Blog-o-ween 2024: Day 16

Lots of ‘Salem’s Lot

Part Two

Chapter 10: The Lot (III)

Sections 4-7

Sunrise: 6:59 AM

Sunset: 6:16 PM

Susan visits Ben in his hospital room. They discuss everything that has happened in the town since Floyd Tibbits put Ben out of commission. Ben tries to convince Susan to put aside her “can’t” thoughts and attack the problem from the perspective that what he and Matt think is happening in the Lot is real. Susan has a hard time accepting that, but she tries.

At the jail, Nolly Gardner brings Floyd Tibbits his breakfast. Fortunately, Floyd doesn’t wake up, so Nolly eats it himself. Lunchtime rolls around, and Floyd is still out like a light. Nolly tries to walk him and discovers that he is dead.

At the dump, Franklin Boddin and Virgil Rathbun pull up with their week’s trash. Dud is not around. No one is. Not even the rats.

Didn’t I tell you that you’d end up wanting to strangle Susan for her rationalism? Or maybe that should be rationalization? Again, the cards are stacked against her. We know she is in a horror novel. We know that vampires are real. She does not. She is doing the best she can. And truth be told, if some out-of-towner who I’d been doing the horizontal mambo with suddenly started spouting off about bloodsuckers, I’d be like…

While Ben is doing his best to convince Susan that Matt is not a kookmeister, he asks her if the well-loved schoolteacher ever before manifested any weird, outré beliefs. For example: water fluoridation causes brain cancer.

This is one of big conspiracy theories of the 20th century. In much the same way that a tv show or movie will use the love for the music of Slim Whitman as a sign that a character is a bit of a dolt, having a character rail against fluoridation in the water supply will mark him or her as an extremist kook. Look no further than Brigadier General Jack T. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Ol’ Jack was convinced the Russians were trying to contaminate his precious bodily fluids. How? Through the fluoridation of the nation’s water supply, natch.

Fluoridation began in the United States in 1950 in Wisconsin. The conspiracy theories surrounding the decision arose quickly. Those who opposed the addition of fluoride to water did so for varied reasons: it was a way to protect the U.S. atomic bomb program from litigation, it was a plot by Communists or the New World Order (What ever happened to that super secretive organization from the 1990s?! Don’t hear much about them anymore.), it was to make the populous submissive, it was to protect polluters like Alcoa, and so on, and so on.

Other examples that Ben offers Susan regarding Matt’s sanity: support for the Sons of the American Patriots and the NLF.

I couldn’t find any such group called Sons of the American Patriots, but there is one that goes by Sons of the American Revolution (SAR). This group seems pretty innocuous, so I'm unsure of who Ben is on about.

The SAR is a hereditary organization made up of male descendants of those who served in the American Revolution. (Their patriarchal structure may be the only black mark against them.) According to their literature, the objectives of the SAR are “to maintain and extend the institutions of American freedom, an appreciation for true patriotism, a respect for our national symbols, the value of American citizenship, [and] the unifying force of ‘e pluribus unum’ that has created, from the people of many nations, one nation and one people.”

They seem pretty tame. I mean…The John Birch Society, they are not.

The NLF may be the National Liberation Front, which was a Vietnamese political organization dedicated to the overthrow of the South Vietnamese government. They were best known to Americans at the time by the name of their military arm: the Viet Cong. What a teacher in rural Maine would be doing supporting the Communists in Vietnam, I haven’t the foggiest, but I suppose that’s Ben’s point.

Later, talking about the reasons Matt would have for concocting such an elaborate story, Ben says,

“Even granting some motive we don’t suspect, why would he go to such Byzantine lengths, or invent such a wild cover story? I suppose Ellery Queen could explain it somehow, but life isn’t an Ellery Queen plot.”

Who now?

“Ellery Queen” was the creation and pseudonym of writers Frederic Danny and Manfred Bennington Lee. In 1928, Dannay and Lee entered a mystery novel writing contest. They used the name of their main character, a detective called Ellery Queen, as their pseudonym as well. During the 1940s, the mysteries of Ellery Queen were the most popular books in America. One of the reasons for this popularity may be that the books of Ellery Queen were known as “fair play” mysteries. The reader gained the clues to the mystery alongside the detective, and each mystery was a well-constructed, intellectually challenging puzzle. The name Ellery Queen was also given to a mystery magazine in 1941. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine is still in publication today.

Over at the dump, two of the town’s ne’er-do-wells are looking for Dud Rogers. As comedian Gary Gulman might say, “How often do Franklin Boddin and Virgil Rathbun do well? Ne’er. They ne’er do well.” What they find instead is an empty dump. Why, one could almost say that it’s…dead (Heh-heh-heh!).

They may not find Dud, but when they step inside the hunchback’s shack, they discover something else:

“The shack was empty but filled with a sickish-sweet odor that made them look at each other and grimace—and they were barroom veterans of a great many fungoid smells. It reminded Franklin fleetingly of pickles that had lain in a dark crock for many years, until the fluid seeping out of them had turned white. 

“‘Son of a whore,' Virgil said. ‘Worse than gangrene.’”

This is a nice, if disgusting, touch, and it serves to underline something that I've mentioned before and that I'll be returning to again as the novel progresses: the vampires of ‘Salem’s Lot are not sexy. They stink of death, of rot, of putrefaction. You become a vamp in the Lot, you ain’t gonna party ’til you puke. You’re gonna stink of the grave and make someone else puke.

One last thing: the rats. Where did the rats go? Hmmm…we’ll have to keep an eye peeled for the little buggers. They just don’t up and disappear overnight…do they?

You wouldn't do that to us, would ya, Stevie?

Yeesh! Fella like that is capable of anydamnthing!

Well, that’s all for today. For tomorrow, I’d like you to finish Chapter 10. That means reading Sections 8-13. Coming up, we’ve got the scene that most people imagine when they think of ‘Salem’s Lot. It’s a doozy!

In the meantime, as you rinse your mouth out after brushing your teeth, remember that when it comes to fluoride in your water, you have to…