost as though the town knows the evil was coming and the shape it would take.”

Then, we get a series of brief character sketches. We see the lives the townsfolk live when they pull their shades down at night. We come to learn of the sexual desires of some and of the crimes of others. We learn that the Great Fire of 1951 was deliberately set. We learn that Hubert Marsten’s wife begged for death on that last, dark day. We also learn that Hubert Marsden burnt a stack of letters from an Austrian nobleman named Breichen before hanging himself. Then, we learn what Floyd Tibbits was thinking as he stumbled around town in the sunlight before beating up Ben.

We also learn that something terrible has happened in the McDougall trailer. I know, I know…something terrible always happens in the McDougall home, but this is especially terrible. As any parent will tell you, having a baby in the house means getting up in the middle of every night and very early every day. You soon internalize this schedule. When something happens that upsets this schedule — such as the baby not crying at the top of its lungs for its morning feeding — the panic that grips your heart is terrifying. Sandy Mcdougall feels that terror when she realizes that the light in her bedroom is all wrong. It’s a nice touch on King’s part to make it the morning sunlight that brings horror to the McDougall house. It is too high on the wall.

Sandy’s discovery is heartbreaking, as is her reaction. That anger over being robbed of her youth and dreams by her son and husband is always bubbling just beneath the surface. It is ugly to see — so too is the violence that usually follows it. All of that pales in comparison to the demented scene that plays out in the kitchen. Sandy shoveling chocolate custard (yecch!) into her dead child’s mouth is darkly comic, worthy of a Tales from the Crypt story that may have been sent back to “Ghastly” Graham Ingels or Jack Davis’s desk for heavy editing. You can just see the word “plop” drawn across the image of the custard falling out of Randy’s mouth and landing on the tray.

And then we have a glimpse into the Glicks’ life. Hoo-boy.

 

Is there anything more terrible than the death of a child? I don’t want to get into a whole “top ten list” of pain and loss, but what the Glicks are going through is awful. It’s only been a week since Danny’s funeral. If Mr. Glick’s breakdown at the feet of Father Callahan was stage two and three of grief — anger and bargaining — then this section shows him fully in stage four — depression. He is sleeping around the clock. The food that well-meaning friends bring to the house remains uneaten as both he and his wife have no appetite. Of course, Marjorie Glick’s lack of appetite might be a little different than her husband’s. In fact, it looks a lot like Mike Ryerson’s, does it not?

Tony Glick finds his wife lying on the floor in a patch of sunlight. She seems unable to move or breathe. She recovers when he pulls her into the shade. Her slow-motion responses could be attributed to grief, but we know better, don’t we Blog-o-weeners? She describes what she sees when looking into a mirror:

“I look awful,” she said. “I know. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror before I went to bed last night, and I hardly seemed to be there. For a minute I…” A smile touched her lips. “I thought I could see the tub behind me. Like there was only a little of myself left and it was…oh, so pale…”

Uh-oh!

And when she tells of beautiful dreams of her son come back to her? I suppose they could be simply written off as the hopes of a heartbroken mother:

“I’ve had the most lovely dream the last three or four nights, Tony. So real. Danny comes to me in my dream. He says, ‘Mommy, Mommy, I’m so glad to be home!!’ And he says…says…” 

“What does he say?” he asked her gently. 

“He says…that he’s my baby again. My own son, at my breast again. And I give him to suck and…and then a feeling of sweetness with an undertone of bitterness, so much like it was before he was weaned but after he was beginning to get teeth and he would nip…”

To paraphrase Mission of Burma: “That’s when I reach for my stake and hammer…”

I think it’s best if we leave off here for today, kiddies. Maybe Marjorie Glick will feel better tomorrow? Sure. I'm sure she'll feel better in the morning. She just needs a good night’s rest.

And so do you! We've got a lot to talk about tomorrow. I want you to read Part 2, Chapter 10: The Lot (III), Sections 4-7. Until then, remember that even at night…in your dreams…it is best to…

Blog-o-ween 2024: Day 14

Lots of ‘Salem’s Lot

Part Two

Chapter 9: Susan (II)

Sunrise: 6:57 AM

Sunset: 6:19 PM

Susan arrives home after selling some of her artwork (you go, girl!), and she finds her mother laying in wait. Ann Norton confronts Susan with the story of the motorcycle accident that killed Ben’s wife, Miranda. Their argument heats up until a phone call from Eva Miller comes to inform Susan that Ben is in the hospital thanks to his violent run-in with Floyd Tibbits.

Susan rushes off to the hospital and finds Ben in bed under heavy sedation. He awakes long enough to tell Susan to speak to Matt Burke…and to make sure the windows are locked.

At Matt’s house, the teacher tells Susan everything that happened the night that he invited Mike Ryerson into his home. While he tells his tale, Matt hears noises on the second floor of his house. He goes upstairs armed with a five-and-dime store crucifix. In the spare bedroom, laying in the bed in which he died, is Mike Ryerson. The vampire gets up and begins to hypnotize Matt with his undead eyes, but Matt fights Mike’s advances off and forces him back with his crucifix. He revokes his invitation and Mike goes backwards out of the open window, disappearing in mid-air. Matt’s heart cannot take the excitement. He collapses, and Susan calls an ambulance.

The scene between Susan and her mom — like all the scenes that feature these two women — is hard to take. I’m sure Mrs. Norton means well, but the way she acts towards her daughter and her daughter’s feelings for Ben is painful to read. She is so smug, so proud of herself for having — and, worse, using — her little tidbit of gossip. It is, frankly, sad.

The nugget of information she flings in her daughter’s face was learned from Mabel Werts (natch):

“‘Mabel thought he looked familiar,’ Ann Norton said, ‘and so she went through the back issues of her newspapers box by box—’ 

“‘You mean the scandal sheets? The ones that specialize in astrology and pictures of car wrecks and starlets’ tits? Oh, what an informed source.’ [Susan] laughed harshly.”

The “newspapers” in question are never named, but enquiring minds already know.

The National Enquirer started publication in 1926. It was founded as The New York Evening Enquirer by William Griffin, a protégé of William Randolph Hearst. During the 1930s and 1940s, the Enquirer was strongly isolationist and pro-fascist. The paper was indicted in 1942 for sedition by a grand jury for subverting the morals of U.S. troops.

In 1952, the paper was bought by Generoso Pope, Jr., who turned the Enquirer into a sensationalist tabloid newspaper, shifting the focus of the paper to national stories of sex and scandal. Pope claimed he got the idea to focus on the more grotesque subjects from the way people will slow down to look at a car crash. Under Pope’s guidance, the Enquirer’s headlines were legendary for their bad taste.

By the time the 1970s and 1980s arrived, the Enquirer was doing boffo business. Its circulation had reached one million. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), in order to gain access to the nation’s supermarkets, the Enquirer had to tone down its front page fascination with gore. Thankfully, the Reagan years were the hey-day of the celebrity, and there was more than enough bad behavior to go around, so the transition was seamless and painless.

We’ve had a glimpse of the motorcycle accident that took Ben’s wife’s life already, so we can just imagine the headlines that the tabloids would run. We can also imagine the photographs. That Mrs. Norton would so gleefully share this with her daughter is pathetic and cruel.

Mrs. Norton likens the death of Miranda Mears and Ben’s “dodging” of jail time to “that Chappaquiddick business.” This incident would also have been tabloid newspaper fodder, and at the time of ‘Salem’s Lot’s publication, it was still a raw nerve for many in the nation.

In 1969, while driving home from a party on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts, United States Senator Ted Kennedy drove his car off a bridge. The vehicle landed upside down in Poucha Pond. He escaped the wreckage, but his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, a secretary and worker for Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign, remained trapped inside the car. Kennedy claimed he tried to save Kopechne, but was unable to. She asphyxiated underwaterr while Kennedy left the scene and failed to report the accident until the next day. He plead guilty to a charge of leaving the scene of an accident and received a two-month suspended jail sentence. The Chappaquiddick Incident became a national scandal that influenced Kennedy’s decision not to run for president in 1972 and 1976.

This chapter begins the reader’s frustrations with Susan. She is, in a word, the Scully to Ben and Matt’s Mulder. The thing is you certainly can’t blame her. Her rationality in the face of what she perceives to be Ben and Matt’s shared psychosis is to be applauded. She’s a grounded, down-to-earth woman. Hell, I’d consider her a source of sanity, if this were real life. Unfortunately, this is a horror novel, and we damn well know that what Ben and Matt are suggesting is the gods’ honest truth.

Honestly, gird yer loins, folks. It’s only gonna get worse from here on out. You’re gonna find yourself yelling more than once over the coming chapters “C’mon, Susan! Get with the program! Why won’t you believe what’s being said about vampires in the Lot?”

Damn it, Scully—don’t encourage her!

While Susan and Scully roll their eyes, let’s talk vampires in pop culture for a second. ‘Salem’s Lot is my favorite vampire novel, and my favorite example of the legend in general. Why do these vampires appeal to me while so many others do not?

King has said that when it came time to write ‘Salem’s Lot, he felt that the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s had made the sexual angle of the vampires passé. So, the vampires that come to inhabit the Lot are not sexy. Oh, they may appeal somehow to their victims on a subconscious level, but that sexuality and sensuality is an utter lie. It is a mask they wear until they can get within striking distance—

Not that Striking Distance!

The vampires we’ll meet in the Lot aren’t hip and young and sexy and cool and listening to Bauhaus and dancing at the club and wearing boat neck sweaters. They are parasites. They are simply leeches in human form.

Sadly, what they really are are addicts. They are driven by nothing but their need for blood. They feel nothing except hunger and emptiness.

(Side note: I’ve always thought of the vampire as the perfect metaphor for capitalism. What is Dracula but the robber baron capitalist who, after raping, pillaging, and strip-mining the life out of the countryside, decides to simply pull up stakes and find a new part of the planet to destroy? Transylvania is an empty, dead husk of a country? Time to hit the bright lights of London! Fresh meat, man! I imagine the people who remain in the area surrounding Castle Dracula to be kin and kith of the men who sat in Pittsburgh bars on a Wednesday afternoon in the 1980s trying to convince anyone who would listen that the mills would be opening again soon.)

Anyhoo…that all being said…the appearance of Mike Ryerson is a beauty of a scene. And it is because of the utter “otherness” of Mike. In the previous scenes we’ve spent with the character, Mike Ryerson seemed a pleasant, amiable chap. Here, however, he is…nothing…

“[Mike’s eyes] glittered for just a moment in the moonlight, silver rimmed with red. They were as blank as washed blackboards. There was no human thought or feeling in them. The eyes were the windows of the soul, Wordsworth has said. If so, these windows looked in on an empty room.”

Suffice to say, Mike isn’t hanging around Matt’s house for kicks and giggles, killing time before he heads down to the discotheque to boogie all night with Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve. Something tells me Mike wouldn’t be able to find the backbeat to save his life. The Mike that would have danced the night away with the ladies is gone, daddy, gone.

That’s enough for today, Blog-o-weeners. Tonight, read Part 2, Chapter 10: The Lot (III), Sections 1-3. It is only about ten pages. We’re heading back to the McDougall trailer, so I’ll issue a “content warning” now. It ain’t pretty, folks.

In the meantime, I’m gonna dig into the Internet Archive’s collection of The National Enquirer. I know it's a load of hogwash, but darn it, I love me some celebrity gossip. I just have to remember when reading about my fave celebs to…

Blog-o-ween 2024: Day 13

Lots of ‘Salem’s Lot

Free Day #2

"Jerusalem's Lot" & "One for the Road"

Haven't we been here before?

Sunrise: 6:57 AM

Sunset: 6:20 PM

It’s Sunday, and we’ve made it through another week, Blog-o-weeners. You should be proud of yourselves! We are very nearly to the halfway point of Stephen King’s vampire yarn. We’ve seen a lot in the past six days, have we not? We misplaced one yow’un and had another one waste away in the hospital. We’ve heard all kinds of terrible things about the previous owner of the Marsten House. We’ve shot rats in the town dump. We’ve looked into the eyes of the undead and heard the high, sweet, evil sounds of laughter in the middle of the night. We’ve earned a break from the horrors, don’t ya think? It would be nice to get away from the Lot for a little while, wouldn’t it? Sure, it would. Unfortunately, that’s not going to be an easy thing to do. We may be taking a breather from the horrors of ‘Salem’s Lot the novel for this free day, but, unfortunately, that just means that we have a little time to look at a couple of Stephen King short stories that are also set in Jerusalem’s Lot.

Makes you feel like Michael Corleone, don’t it?

As I stated at the beginning of this Blog-o-ween, one of the editions of ‘Salem’s Lot that I am using is the illustrated edition put out by Doubleday in 2005. It’s a beautiful book with loads of lovely, creepy photographs by Jerry N. Uelsmann.

Weird, huh?

In addition to the full novel, the illustrated edition comes with an introduction and afterward by the author (Mr. King, natch!), and a section of “deleted scenes.” While many of these scenes are not nearly as exciting as you would hope they would be (there is a reason that they were deleted, after all), I find them to be an interesting look at the writer behind the curtain, so to speak. As a writer, I am always interested in the processes of other (more successful) writers. I like to know how much each draft is different from the one that came before it and why. With these deleted scenes, you gain a little lookie-loo into King’s mind. Like I said, many if not all of these scenes were cut or trimmed for good reason…except for one. That one should have stayed put. We’ll talk about that scene at length when the time comes. Consider this a teaser trailer!

Rounding out the illustrated edition are two short stories that also take place in that quaint little village just off Maine Route 12. One is a prequel of sorts, while the other is a sequel. I feel safe in discussing both of these stories (especially the second one), because I don’t think anything revealed in them takes away from our enjoyment of the novel. If some of you would rather not hear what happened to the little town of ‘salem’s Lot, then why not come back to this Blog-o-ween entry after everything is said and done. No biggie! For the rest of you…keep yer crucifixes handy. You just might need them!

The first story, “Jerusalem’s Lot,” was included in the author’s 1978 short story collection, Night Shift. (Which, for my money, is the scariest paperback book cover ever made. The eyes! The eyes!) It is an epistolary tale, made up of a series of letters and diary entries. King had his H.P. Lovecraft hat on when he wrote this one. It is very much a pastiche of Lovecraft’s tales, most notable “The Rats in the Walls.”

More rats!

“Jerusalem’s Lot” is set in Maine in the year 1850. It concerns a man named Charles Boone who has just taken control of an abandoned ancestral manse called Chapelwaite in the town of Preacher’s Corners. In a series of letters written to his friend “Bones”—

Not that Bones!

Anywho…in a series of letters written to his friend, Charles tells of moving into the house with his manservant, of being looked at askance by the townsfolk, of the sounds of rats in the walls, and of hearing Chapelwaite referred to as a “bad house.”

Hmmm…kinda sounds familiar, no?

Charles finds a map hidden in the library (never a good thing) that shows him how to get to a village called Jerusalem’s Lot. He and Calvin McCann, his manservant, follow the map and find an abandoned Puritan settlement. In the local church, they discover an obscene parody of the Madonna and Child and an inverted cross. They also find an old book called De Vermis Mysteriis, or The Mysteries of the Worm.

Upon returning from Jerusalem’s Lot, Charles is shunned by the Preacher’s Corners townsfolk. Later, while in the cellar searching for the source of the mysterious noises in the walls, Charles and Calvin discover two corpses that Charles immediately recognizes as “nosferatu.”

Uh-oh!

Who are the corpses in the cellar? Why do the townsfolk fear Charles and his family? How and why did the residents of Jerusalem’s Lot disappear? Who or what is “The Worm”?

“One for the Road” is also a part of Night Shift (…the eyes!…), but it was first published in the March/April 1977 issue of Maine.

This story takes place two years after the end of ‘Salem’s Lot. The Lot is a burned out shell. It is abandoned, and no one in the neighboring towns will have anything to do with it. Many wear religious symbols for protection.

Hmmm…I wonder why…

Booth, the narrator, is at a bar owned by his friend Tookey while a blizzard rages outside. Into the bar stumbles a man named Gerard Lumley. Lumley tells the men that his car broke down. He left his wife and daughter in the car while he went out for help. Booth and Tookey slowly realize that Lumley has left his family in Jerusalem’s Lot. The three men jump into action to find Lumley’s Mercedes. It is heated and still running…but empty.

What happened to Gerard Lumley’s wife and child? Do the men reach them in time?

These short stories make a nice pair of bookends to the novel we are currently reading. Although “Jerusalem’s Lot” is not a perfect prequel, it still works as a kind of alternate history to the Lot. Do the events leading up to the murder-suicide of Hubie Marsten and his wife Birdie have anything to do with “The Worm”? Is that who Straker offers Ralphie Glick to?

“One for the Road,” on the other hand, is a great sequel. I love me a good snowy horror setting. Although, if you think about it…

…the fact that there are still vamps running around the Lot…does that mean our Fearless Vampire Hunters ultimately failed? Or are they still out there wandering Brock Street and Schoolyard Hill with an athletic bag filled with wooden stakes? Could they have saved the Lumleys?

That’s it for today, kiddies. Tomorrow, I want you to have read Part 2, Chapter 9: Susan (II), Sections 1-8. Is Ben all right? Who is the visitor who comes to see Matt at night? Read and you will find out! Until tomorrow, Blog-o-weeners.

And remember if you are going to go traipsing through the woods following a map you found hidden away in the family library, then you’ve got to…

Blog-o-ween 2024: Day 12

Lots of ‘Salem’s Lot

Part Two

Chapter 8: Ben (III)

Sunrise: 6:56 AM

Sunset: 6:21 PM

Ben receives a phone call from Matt very early in the morning. Matt wants Ben to come out to his house, and to bring a crucifix.

Once they are together, sitting around the kitchen table, Matt tells Ben all about the night before and what he suspects. The two men go upstairs. Mike is dead, and the window is open. Back in the kitchen, Ben and Matt call the authorities. Dr. Cody and Parkins Gillespie arrive and begin the official process of dealing with a dead body.

Exhausted, Ben goes back to bed at Eva’s boardinghouse. Later that afternoon, as Ben walks to his car to drive to Susan’s house, Floyd Tibbits, ridiculously dressed in an old fedora hat, wrap-around sunglasses, overcoat, and rubber gloves, attacks him.

Well, we’ve survived long enough to put Part One behind us and to start Part Two. Good work, everyone! Let’s see if we can’t continue the trend.

Like Part One, we start things off with an epigraph. Or in this case, two epigraphs. The first is the entirety of Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Emperor of Ice Cream.” Anyone who’s been through the mill of a 20th Century American Literature college course or two has probably read this poem. I won’t dredge up any bad memories by engaging in a close reading of the work, but I do have to say that “whip / In kitchen cups concupiscent curds” is such a delicious line to say aloud. And speaking of saying the poem aloud, apparently Ken Nordine — he of the deep, resonant voice heard in many a commercial and movie trailer and spoken word jazz LP — recorded a version of the Stevens’s poem in 1994 set to circus music. Unfortunately, I can’t find that rendition, so here’s Nordine spittin’ bars about the color “Crimson”…

The other epigraph is from the Greek poet George Seferis. Born in 1900 as Georgios Seferiades near Smyrna (then a part of the Ottoman Empire, then occupied by Greece after the First World War, now a part of Turkey), Seferis served in the Greek Foreign Service, and later in his life became Royal Greek Ambassador to the United Kingdom. He was awarded the 1963 Nobel Prize for Literature.

‘Salem’s Lot features quite a epigraphs from George Seferis. The first began the Prologue (remember the Prologue?) and was a quote from Seferis’s 1938 poem “The Return of the Exile.” Here, at the start of Part Two, King chooses a haiku by the Greek poet. However, the translation that he uses is curious to say the least:

This column has
A hole. Can you see
The Queen of the Dead?

According to the copyright page of my edition of ‘Salem’s Lot, both the excerpt from “The Return of the Exile” and this haiku were translated by Rex Warner in 1960 for the book Poems polished by Little, Brown and Company. I have found another translation of “Haiku 14” that gives it a different feel:

In this column a hole:
Can you see
Persephone?

Columns and their holes make an appearance in another of King’s works: The Dark Tower. In the sixth book of the series, Song of Susannah, King writes,

“He said that writin about the walk-ins in western Maine taught him something he’d never expected to learn in old age: that some people just won’t believe, not even when you can prove em. He used to quote a line from some Greek poet. ‘The column of truth has a hole in it.’”

I suppose that that is the lesson we need to take forward with us as we read the rest of ‘Salem’s Lot. We are going to meet up with strangeness in the coming pages, and some characters are just not going to be able — or willing — to believe in the truth of said strangeness, no matter how much proof piles up at their feet.

Okay, okay…’nuff of the English major hooptedoodle. Let’s move on…

I think I’ve said this in the past few Blog-o-ween entries, but here is where the ball really starts rolling. Matt is terrified of what he heard the night before — the opening of Mike’s bedroom window, the evil laughter of a child, and sucking sounds. He is so terrified that he refused to check on Mike. He hid in his own bedroom for four hours before calling Eva’s and getting Ben up.

Four hours!

I feel for old Matt. I can recall laying in bed after seeing The Blair Witch Project in 1999 and being so scared by what I’d seen that I stayed awake ALL NIGHT! I could not fall asleep. Every noise in the house had me pulling the blankets up to my eyes, every dark corner seemed to writhe with preternatural movement. Brrr!

One of the topics up for discussion between Ben and Matt is whether or not the body upstairs in bed is a dead one or not:

“When you speak to Cody, don’t even say he’s dead.”

“Not dead—”

“Christ, how do we know he is?” Ben exploded. “You took his pulse and couldn’t find it; I tired to find his breath and couldn’t do it. If I thought someone was going to shove me into my grave on that basis, I’d damn well pack a lunch. Especially if I looked as lifelike as he does.”

“That bothers you as much as it does me, doesn’t it?” 

“Yes, it bothers me,” Ben admitted. “He looks like a goddamn waxwork.”

The determination of death in a body — and being horribly wrong about pronouncing someone as dead — has a long, proud history in horror fiction. This history of the trope, however, has a terrifying basis in reality. For much of human history, the chances of premature burial were uncomfortably high. So high were they that in the 17th Century, many people were interred with a bell tied around their finger. A guard was placed to sit at the gravesite for a period of time and to listen out for the tell-tale ringing of the bell. Hence, the meaning behind the phrase “saved by the bell.”

Bet you thought I was gonna post a pic of Screech and the gang, right?

And on that spine-tingling note…brrr!…let’s call it a day. Tomorrow, we have our second “Free Day” of the month, so no readings to prepare. (I heard that sigh of relief in the back of the class, ya smart alecks.) Instead, tomorrow we will talk about the other Stephen King short stories that feature the Lot. Should be fun!

In the meantime, while you are whipping your concupiscent curds (and what you choose to do in the sanctity of your own kitchens is y’all’s own business) remember to…

Blog-o-ween 2024: Day 11

Lots of ‘Salem’s Lot

Part One

Chapter 7: Matt

Sunrise: 6:55 AM

Sunset: 6:23 PM

Ben meets Matt at the local high school and has a rap session with the kids there. Later, Ben has dinner at Matt’s house. They discuss Ben’s book, the disappearance of Ralphie Glick, and the connections between Ralphie and other disappearances in the area during the 1930s. They make plans to take a drive up to the Marsten House later in the week and welcome the new owners.

Later that week, Matt takes a trip out to Dell’s for a late-night brewski. He meets Mike Ryerson, who looks to the old teacher like he is on hard drugs. Mike says he is sick. He has slept the days away ever since Danny Glick’s funeral. At night, he says, he has the sweetest, scariest dreams of red eyes staring at him. Matt invites Mike back to his house for the night so that he can take him to his doctor, Jimmy Cody, the next morning.

That night, as he lays in bed, Matt hears Mike talking to someone…someone outside his second floor window. Matt hears Mike invite this person in. Then, he hears a child’s laugh…and sucking sounds…

Hoo-boy! Before we make with all the inviting and laughing and biting and sucking, let’s talk a few little details from the non-Nosferatu sections.

When it comes to politically correct language, I am 98% for whatever changes and updates are made. People have preferred pronouns? I use ‘em! People have a preferred gender identity? I recognize it and use it! I grew up in a time when some pretty ugly language got thrown around willy-nilly. The T-word, J-word, the G-word, the R-word, the N-word — I’ll let you figure out what’s what in your dirty little bigoted minds — these should be relegated to ancient history ASAP.

However…

…when it comes to replacing simple, straightforward words with multi-syllabic, fancy titles, I must put my foot down. I am not going to say “sanitation engineer” when “garbageman (or woman)” fits the bill. I’m not trading in three or four syllables for seven. And if I’m not going to do that, I sure as hell am not going to call the kids attending 'salem's Lot High School a “homogenous mid-teen coeducational student body.” You must be out yer damn mind!

Moving on…

Matt’s house is a pretty inviting place. (Oooo…there’s that word again — invite!) When Ben enters he is met by “a small living room furnished in Early American Junk Shop.” I can appreciate that style. Just as Ben says he’s a kitchen table eater who comes from a long line of kitchen table eaters, my personal furnishing style is rag-tag and catch-as-catch-can. Matching chairs? I’m lucky if the silverware matches!

One of the items sitting in Matt’s living room is a KLH sound system with quad speakers. KLH Research and Development Corporation was founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1957. The company takes its name from the initials of its founders: Henry Kloss, Malcolm S. Low, and Josef Anton Hofmann. At one time, KLH was the largest loudspeaker company in the world, responsible for many “firsts”:

• the first-ever high-selectivity FM table radio, the Model Eight

• the first full-range electrostatic loudspeaker, the Model Nine (which many audiophiles consider to the one of the best loudspeakers ever built)

• the first portable solid state record player, the Model Eleven

• the first reel-to-reel tape recorder to feature the Dolby noise reduction, the Model Forty.

Boy-oh-boy, Matt sure knows how to rock out with the best!

For all his “junk shop” leanings, Matt is not above getting fancy with the dinner drinks, however. He tells Ben to look for a bottle of Lancers in the refrigerator. Lancers was started in 1944 by Henry Behar, who was searching for a rosé wine that would please the American palate. He found what he was looking for in the wine cellars of José Maria da Fonseca of the Palmela region of Portugal. Lancers’s medium-sweet, sparkling wine was an immediate hit, selling over a million boxes a year by the 1970s. It is still produced to this day, so you can maybe pour yourself a glass while reading ‘Salem’s Lot!

Now, let’s get down and dirty…

Ben gives us another glimpse into the book he’s been writing in the Lot. He’s writing it the money, he fully admits, so he’s making it a juicy horror novel that begins with a long, drawn out murder. Matt asks if Ben is basing the book on the disappearances of the 1930s. Ben is taken aback, but Matt assures him that there are many older residents in the town that have already made the connections between the current disappearance of Ralphie Glick and the vanishing of other children the last time the Marten House was occupied. The town’s conscience and consciousness — as well as its rumor mill — is in full swing.

Matt also mentions the death of Danny Glick. Matt’s doctor, Jimmy Cody, was called in to consult on Danny’s case. It seems that Danny’s red blood cell was way, way down. He was given B-12 injections and was getting better, but then he died suddenly.

Strange that, don’cha think?

Things get even stranger when Matt gets together with Mike Ryerson. Matt, it seems, is primed for what is to come in the rest of the novel. As Mike tells his story about falling asleep in Harmony Hill Cemetery, about the filling in of Danny Glick’s grave (which he doesn’t recall doing at all), the dreams he’s been having about red eyes and sweet singing, about sleeping all day and having no desire to eat when he wakes up (food and drink, in fact, make him ill), Matt seems to be putting two and two together pretty quickly. We already know that, although he isn’t a native of the town, Matt knows quite a bit of its history, especially where the Marsten House is concerned. We also know that he has the mystery of Danny Glick’s demise (the low red blood cell count, etc.) at the back of his mind. So when Matt sees red marks on Mike’s throat, his mind is made up.

Matt thinks of two texts as he lies in bed wondering if he’s crazy for what he’s believing is the cause of Mike’s “sickness.” One is, of course, Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula. The other is a lesser known work (at least to non-English major Monster Kids): Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Christabel.”

Close…but wrong Cristabel.

Beneath the lamp the lady bowed, 

And slowly rolled her eyes around; 

Then drawing in her breath aloud, 

Like one that shuddered, she unbound 

The cincture from beneath her breast: 

Her silken robe, and inner vest, 

Dropt to her feet, and full in view, 

Behold! her bosom and half her side— 

A sight to dream of, not to tell! 

O shield her! shield sweet Christabel!

“Christabel” is an unfinished poem that tells the story of a young woman, Christabel, who enters the forest to pray. There, she discovers another young woman, Geraldine.

Not that Geraldine.

Geraldine tells Christabel that she is alone, having escaped from a group of men who tried to abduct her. Taking pity on the girl, Christabel invites Geraldine back to her home. (There’s that word again — invite!) There are many supernatural signs that Geraldine may not be who or what she purports herself to be — animals moaning in their sleep as she passes by, torchlight fading and returning in her presence, her inability to cross an iron doorway, her refusal to pray. Christabel and her family soon fall under the spell of the malign Geraldine.

The story of Christabel fits Matt’s state of mind perfectly, no?

One last thing to talk about is a word that pops up in King’s work from time to time. At Dell’s, Mike tells Matt that he became frightened at his home for no good reason: 

“I got scared before I went to bed. Just like a kid afraid of the Allamagoosalum.”

The what now?

Plenty of King fans have tried to track down the history of the Allamagoosalum, but to no avail. King may have picked the word up from a 1955 science fiction short story by English author Eric Frank Russell, “Allamagoosa.” In this story, a spaceship crew creates a meaningless contraption called an “offog” in order to pass inspection. In this context, an allamagoosa is the name given to something unknown — kind of like a “thingamajig” or a “doohickie.” Still, Allamagoosalum has a nice ring to it, and in the context of Mike being afraid of it like a child, one can imagine a New England urban legend of some kind, something that would be passed back and forth across a campfire or a sleepover.

Well, that’s the end of today’s readings, as well as the end of Part One of ‘Salem’s Lot. Tomorrow, I want you to read Part 2, Chapter 8: Ben (III). We’ll find out what happened to Mike Ryerson, and just who Mike invited into Matt’s house.

In the meantime, keep in mind that if you find young women wondering around the woods at night, you might want to…