Blog-o-ween 2024: Day 20

Lots of ‘Salem’s Lot

Free Day #3

There's a Signpost Up Ahead!:

'Salem's Lot and the King Oeuvre

Sunrise: 7:02 AM

Sunset: 6:12 PM

Buon giorno, Blog-o-weeners! It’s Sunday, and that can only mean one thing.

After everything we’ve read so far in ‘Salem’s Lot, you think skipping church is a good thing?!

(Although, I gotta admit, if that comics section on the floor there has Peanuts, Calvin & Hobbes, and Bloom County, I might be tempted to stay home, as well.)

No, it’s Sunday, which means it is time for another of our “Free Days.” You know, those days when we don’t have any reading due, and we can just kick back and relax and think about other things. Well…you can…some of us have to keep the lights on, so for me there is still work to do. But don’t you worry. You go have fun with your friends. I’ll be okay…all by myself…

We’ve already talked about two short stories that happen in ‘salem’s Lot, a prequel — “Jerusalem’s Lot” — and a sequel — “One for the Road”. Today, we are going to take a look at those novels by Stephen King that feature references or characters from ‘Salem’s Lot. Granted, these references are few and far between. The Lot isn’t like Derry (home of Pennywise the Dancing Clown from It) or Castle Rock (setting for several novels such as The Dead Zone and Needful Things), but it does get mentioned from time to time.

For much of King’s oeuvre, the Lot is only a town or a topic passed by quickly. It is a “blink and you miss it” kind of reference. For those of us in the know (which, by the time we hit 31 October, you, too, Dear Reader, shall be one of us…gooble, gobble…we accept you, one of us!…gooble, gobble…

…er…where was I?

Oh, yeah…)

For those of us in the know, when we come upon a mention of “that little town in the southern part of the state where they say no one lives” (Dolores Claibourne) or when a character drives past a sign for the Lot and a shiver wends its way down their spine for no good reason (Pet Semetary), we get a little frisson of dread. It’s like adding a pinch of spice to a cooking dish. It may be just a few grains, but it adds so much flavor!

King throws in Lot references in around a half-dozen or so of his books. Early stories like The Dead Zone (1979), The Body (1982), and the aforementioned Pet Semetary (1983) only mention the Lot by name. Books like Dolores Claibourne (1992), Doctor Sleep (2013), and The Institute (2019) mention the Lot by reputation. In those later novels, the fact that the Lot is a ghost town and is empty under very odd circumstances is presented front and center. Again, these are only brief mentions, but they serve to show how King’s work can be read as one big interconnected story. Nowhere is this most evident than in his magnum opus, The Dark Tower.

Begun in 1970, The Dark Tower came to life as a series of five short stories that were separately published during the late-1970s and early-1980s and eventually gathered together and published in 1982 as a novel, The Gunslinger. Taking inspiration from such diverse texts as Robert Browning’s poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic fantasy The Lord of the Rings, King fused together many genres — the western, fantasy, science fiction, and horror — to tell the tale of Roland of Gilead and his quest to catch The Man in Black. Roland’s adventures would span across eight novels, a novella, and a children’s book and would take nearly thirty-five years of King’s professional life to complete.

So how does the Lot figure into a series of books that take place mainly in an alternate dimension? What do the events in a little town in Maine have to do with the sprawling, epic story of a gunslinger-cum-Knight of the Round Table trying to find The Dark Tower-cum-Holy Grail in a world that has “moved on”?

I’m so glad you asked.

It is in the fifth book of the Dark Tower series that we catch up with and find out what happened to one of the Fearless Vampire Killers of ‘Salem’s Lot: Father Callahan.

I won’t get into the details since we haven’t reached that point in our story just yet, but suffice it to say that things don’t end well for the abbé of the Lot. He doesn’t die, but he certainly wishes he were dead.

We catch up with Callahan in the farming village of Calla Bryn Sturgis in Mid-World, which is for lack of a better term, the plane of existence in which Roland and his ka-tet live.

And, no, I’m not explaining what a ka-tet is…

Callahan tells Roland and his friends about his failure of faith and banishment from ‘salem’s Lot at the hands of Barlow, about his ability to identify “type-3 vampires,” and his eventually murder by the “low men,” which led him to find his way to Mid-World.

…whew…I hope you all are taking notes…

Later, in Book VII, after joining the ka-tet, Callahan travels back to our world and leads an assault on a den of vampiric iniquity known as the Dixie Pig. There, to take a quote from another King novel, he makes his stand.

In between these moments, there are all sorts of crazy literary mash-ups, including (but certainly not limited to) the ka-tet finding a copy of King’s novel ‘Salem’s Lot and the group of adventurers traveling to Maine to meet and save the life of…Stephen King!

Needless to say…it is a wild ride. A wild ride that is much too long and twisty and heartbreaking and exciting to go into any further here. Do yourselves a favor…come 1 November, when the travails of ‘Salem’s Lot are behind us, pick up a copy of The Gunslinger, and take those first steps into Mid-World. You won’t regret it.

Well, that’s all for today, Blog-o-weeners. Tomorrow, we get back on track with ‘Salem’s Lot. Read Part 2, Chapter 12: Mark. We’re gonna find out who snuck up on Susan outside the Marsten House and how being a magic-loving Monster Kid can save your life.

Remember: if you are ever reading a book and one of the characters happens to mention a little, out-of-the-way town where no one lives…well…