Blog-o-ween 2024: Day 1

Lots of ‘Salem’s Lot

Prologue, Sections 1-7

Sunrise: 6:47 AM

Sunset: 6:36 PM

A man and a boy (who are not father and son, though many people think they are) travel a southwesterly route across the United States from New England to California. They stick to secondary roads, making extended stops here and there along the way. Whenever and wherever they stop, the man is sure to track down a copy of a Maine newspaper, the Portland Press-Herald. He scans this newspaper for stories concerning a small town called Jerusalem’s Lot. The boy does his level best not to look at the newspapers and won’t talk about the town at all. The man is a writer — or was one a long time ago. While they travel, he writes the first draft of a book. His agent sells the book, and with the advance, the boy and the man cross the border into Mexico.

While living in a small town south of the border, the boy decides to be taken into the Catholic Church. Soon thereafter, the man finds a story in the Press-Herald that scares both him and the boy. Its headline reads “Ghost Town in Maine?” It is about Jerusalem’s Lot, or ‘salem’s Lot as it is colloquially known. What disturbed the article’s writer, as well as the man and boy, is that it seems as though the people of ‘salem’s Lot simply walked out of their homes and disappeared. Authorities can find no traces of many of the town’s former resident. Those that can be found refuse to discuss the reasons for their leaving, refuse to talk about or even mention the town.

A few months later, the boy makes his first confession to the local priest and confesses everything. The priest is troubled by what the boy has told him, about what he says the man and he did back in Maine. The priest speaks to the man about it. The man assures him that it is all true. The priest asks what the man plans to do about it. A week later, the man and boy begin the long journey back to…

See…didn’t I tell you this first day would be easy going?

I like a book that begins at the end and goes back to the beginning, as this one eventually will with the start of the next section. I like being in the dark about the characters and their motivations. It’s like seeing an artist begin a painting. We see only the faintest outlines of the subjects and their backgrounds, but those rough designs enough to draw us in and want to see more.

King does that here — we don’t have names, we only know we are dealing with a “man” and a “boy.” They are not related. How, then, did they fall in with one another? Why are they on the run? Why is the boy so averse to talking about ‘salem’s Lot? What have they done back in that small town that is so terrible? So many questions! And they are all delicious.

I am also a big fan of the inclusion of other media in a story. In his first novel, King filled out the sad tale of high school scapegoat and telekinetic Carrie White with snippets from other books, television interviews, magazines, official reports, and the like. It’s like a literary mosaic that allows us different points-of-view. Here, King gives us a newspaper article from the Portland Press-Herald. Now, in all honesty, if I am going to be one of those people who loves to pick nits, I’m going to say that the language and structure of this article isn’t exactly newspaper-like. It gets a little florid here and there — referring to the increase in population as “a gain of exactly 67 souls” seems a bit fancy. If this is from a Sunday supplement, then I’m willing to go along with it. Regardless, this article does a fine job of giving an outsider’s view of the situation in ‘salem’s Lot. We have no idea what is happening there or why, but it seems that it is something very odd. This is a nice initial peeling away of the first skin of the onion that is ‘Salem’s Lot.

There is something else that happens in this article that I really love — the use of local legend. In the second paragraph of the article, the writer equates the emptying of ‘salem’s Lot not only to the ghost towns of the Old West, but to a strange disappearance much closer to home: the town of Momson, VT. It’s such a throwaway little story, that it feels true. Those of us old enough to remember the television series In Search of… will immediately hear host Leonard Nimoy read this paragraph. If you try to look for any official mentions of Momson, however, you’ll find that King just made the whole thing up. This brief tale adds a little spice to this prologue. Its strangeness is another lens through which we can view what is to come.

Let’s see…what else should we talk about?

Younger readers may question how the man in the story is able to get copies of a Portland, ME, newspaper across the country. As someone who used to work in bookstores (and was the Newsstand Lead in quite a few of them), I can assure you that there was a time — back when physical newspapers were an important source of information and local identity — when you could have copies of just about any newspaper in the country sent to you, either directly or through a service. I used to love reading the Chicago and Seattle newspapers at my old job. Newspapers were a wonderful window into those other cities. I don’t get the same…frisson…with the internet.

One other person that gets mentioned: Wolfman Jack.

Robert Weston Smith was a radio disc jockey for thirty years beginning in the early 1960s. Adopting the name “Wolfman Jack” due to his love of horror movies, Smith was hired by one of the “border blaster” radio stations that sat across the border in Mexico. These stations broadcast on 150,000 watts (three times what was used in the U.S.) and could be picked up all over North America, even going as far away as Europe and the Soviet Union. Thus, I find it strange that the man and boy only sporadically are able to pick up the Wolfman’s show on their radio. C’mon! He was the world’s DJ, baby!

Later, Wolfman Jack would record his show in his offices on Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood, CA, and syndicate it to stations all over the country. He became popular enough to make appearances in movies and television, including, George Lucas’s 1973 film American Graffiti, The Odd Couple, Vega$, Married…with Children, as well as regularly hosting the TV musical variety series The Midnight Special.

That’s enough for our first day of class. I hope this gives you a taste of what you can expect for the rest of the Horror High Howl-idays. (...heh-heh-heh...) Tomorrow, we will start the novel proper. I mean…we get names of characters and everything! So in preparation, why don’t you read Part 1, Chapter 1: Ben (I) through Chapter 2: Susan (I): Sections 1-3. It’s about 15 pages or so. Easy-peasy!

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