3 October: Salem's Lot

“The town took its peculiar name from a fairly prosaic occurrence. One of the area’s earliest residents was a dour, gangling farmer named Charles Belknap Tanner. He kept pigs, and one of the large sows was named Jerusalem. Jerusalem broke out of her pen one day at feeding time, escaped into the nearby woods, and went wild and mean. Tanner warned small children off his property for years afterward by leaning over his gate and croaking at them in ominous gore-crow tones: ‘Keep ‘ee out o’ Jerusalem’s wood lot, if ‘ee want to keep ‘ee guts in ‘ee belly!’ The warning took hold, and so did the name. It proves little, except that perhaps in America even a pig can aspire to immortality.”

Today’s topic for Cinematic Void’s 31 Days of Voidoween is “Vampires.” For my money, that can only mean one thing: Stephen King’s 1975 sophomore effort, Salem’s Lot. I’ve read King’s novel every October for at least the last ten years and off and on before that since I first picked it up in the mid-90s. It’s my favorite of King’s works for several reasons.

First off, it’s the ultimate horror high concept novel. King himself summed it up perfectly when he described Salem’s Lot as “Peyton Place meets Dracula.” Boom! What else ya need to know?

Second, Salem’s Lot may be a story about a small New England town, but King does a great job of working with a large cast of characters. He balances the main characters and the central narrative with all these vignettes that bring the many background characters to the foreground for their fifteen minutes. He also uses these characters and their dark secrets to reveal the rotten heart of the town and why Barlow, the vampire, and his human familiar Straker decided to settle there. Chapter Three is a perfect example of this. In it, King introduces characters whose names we've heard mentioned in passing. Here, however, their lives are given front-and-center attention. They are brief sketches, but they perfectly sum up who these people are and why they just might prefer being the living dead as opposed to the living dead.

Lastly, Barlow and all the vampires he creates are parasites sucking the town dry. These aren’t romantic, misunderstood, emo-listening, anti-heroic vampires who sparkle. They smell of the grave. Their flesh is as smoke when a cross is dragged through their faces. They squirm like worms when pulled from their resting places into sunlight. They are leeches, and they deserve their fates at the hands of Ben and Mark come the last page of the book.

If you plan on reading Salem’s Lot for the holidays, be sure to track down the illustrated edition that was released in 2005. In addition to the novel, you get two Lot-adjacent short stories (one of which, “Jerusalem’s Lot,” serves as the basis for the Epix TV show Chaplewaite). Also included are deleted scenes, one of which I count as one of the most disgusting scenes King ever committed to paper.

Throughout the novel, much is made of the rats in the town dump. At one point, they disappear. Where did they go? Well, vampires are known to control the lesser animals - including rats. Towards the end of the novel, Mark Petrie and Dr. Jimmy Cody hunt for Barlow’s hiding place. They go to Eva Miller’s boardinghouse. Jimmy goes down to the basement. There, he is swamped by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of rats. They stream out of the shadows and cover him. As Jimmy tries to scream to warn Mark, one rat crawls into his mouth.

Sadly, King’s editor talked him out of using the scene. He thought it was too gross. Well, duh! King never put the scene back into the book proper, even though all the references to the rats were rendered moot by the excision. Now you can enjoy it in all its furry, grotty goodness as the good Lord intended.