Lots of ‘Salem’s Lot
Part Three
Chapter 14: The Lot (IV)
Sections 41-47
Jimmy and Mark pull into the parking lot of Eva Miller’s boarding house. The smell of corruption is thick in the air. They go inside. While Mark searches for a flashlight, Jimmy finds the door to the basement. He enters…then the screams begin.
Later, after escaping the house, Mark drives Jimmy’s car rather haphazardly across town. He finds Ben walking down Jointner Avenue. Mark tells him what happened to Jimmy: the stairs leading down to Eva’s basement had been removed. At the bottom, on the floor, boards with knives sticking up from them awaited Jimmy when he fell.
Ben and Mark find Parkins Gillespie, but the Constable wants nothing to do with them. He knows that vampires are loose in the Lot, he knows that the town is dying, but he still won’t help.
Ben and Mark get back to Eva’s. It is ten after six; the sun has nearly set. They stand at the top of the cellar looking down and trying to steel themselves against what is to come…
Didn’t I tell you that we’d find out what happened to the rats in the town dump? And what did happen to them?
Abso-freaking-lutely nothing!
In his book on the history of horror, Danse Macabre, King tells the story of writing a scene so horrible, so disgusting, so gross, that his editor at Doubleday, Bill Thompson, suggested he remove it. What was the scene? What could be so barf-ilicious that an editor would have the temerity to ask the King of Horror to 86 it?
Rats, man, rats!
As King tells it:
“The scenes from Dracula which I chose to retool for my own book were the ones which impressed me the most deeply, the ones Stoker seemed to have written at a fever pitch. There are others, but the one…that never made it into the finished book was a play on Stoker’s use of rats in Dracula. In Stoker’s novel, the Fearless Vampire Hunters…enter the basement of Carfax, the Count’s English house. The Count himself has long since split the scene, but he has left some of his traveling coffins (boxes full of his native earth), and another nasty surprise. Very shortly after the F.V.H.s enter, the basement is crawling with rats. According to the lore (and in his long novel, Stoker martial a formidable amount of vampire lore), a vampire has the ability to command the lesser animals—cats, rats, weasels (and possibly republicans, ha-ha). It is Dracula who has sent these rats to give our heroes a hard time.
…I decided I would let Barlow…also use rats, and to that end I gave the town of Jerusalem’s Lot an open dump, where there are lots of rats. I played on the presence of the rats there several times in the first couple of hundred pages on the novel, and to his day I sometimes get letters asking if I just forgot about the rats, or tried to use them to create atmosphere, or what.
…
In the first draft manuscript…I had Jimmy go down the stairs and discover—too late—that Barlow had called all the rats from the dump to the cellar of Eva Miller’s boarding house. There was a regular HoJo for rats down there, and Jimmy Cody became the main course. They attack Jimmy in their hundreds, and we are treated (if that is the word) to a picture of the good doctor struggling back up the stairs, covered with rats. They are down his shirt, crawling in his hair, biting his neck and arms. When he opens his mouth to yell Mark a warning, one of them runs into his mouth and lodges there, squirming.
I was delighted with the scene as written because it gave me a chance to combine Dracula-lore and E.C.-lore into one. My editor felt that it was, to put it frankly, out to lunch, and I was eventually persuaded to see it his way. Perhaps he was even right.”
No, goldurnit, he was not right!
In a world where George Lucas thinks its okay to stick meaningless, dumb, CGI atrocities into Star Wars decades after it was released because it was his “original vision” (yeah, right), the fact that King has never gone back and put that scene of Jimmy vs. the rats back where it belongs infuriates me.
Luckily, we do have access to the scene as written. In the Illustrated Edition of ‘Salem’s Lot, King kindly gives us a section of “deleted scenes.” For the most part, these are scraps of scenes that didn’t make it through the editing process. They were rightly excised.
The scene of Jimmy covered in rats, however, stands out. It is, in King’s words, “out to lunch” — and I love it! It has a pure, Tales from the Crypt gross out factor that really elevates the stakes (Pun intended! Heh-heh-heh!) of what our heroes are up against.
One of the things that maybe gets lost in translation from the written word to the mind of the reader is Mark’s age. As the action unfolds and comes at us faster and faster, I think the reader loses sight of the fact that Mark is only twelve-years-old. So when he leaves Eva’s boarding house and begins screaming, it is a child trying to cope with the horrors he’s just witnessed. It is also a child who gets behind the wheel of Jimmy’s Buick and drives off. I think readers often forget about Mark’s true age and picture an older teenager. For myself, it is hard not to picture actor Lance Kerwin from Tobe Hooper’s 1979 tv miniseries, who was eighteen at the time of filming.
All that to say that Ben’s use of Mark dead parents to goad the child into action is really harsh.
“‘I’m scared,’ Ben said, ‘but I’m mad, too. I lost a girl I liked one hell of a lot. I loved her, I guess. We both lost Jimmy. You lost your mother and father. They’re lying in your living room under a dust cover from your sofa.’ He pushed himself to a final brutality. ‘Want to go back and look?’
Mark winced away from him, his face horrified and hurt.”
Jeepers, Ben—cool out! He’s just a kid!
One last thing before I let you out of class for the day—Parkins Gillespie. When Ben and Mark ask for his help, he refuses. In fact, he seems resigned to the fact that the Lot has become what it has. He even seems to think that the Lot deserves its fate:
“Ben heard himself say remotely, ‘You gutless creep. You cowardly piece of shit. This town is still alive and you’re running out on it.’
‘It ain’t alive,’ Parkins said, lighting his smoke with a wooden kitchen match. ‘That’s why he came here. It’s dead, like him. Has been for twenty years or more. Whole country’s goin’ up the same way. Me and Nolly went to a drive-in show up in Falmouth a couple of weeks ago, just before they closed her down for the season. I seen more blood and killin’s in that first Western than I seen both years in Korea. Kids was eatin’ popcorn and cheering’ em on.’ He gestured vaguely at the town, now lying unnaturally gilded in the broken rays of the westering sun, like a dream village. ‘They prob’ly like bein’ vampires…’”
Parkins’s complaint is an old one, it seems—namely that the country is going to hell in a hand basket because of violence in media. Whether its violent movies or violent tv shows or violent video games or violent lyrics in music, it is always easy to point elsewhere and lay blame for society’s woes.
The Constable, however, may be on to something. Once again, if I may make the point I keep returning to, capitalism has had its way with the Lot for years. Now its Barlow’s turn. The sawmill collapsed and jobs dried up. The Lot is just a bedroom community for neighboring towns. There is no lifeblood coursing through the Lot. The town was dead before Barlow showed up. And Barlow showed up because it was dead. The people of the town were already vampires in a sense. They just didn’t know it.
Well…if you’ll give me a second to get down off’n my high horse…there we go…that’s all for today, Blog-o-weeners. We have two days left—two days! Can you believe it? Ben and Mark stand at the top of the cellar stairs looking down into the darkness. What will they find when they go below? You’ll just have to read Part 3, Chapter 14: The Lot (IV). Sections 48-50 and Chapter 15: Ben and Mark to find out.
We know that Ben and Mark won’t find any rats down there, but what they do find…well…they should…
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