Blog-o-ween 2024: Day 26

Lots of ‘Salem’s Lot

Part Three

Chapter 14: The Lot (IV)

Sections 21-32

Sunrise: 7:07 AM

Sunset: 6:05 PM

Ann Norton, who doesn’t seem to be quite herself, arrives at the hospital disheveled and seemingly hypnotized. Mrs. Norton has been sent to kill Matt Burke by Barlow. She enters the hospital armed with a .38 special. She is subdued before she gets very far. It seems a boy entering the hospital warned a man visiting his sister of Ann Norton’s intentions. 

That boy is Mark Petrie. He arrives at Matt’s room with the terrible news of the deaths of his parents. He does not know what became of Father Callahan. 

But we do. 

Father Callahan wanders the streets of the Lot. He stumbles about in a daze, but he is unfrightened. He knows that because he carries Barlow’s mark, no other vampire would dare attack him. He attempts to enter his church, but a bright flash of light throws him back when he touches the doorknob. He is unclean. 

The Fearless Vampire Killers grill Mark over his encounter with Barlow. Mark can remember nothing but a smear of blue chalk on Barlow’s sleeve. It ain’t much, but it’s a clue to the vampire’s hiding spot. In the morning, the FVKs will begin making stakes — hundreds of them — and start the thankless task of hunting down each and every member of the Undead. 

Father Callahan buys a one-way ticket out of the Lot at Spencer’s. He tells Miss Coogan to go straight home after casino up for the night. “Things have gone bad in the Lot now,” he says. 

He isn’t the only one who senses what is happening under cover of darkness in the Lot. Bill Norton is informed that his wife has passed away at the hospital. Mabel Werts sits in her house not looking out the window and, for the first time in a long time, not wanting to. Parkins Gillespie, wearing a cross, a St. Christopher’s medal, and a peace sign, sits up playing solitaire trying hard not to hear the screams in the night. Charlie Rhodes, the school bus driver, is visited by the children whose lives he made a living hell. Reggie Sawyer, too, receives a visitor in the middle of the night, a visitor more interested in saying hello to his wife Bonnie.

Wow! That was a lot, wasn’t it, Blog-o-weeners? Or should I say, “That was the Lot”—heh-heh-heh!

Gotta say, I did not care for Mrs. Norton, but to see her used as an assassin by Barlow is not a pretty picture. As she steps out of her car in the hospital parking lot, King’s description of her is rather heartbreaking:

“She was a very different-looking woman from the lady Ben Mears had met on the first evening Susan had invited him to take dinner with her family. That lady had been medium-tall, dressed in a Greenwood dress that did not scream of money but spoke of material comfort. That lady had not been beautiful but she had been well groomed and pleasant to look at; her graying hair had been permed not long since. 

This woman wore only carpet slippers on her feet. Her legs were bare, and with no Supp-hose to mask them, the varicose veins bulged prominently (although not as prominently as before; some of the pressure had been taken off them). She was wearing a ragged yellow dressing gown over her negligee; her hair was blown in errant sheafs by the rising wind. Her face was pallid, and heavy brown circles lay beneath her eyes.”

Part of the horror that ‘Salem’s Lot exudes is similar to the horror of one of King’s favorite books—Invasion of the Body Snatchers by Jack Finney.

Finney’s novel is about an outside evil that takes over Mill Valley, a small town in Marin County, California. Aliens have landed and begun to assume the form of the humans living in town. They are near perfect simulacra, but for one key difference that the book’s hero notes:

“…the look of Throckmorton Street depressed me. It seemed littered and shabby in the morning sun, a city trash basket stood heaped and unemptied from the day before, the globe of an overhead streetlight was broken, and a few doors down…a shop stood empty. The windows were whitened, and a clumsily painted For Rent sign stood leaning against the glass. It didn’t say where to apply, though, and I had a feeling no one cared whether the store was ever rented again. A smashed wine bottle lay in the entranceway of my building, and the brass nameplate set in the gray stone of the building was mottle and unpolished.”

In other words, the aliens don’t care about keeping up appearances. They are dirty, messy slobs at heart—if they even have a heart!

The appearance of ‘salem’s Lot is very much the same. We’ve been told in the book’s Prologue, that Jerusalem’s Lot is a ghost town. There are empty businesses and boarded up windows all over the place. The Lot, like pleasant little Mill Valley, has been allowed to deteriorate and become run-down and grubby-looking. The town’s residents are very much the same.

As I’ve stated before, these vampires aren’t sexy. They aren’t looking to boogie down at the discotheque. They don’t care about looking pretty and dressing in the latest haute couture. In fact, they don’t seem to care much about anything except satiating their undying hunger. They are, like the buildings on Brock Street, grubby, run-down, and, as Sheriff McClelland from Night of the Living Dead would say…

My favorite moments from today’s reading are the fates of Charlie Rhodes and Reggie Sawyer.  Similar to the way in which the scene of Sandy McDougall feeding her dead son Randy seemed to recall the spirit of those old horror comics of the 1950s — Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, and The Haunt of Fear — their deaths are filled to overflowing with the kind of black-as-midnight, poetic justice that would have made EC Comics publisher William Gaines proud.

Charlie Rhodes’s demise is especially delicious given that he was such a fascist jerk. Thinking he’s going to catch the little creeps who are desecrating his beloved school bus in the act redhanded, he instead stumbles upon a waking nightmare:

“The kid sitting in the driver’s seat with both hands plastered on the horn ring turned to him and smiled crazily. Charlie felt a sickening drop in his gut. It was Richie Boddin. He was white—just as white as a sheet—except for the black chips of coal that were his eyes, and his lips, which were ruby red. 

And his teeth— 

Charlie Rhodes looked down the aisle. 

Was that Mike Philbrook? Audie James? God Almighty, the Griffen boys were down there! Hal and Jack, sitting near the back with hay in their hair. But they don’t ride on my bus! Mary Kate Greigson and Brent Tenney, sitting side by side. She as in a nightgown, he in blue jeans and a flannel shirt that was on backward and inside out, as if he had forgotten how to dress himself. 

And Danny Glick. But—oh, Christ—he was dead; dead for weeks!”

As the children of the Lot descend upon good ol’ Charlie, one can almost hear the Crypt Keeper cackling in the background and maybe saying something about how the kids in ‘salem’s Lot really show a lot of...school spirit…heh-heh-heh! They really believe you should be cruel to your school…heh-heh-heh!

That’s the end of class for today, kiddies. Tomorrow is Sunday, and that means it is another “free day.” In fact, it is our last free day of Blog-o-ween 2024. No reading to do, but we will be discussing ‘Salem’s Lot. We will be talking about the many adaptations that have been made of Stephen King’s 1975 novel. And when it comes to these adaptations, it is best to…