Blog-o-ween 2024: Day 23

Lots of ‘Salem’s Lot

Part Three

Chapter 14: The Lot (IV)

Sections 1-6

Sunrise: 7:05 AM

Sunset: 6:08 PM

It is 6 October, and the Lot wakes up not knowing that the sickness has spread overnight. We move across the town to find that many of the characters we have come to know now sleep in attics and basements during the day.

Mark waits for Ben at Eva Miller’s boardinghouse. He breaks the bad news about Susan to Ben. As they drive along Brooks Road, they come across Susan’s car. She is not in it.

At the hospital, the remaining Fearless Vampire Killers decided what to do next. Daylight is burning, and the sun sets earlier and earlier these days…

Before we get into today’s reading, we at LARPCo would like to wish a very heartfelt and happy Silver Shamrock Day to those who celebrate. Today is, of course, 23 October, which is the day on which the action of Tommy Lee Wallace’s 1982 film Halloween III: Season of the Witch opens. Maybe this year will be the year that Dr. Challis gets that third television station to turn off the Silver Shamrock commercial?

Then again…maybe not. That song is catchy as hell, though, you gotta admit!

Onward!

We are now in Part 3 of ‘Salem’s Lot. That can only mean one thing: more epigrams!

We’ve got quotes from two of the greatest poets these United States have ever produced: Edgar Allan Poe and Bob Dylan. Poe’s “The Haunted Palace” was first published in 1839 in Nathan Brooks’ American Museum. Later, Poe re-used the poem in “The Fall of the House of Usher” as a song written by Roderick Usher. The section quoted here is the final verse and fits the action of the novel perfectly. What else are the denizens of the Lot but a “hideous throng” that “laugh—but smile no more”?

The quote from Dylan is from his song “North Country Blues” from his album The Times They Are a-Changin’. Influenced heavily by the songwriting of Woody Guthrie, “North Country Blues” tells the story of the collapse of a town and family due to the closing of a mine. This particular line is from the first verse of the song:

“Come gather ’round friends

And I’ll tell you a tale

Of when the red iron pits ran plenty

But the cardboard filled windows

And old men on the benches

Tell you now that the whole town is empty”

That line about the “old men on the benches” brings to mind the old men who hang out at Milt Crossen’s store day in and day out. I think this quote and the song that it is from is especially apt, because it supports my idea that the best vampire stories are, on a sub-textual level, about the bloodsucking nature of capitalism. In Dylan’s song, the mine and company feed upon the land and the people on it, sucking the life out of each. The narrator’s family has been decimated by the company — her father and brother have died underground, her husband has taken to drinking when work dries up. Then, one day, having satiated its thirst on the region, the company closes the mine, pulls up stakes, and leaves for South America “[w]here the miners work almost for nothing.” Left behind is an entire town — a ghost town as it were — not very much different from the Lot or Momson, Vermont, which was mentioned in the book’s Prologue.

The third epigram is from a source that King will return to again and again throughout his career: old-school rock’n’roll. A child of the 1950s, King had front row-center seats for the birth of this American art form. This particular quote is attributed as “Old Rock’N’Roll Song.” I’m not sure if that was done to give its provenance an older feel, or nobody felt like looking up who actually wrote the darn thing. After seeing poet Edwin Arlington Robinson called Edward Arlington Robinson in the pages of ‘Salem’s Lot, I’m leaning towards the latter.

These lyrics do have proper authorship, however. They are from the song “Endless Sleep” written by rockabilly artist Jody Reynolds and “Dolores Nance” in 1958. That second name was added to give the song the look of having been written by a professional songwriting team. An example of the time-honored rock’n’roll subgenre of the “Teenage Tragedy,” “Endless Sleep” tells the story of a young woman who, after fighting with her boyfriend, runs down to the shore and throws herself into the water. Demon Records in Los Angeles told Reynolds that they would record and release his single if he’d give it a more upbeat ending. So, he rewrote the last verse as:

“I looked at the sea and it seemed to say

‘You took your baby from me away’

My heart cried out ‘She's mine to keep’

I saved my baby from an endless sleep.”

For fear of alienating my already minuscule audience further — especially after my controversial “sexy vampires are dumb” opinion — I would like to go on record as saying the marriage between horror and heavy metal is equally dumb. It doesn’t make any sense to me. The best horror is when something unnatural quietly appears in the midst of natural surroundings. The strangeness sort of creeps up on you and gets under your skin. I don’t find adding an Alice Cooper or Dokken song to a scene particularly horrifying. It’s too on the nose, and it’s just noise. (It pained me to write that, because I love “Teenage Frankenstein” and “Dream Warriors” as songs on their own so much!)

But the ironic use of those moldie, golden oldies of yesteryear? Perfection, baby. Maybe it's the lyrics about obsessive love or the juxtaposition of voices happily singing in harmony while something horrifying happens on screen, but the songs of the 1950s and pre-Beatles 1960s are just inherently creepy to my ears. "Mr. Sandman" by The Chordettes in Halloween II is a good example. Sure, it only plays at the beginning and end of the movie, but it puts everything in between in a new, weird groove.

For those of you who stuck around after that diatribe…let us move on to Chapter 14.

This is another of “The Lot” chapters, which means we get a wide-angle view of the town. And said view is not pretty.

“No one pronounced Jerusalem’s Lot dead on the morning of October 6; no one knew it was…”

In a series of brief vignettes, we discover that Ruthie Crockett and Dud Rogers sleep together in an abandoned freezer in the dump, that the town librarian Loretta Starcher sleeps on the library’s third floor, that Hal Griffen’s hatred of school has become academic, and that Sheriff McCaslin found more than he bargained for when he discovered Susan’s car on Brooks Road. The vampires are spreading across the Lot quickly.

Meanwhile, Mark Petrie tracks down Ben and informs him of Susan’s fate. Ben is immediately thrust back in time to the accident that killed his wife, Miranda. We see what really happened that night, and it is nothing like the stories in the tabloid rags that Mabel Werts read to Mrs. Norton.

Mark and Ben go to the hospital and tell the rest of the Fearless Vampire Killers. There, we learn a scrap of vampire folklore that I had never heard before:

“‘…Straker performed another service for his Master before Barlow ever arrived. Do any of you know what?’ 

For a moment there was silence, and then Mark said quite distinctly, ‘The dog that man found on the cemetery gate.’ 

‘What?’ Jimmy said. ‘Why? Why would he do that?’ 

‘The white eyes,’ Mark said, and then looked questioningly at Matt, who was nodding with some surprise. 

‘All last night I nodded over these books, not knowing we had a scholar in our midst.” The boy blushed a little. ‘What Mark says is exactly right. According to several of the standard references on folklore and the supernatural, one way to frighten a vampire away is to paint white “angel eyes” over the real eyes of a black dog. Win’s Doc was all black except for two white patches. Win used to call them his headlights—they were directly over his eyes. He let the dog run at night. Straker must have spotted it, killed it, and then hung it on the cemetery gate.’”

The Monster Kid strikes again!

And as our small group of vampire hunters begins to gather their resolve, let us call it a day. Tomorrow, we will continue with Part 3, Chapter 14: The Lot (IV), Sections 7-15. Get your rest, kiddies, because there’s a big job to do in the coming sections. Ben and Susan have a reunion of sorts. You’re gonna need your strength.

In the meantime, don’t forget to celebrate Silver Shamrock Day. I hear that Conal Cochran is giving free tours of his mask manufacturing plant out in Santa Mira, CA. And if he offers to show you his “Final Process,” just…