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…