Blog-o-ween 2024: Day 2

 Lots of ‘Salem’s Lot

Part One

Chapter 1: Ben (I)

Chapter 2: Susan (I), Sections 1-3

Sunrise: 6:48 AM

Sunset: 6:34 PM

It is 5 September 1975, and writer Ben Mears is doing what Thomas Wolfe said couldn’t be done: he’s going home again. It’s been 25 years since he was last in Jerusalem’s Lot. He only lived there for four years at that, but in that short span of time the town had placed its mark on him. Arriving, he happily finds that much is unchanged in the Lot. One thing that remains and seems to have a preternatural hold on his imagination is the local haunted house: the Marsten House.

We cut to almost a fortnight later, and Ben is out walking in the park and meets a young woman reading one of his books. This is Susan Norton, and she and Ben hit it off. They head to Spencer’s for some ice cream sodas and to reminisce about the Lot.

Watching them from afar is the local constable Parkins Gillespie and his deputy (part-time) Nolly Gardner. Nolly notes that Susan’s current boyfriend, Floyd Tibbets, won’t like hearing about her going around with another man. Gillespie mentions that Ben tried to rent the Marsten House.

Well, like I said yesterday, we are starting the novel proper today.

We get a quote — the quote — from Shirley Jackson’s famous novel, The Haunting of Hill House, to set the tone for Part One:

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

Brr! Spooky!

As we will learn, ‘salem’s Lot has a Hill House of its own, but I think King is using the quote to describe the town as a whole. Things may look sane and neat in the Lot, but something — not sane, not neat — stalks its streets.

We aren’t told outright, but I think we can add two and two together and come up with the “man” in the prologue is Ben Mears. (No sign of the “boy” yet.) Ben is engaged in the act that all of us attempt when we return home after a long period away. He’s trying to make two pictures taken years apart match up. The first is the ‘salem’s Lot of his childhood, the second is the Lot he finds 25 years later. In Ben’s case, he can slide his memories of the Lot over his present reality like a transparency on an overhead projector (remember those?) and find little difference. Lord knows I’ve played the “Do you remember…” game enough whenever I make it back to Western Pennsylvania. It can be pretty terrifying to discover just how impermanent the people, places, and things of our youth really are.

I like that the choice of car for Ben is a Citroën. Citroën is a French car company founded in 1919 by Andre Citroën (natch). We don’t know what model and year of the car Ben is driving, but that’s not important. What is important is that it’s a foreign car, not a good ol’ Amurrican gas-guzzling, muscle car. Later in the novel, much will be made of Ben’s masculinity (or perceived lack thereof). The fact that he drives a vehicle that is coded as “other” and “unmanly” and “un-American” is just another marker that places Ben on the outside looking in when it comes to ‘salem’s Lot. We will come back to the choice of vehicle for Ben when we talk about Tobe Hooper’s 1979 made-for-tv mini series.

(If you want a little more on the topic of cars and masculinity, maybe you wanna […cough-cough…shameless self-promotion…] read what I had to say about Steven Spielberg’s 1971 film Duel? You can find it on this blog here.)

We get a “meet cute” scene in the park with Ben and Susan. We also get a King staple: the writer who does not read “literary fiction.” Ben is reading a paperback Western, not a Philip Roth or William S. Burroughs or Thomas Pynchon, when he goes over to introduce himself to Susan. We’ll get more on Ben’s literary ambitions and his thoughts on the current state of literature later, but for now we get a sense that Ben is the unpretentious sort. I often wonder what book he was reading, though. Maybe a Zane Gray? Or Louis L’Amour? Or perhaps an Elmore Leonard?

At Spencer’s, over ice cream sodas, we get a strange exchange between Ben and Susan:

“I was born the year of the fire,” Susan said. “The biggest damn thing that ever happened to this town and I slept through it.”

Ben laughed. “That makes you about seven years older than I thought in the park.”

It is 1975. The fire, we will learn, happened in 1951. That makes Susan 24 years old. Ben is admitting that he thought she was 17 when he saw her in the park. He is 32.

There’s another exchange between the two that makes up for the creepiness of the above. Ben asks Susan to the movies. She accepts, and he asks what kind of movies she likes. “Something exciting with a car chase,” she replies. Bless you, Susan Norton, you are a woman after my own heart!

Much in the same way that I like imagining Ben’s choice of Western reading, I often wonder what movie Ben and Susan decided to see. Theatrical distribution was completely different 50 years ago. Movies moved slower through the cultural bloodstream. Maybe they went to see Jaws or Shampoo? Dog Day Afternoon wouldn’t open for another week, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was still a couple of months away from release. Or…maybe they went to see a movie that had only come out the week before…

We close out today’s reading with the town constable. Through him we get a sense of how like a fish bowl the town is. Sitting on the steps of the Municipal Building, Parkins Gillespie can see the comings and goings of just about everyone in the middle of town. This visibility will play an important role in the what is to come. Gillespie seems to know an awful lot about what is happening behind the scenes. He knows that Ben has three books in the library. He knows that Ben tired to lease the Marsten House. (“What is he, crazy?” Nolly says to that.) And he knows that Larry Crockett, the town real estate agent (who we will meet later), has been a busy bee lately. In a town with less than 1,500 people, it is difficult to fly under the radar. People are curious, and people will talk. The way that information is gathered and dispersed is of the utmost importance in this book. This information is a type of currency. There are things in the town’s past that only a select few know. But there are also things that no one knows. There are secrets in ‘salem’s Lot. Dark secrets. Secrets that may ruin individual people and the town as a whole.

Quick little observation before we break for the day. These are New Englanders, so they speak in a certain way. King (as a native New Englander) captures this patois really well. When Nolly asks Gillespie where Ben Mears is living, the constable replies “Down to Eva’s.” Not “Down at” or simply “At,” but “Down to Eva’s.” I find that grammatically fascinating. We will get more of this New Englandese throughout the novel, and I’ll try to catch it and point it out. Maybe we could all trying using it in our day-to-day conversations? For instance, if you ask me where I rent movies from, I’ll tell you “Down to Cinefile.”

That’s enough for today. The end of class bell is about to ring. Come back tomorrow, and we will discuss Part 1, Chapter 2: Susan (I), Sections 4-8. This is another quickie selection, only 18 pages.

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