Lots of ‘Salem’s Lot

First Day of Class

Greetings, Blog-o-weeners!

We are on the verge of the most wonderful time of the year!

I know there are people out there who just love it when the days get longer and the temperature gets warmer. Summer vacations were a wonderful time when I was thirteen and didn’t have a care in the world outside of riding my bike up and down the hill at the end of Oakhaven Drive and playing soccer in my backyard. But things have changed now that I’m fifty-three. Nowadays, summer just means riding my bike back and forth on the Chandler Bikeway and playing soccer on my Nintendo Switch. See?! There’s a difference!

And I know there some of you out there who just love when it’s time to drive out to the woods and find a pine tree in the prime of its life — and then take an axe to its legs, hobbling it, then drag it back to your car, tie it to the roof, get it home, drag it inside, give it only just enough water to keep it barely alive, and then dress it up like a cheap floozy! Oh, and you probably also like roasting chestnuts, singing carols, and exchanging presents.

Well, those moments in time are okay (I guess!), but for my money, I think Halloween is the highwater mark of the year. It’s perfect! Think of it: there are no gifts to buy for anyone, we aren’t forced to be nice to people who patently do not deserve it, we don’t have to salute a flag and sit through excruciatingly dumb fireworks displays (I mean…c’mon…there’s a reason George Romero had his heroes use fireworks to distract the zombies in Land of the Dead…), we don’t have to get together with friends and family we don’t particularly like and try not to mention religion and politics while we eat lumpy mashed potatoes and overcooked turkey. There’s none of that rigmarole. All you have to do to enjoy Halloween is hand out candy to disguised strangers who knock on your door, watch spooky movies, and read scary stories. That’s it! That’s all the holiday demands of you. Oh, I know there are folks out there who spend hundreds — nay! — thousands of dollars on lawn decorations, but it ain’t necessary. In fact, my favorite lawn decoration from the past few years was the house near me that had the stick figures from The Blair Witch Project hanging from their trees. Very minimalist, but, oh, so classic!

Halloween, for me, isn’t limited to the 31st of October. As anyone who has spent the past few years with me here at LARPing Real Life can attest, I like to spread the joy over the entire month. Halloween is thirty-one days of spooky fun. I try to pack in as many movies, TV shows, old time radio classics, horror movie soundtracks, short stories, and novels as I can into those thirty-one days. There are old favorites I try to visit the High Horror Holidays — John Carpenter’s Halloween is a must, as is his homage to Val Lewton, The Fog. I love reading A.M. Burrage’s Christmas ghost story “Smee.” There are several episodes of the old radio shows Quiet…Please!, Inner Sanctum, and Suspense that are musts. But my most important ritual is the reading of Stephen King’s 1975 novel, ‘Salem’s Lot.

Halloween just isn’t Halloween without a trip up the interstate to that cozy little Maine village. Visiting with writer Ben Mears, Monster Kid Mark Petrie, the (perhaps overly) rational Susan Norton, and the high school English teacher-cum-Fearless Vampire Hunter Matt Burke is something I look forward to when the the sun starts setting earlier in the west and the leaves turn sere and fall from the trees. Heck, I even relish spending time with the cruel and devious Preparer-of-the-Way Richard Straker and the town snoop and gossip Mabel Werts. I know what is coming with every page I turn. Every character’s fate is sealed before I start reading. There are no surprises in store for me. Why should I return to a book — this book — every autumn?

For one thing, The Lot feels awfully familiar to me. I grew up in a small town in Western Pennsylvania. In fact, Economy Borough, PA, would be a metropolis compared to ‘salem’s Lot. King’s small New England town holds around 1,500 people (according to a newspaper article in the book’s prologue…more on that later!), while my hometown has closer to 10,000. Those 10,000 yinzers are spread out over 18 square miles. There are lots of woods, streams, hills, and winding roads. For the most part, people know their neighbors. They may not like them, but they know them. There are a few businesses and churches (which is just another kind of business) along Conway Wallrose Road. There are well-to-do folks and folks that are having a hard time making ends meet; brand new housing developments with big McMansions and rundown parks filled with mobile homes that have long since lost their mobility; areas that add the term “Heights” to their name to make themselves seem more important than those who don’t. Economy, PA, is like any other small, rural town in America, which is why when I crack open ‘Salem’s Lot, it feels a lot like going home.

As I’ve said before, I don’t know exactly when I read the novel for the first time or when I decided that I would return to it every year. It’s been, by my guesstimations, about a decade that I’ve made the book my annual Halloween read. The first time I read it would probably be in the mid-90s. I was not much of a reader as a kid. I did well in school English classes (or “Language Arts” as it was known then), but I didn’t do a whole lot of reading-for-pleasure in my spare time. I did read Fangoria magazine religiously, however, and I loved Calvin & Hobbes and Bloom County. But novels? Collections of short stories? Not unless I had to for school. I didn’t read-for-pleasure until I was in my twenties and got a job at Barnes & Noble Booksellers.

I know what you’re thinking: what the hell is a vulgarian like you doing getting a job at a bookstore? That’s like a vegan working at Arby’s. Long story short — I needed to make a major lifestyle change and that meant getting a new job. I lived in Pittsburgh at the time, didn’t have a car, and had to find something to do that was easily reached via public transportation. There was a Barnes & Noble in downtown Pittsburgh at the time (long since closed - R.I.P.!), and I took a chance. And guess what? The fools hired me!

Before Barnes & Noble, I worked at a restaurant. When you work in the food services industry, and you are surrounded by french fries, pizzas, and/or salad makings, you’re gonna partake. You start to graze. You can’t help yourself. If that restaurant also has a bar, then after work you’re gonna belly up and have a cold one just to take the edge off. It’s just the way it goes. (And if that isn’t the way it goes for you, then you are a better man than me, Charlie Brown.)

The same went for working at Barnes & Noble. All day, every day, I was surrounded by books. So…I started grazing. And soon I was stuffing myself day in and day out with everything I could get my hands on.

One of the first authors I began feeding on (pun intended!) was Stephen King.

Oddly, the first book I picked up of his (and it may be the first thing I ever bought with my discount aside from copious amounts of coffee) was his history of the horror genre, Danse Macabre. Maybe this was my inner English major making himself known to me (he would come out fully for another fifteen years), but I wanted something I could use to track down other books and movies, and DM has two wonderful appendices that serve as a terrific checklist of pre-1980’s horror. I fell in love with King’s voice in that book. It was like having a friend’s cool older brother tell me what to read and watch. It was only a matter of time before I was buying other King titles.

That bookseller discount kicked a lot of ass.

I was more of a tv watcher in my teens. And back in the 1980s, tv meant horror. We had cable and HBO when I was growing up, so there was always something spooky on: Ray Bradbury Theater, Tales from the Darkside, Tales from the Crypt, USA Network’s Saturday Nightmares, Commander USA’s Groovie Movies. And chances were that if horror was on the tv, it would be a Stephen King adaptation. I mean, even the commercials feature King!

When the King and George Romero team-up, Creepshow, hit HBO, the Tobe Hooper-helmed made-for-TV adaptation ‘Salem’s Lot was also scheduled (See…I’m getting back on track!) We’ll talk more about this movie version later in the month, but for now, let’s just say that it was a seminal moment in my movie-watching life. There were scenes and visuals that stuck with me (if you know, you know!). So, it was only natural that one of the first King titles I sought out was the basis of Hooper’s film.

I know that every King fan has their own favorite book, story, and character. For many, Danny Torrence’s experiences in the Overlook Hotel; for others, it’s the gunslinger’s quest for the Dark Tower; for still others, it’s a certain drain-dwelling clown. For me, ‘Salem’s Lot hit and hit hard. Maybe it was for the reasons stated above — being from a small town made me appreciate it all the more — or maybe there are other psychic pressure points being pressed by the book. Was there something about the horror-obsessed teen, Mark, and how his interest in monsters saved him from certain death? Or was it the fact that the big bad, Barlow, doesn’t make his appearance until much of the book is gone? Or was it the non-horror chapters, the history of the town and its people, that put a spell on me? I’m not entirely sure. What I am sure of, however, is that the only way to get at the whys and wherefores is to talk about it.

So…for the next month, we are going to talk, day by day, page by page, about ’Salem’s Lot!

The map that I am using to find my way through the terrain of ‘Salem’s Lot is Frank Delaney’s excellent close reading of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses. Delaney used his podcast, RE:Joyce, to break Joyce’s book into bite-sized chunks that he could chew for us before spitting into our mouths for consumption. (Where the hell am I going with these metaphors?) Every day, Delaney would take a page or a paragraph or, sometimes, just a sentence, and break it apart to study the pieces. If you’ve ever wanted to read Ulysses, but were afraid of running aground on its rocky shore, then by all means you should track down RE:Joyce.

(But be forewarned: Delaney, sadly, died before completing his task. He left us in Chapter 10 — “Wandering Rocks” — only halfway through that day in Dublin on 16 June 1904. I, myself, am feeling pretty hale and hearty, so have no fear!)

Now, to be sure, ‘Salem’s Lot is no Ulysses. I don’t mean that in a snotty, snooty way. I am not turning up my nose to look down on King. I only mean that Joyce’s novel is so jammed full of meanings and double-meanings, texts and sub-texts (and sub-sub-texts) that it really takes a group effort to unpack everything to get at the heart of it. King’s book, on the other hand, is not so densely packed with linguistic riddles, history, myths, and literary devices. Still, I think slowly reading any text can open up new vistas of understanding, if not of the text itself then of the person reading said text.

So…how is this whole Blog-o-ween thing gonna work this year?

I’ve broken the book up to cover twenty-seven days. The edition I am using runs about 478 pages, so that means that we will be reading around eighteen pages a day. Sometimes it will be less, sometimes it will be more. Regardless, I think that is a very doable schedule.

“But LARPing Real Life,” I hear you say, “there are thirty-one days in October. You’re skipping the other four days!”

Mathematically, you are correct. Those other four days, however, are not forgotten. In Frank Delaney’s schedule of RE:Joyce, after twelve episodes, he would record a “Baker’s Dozen” entry. This episode would be about Joyce’s life or Irish history, or what was happening in the literary world at the time of Ulysses’s publication. It was a way of breaking up the book and of placing it into context. We will do the same. Every week, on Sunday, we will rest. (Hey, if the big “G” can do it, so can we!) On those four Sundays, we will talk about the influences on King and his novel, the other short stories and novels that are connected to the goings-on in The Lot, and the various adaptations of the book.

One other quick bit of housekeeping: as with Blog-o-weens past, my entries will not be super long. In fact, today’s entry is going to be the wordiest (by far!) of the bunch. (Fingers-crossed!) This is a daily blogging exercise, so I just want to get them out the door. Six to eight hundred words a day should suffice. As with our reading schedule, sometimes I’ll go over that number, sometimes I’ll go under. I’m not here to bore you to tears or to drive home a point in a thousand words when a hundred will work just as well. I like to keep things light here at LARPing Real Life. As much as I love academic readings of texts, this is not the place for that. Like King shows in Danse Macabre, we can talk about the horror genre without getting too eggheaded about it. Imagine us not in a classroom, but in a coffee shop or bar. We’re just sitting around sipping cold brew coffees or just plain cold brews, if you know what I mean. If ever you want to engage me about a point I made or missed, by all means, leave a comment. I’m hoping this becomes more of a dialogue than monologue. Brian Oblivion, I am not!

So, now we come to it. Time or me to assign your reading for next time. Hopefully, you’ve all acquired your copies of ‘Salem’s Lot. When I created the schedule to follow, I used the hardback “Illustrated Edition” of the novel. (ISRC:0-385-51648-7) It has ‘Salem’s Lot, as well as other stories taking place in the same town and some deleted scenes. My everyday readin’ copy, however, is a mass-market paperback put out by Signet probably some time in the early 1990s. It’s pretty beat up, but it reads just fine. These editions have page numbering discrepancies. Some chapters in one edition begin or end on different pages in another edition. When I assign reading, I won’t be doing it by page number. I’ll do it by Part, Chapter, and/or Section.

So, for our first day, I am asking you to read the Prologue — all seven sections. It’s only twelve pages long. It’ll be a breeze!

See all you Blog-o-weeners tomorrow…and remember…