Blog-o-ween 2024: Day 31

Lots of ‘Salem’s Lot

Epilogue

Sunrise: 7:12 AM

Sunset: 6:00 PM

A collection of newspaper articles clipped from the Portland Press-Herald. They all are dated from November 1975 onwards. All concern the strange goings-on in the vicinity of a small town in Maine called Jerusalem’s Lot. Odd sounds have been heard in the night, livestock have been killed, people have gone missing.

The man and the boy from the Prologue arrive in Portland, Maine, in mid-September 1976. They both rest and swim in the pool. The man reads the newspaper, paying close attention to the weather reports. The fire index has been set to its second highest setting. On 6 October, he announces to the boy that it is time.

Ben and Mark — the man and the boy — drive through ‘salem’s Lot. The town is, for all intents and purposes, dead. There are new names on some of the businesses, but there are many more that are simply closed down. Homes have their windows drawn against the sun. Paint is peeling; grass is high.

Ben and Mark drive past the Marsten House on their way to Harmony Hill graveyard. There, they get out of the car and look around. Ben notes that authorities think that it was from just this point that the fire of 1951 started. He tells Mark that if the vampires’ hiding places are destroyed by fire, then they will hide badly the second time, and they could be found. Mark agrees. Ben flicks his burning cigarette into the tall, dry grass. It catches and the wind fans the growing flames…

First things first, Blog-o-weeners — Happy Halloween! Woo-hoo! It is the highest of the High Horror Howl-idays — heh-heh-heh! I hope you are spending the evening either going out trick-and/or-treating and then stuffing your bellies full of Necco Wafers and Charleston Chews afterwards while you watch the Horror-thon or you are handing out candy to all the trick-and/or-treaters before calling it a night to eat whatever is left over in your bowls of Necco Wafers and Charleston Chews before pulling the lever on your Laz-E-Boy and enjoying the Horror-thon. Either way…enjoy the Horror-thon! I hear Silver Shamrock is putting on one helluva a show tonight. Be sure to tune in and wear your masks!

Now…onto the business at hand…

We’ve not only reached the end of the month and the end of Blog-o-ween, but we’ve reached the end of Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot. Can you believe it, kiddies? Holy cats!

Our month-long trip through Stephen King’s 1975 vampire epic ends back where it started. We are with “the man and the boy” (who we now know are Ben Mears and Mark Petrie) as we were 430-odd pages ago. We also get a look at the horrors of the Lot from the outside viewpoint of some newspaper articles just like we did in the Prologue. Heck, we even get some more epigrams from George Seferis.

(Was there a 2-for-1 deal on quotes from the Greek Nobel Prize-winner? Jeepers!)

As I said at the start of Blog-o-ween, I do love when a book uses other forms of media, whether it is in the “meta” form of a screenplay or a play or, as we have here, newspaper clippings. We learned at the beginning that Ben has been keeping tabs on ‘salem’s Lot via the Portland Press-Herald. The clippings we are shown are from the eight months after the killing of Barlow. We know from descriptions earlier in the novel that the town of Jerusalem’s Lot is east of Cumberland and twenty miles north of Portland in the southwest corner of the state. The datelines of the articles Ben clipped suggest that the remaining vampires seem to be slowing spreading their influence throughout the region.

It isn’t only the stories of grinning faces staring in windows or mutilated sheep that Ben is reading. He is also interested in the weather reports. It hasn’t rained in the area since the beginning of September, so the fire index has been set to five. The wind has also picked up. As someone who lives in Southern California, a lack of rainfall mixed with dry foliage and wind makes for dangerous wildfire conditions.

I’ve previously pointed out the influence of Jack Finney’s science fiction-horror classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers on King. In that book, one of the unsettling aspects of the invasion is that the pod people do not take care of the little town of Mill Valley. They seem to be okey-doke with the shoddy, rundown look of the town’s streets and buildings. It’s no different in the Lot:

“They had changed Spencer’s Sundries to a LaVerdiere’s, but it had fared no better. The closed windows were dirty and bare. The Greyhound bus sign was gone. A for-sale sign had fallen askew in the window of the Excellent Café, and all the counter stools had been uprooted and ferried away to some more prosperous lunchroom. Up the street the sign over what had once been a Laundromat still read ‘Barlow and Straker—Fine Furnishings,’ but now the gilt letters were tarnished and they looked out on empty sidewalks. The show window was empty, the deep-pile carpet dirty. Ben thought of Mike Ryerson and wondered if he was still lying in the crate in the back room. The thought made his mouth dry. 

Ben slowed at the crossroads. Up the hill he could see the Norton house, the grass grown long and yellow in front and behind it, where Bill Norton’s brick barbecue had stood. Some of the windows were broken. 

Further up the street he pulled in to the curb and looked into the park. The War Memorial presided over a junglelike growth of bushes and grass. The wading pool had been choked by summer waterweeds. The green pain on the benches was flaked and peeling. The swing chains had rusted, and to ride in one would produce squealing noises unpleasant enough to spoil the fun. The slippery slide had fallen over and lay with its legs sticking stiffly out, like a dead antelope. And perched in one corner of sandbox, a floppy arm trailing on the grass, was some child’s forgotten Raggedy Andy doll. Its shoe button eyes seemed to reflect a black, vapid horror, as if it had seen all the secrets of darkness during its long stay in the sandbox. Perhaps it had.”

Such is the kingdom of the vampires. Not very sexy, is it? Maybe dancing the night away to Bauhaus doesn’t leave a lot of time for painting the park benches.

As Ben and Mark stand on the hillside outside of town, Ben mentions that they are at the spot where many people agree that the fire of 1951 started.

“The wind was blowing from the west. They think maybe a guy got careless with a cigarette. One little cigarette. It took off across the Marshes and no one could stop it.”

But we, dear Blog-o-weeners, know how that fire started, don’t we? Way back in Part 2, Chapter 10: The Lot (III), Section 1, we learn the following:

“They know that a fire burned up half of the town in that smoke-hazed September of 1951, but they don’t know the it was set, and they don’t know that the boy who set it graduated valedictorian of his class in 1953 and went on to make s hundred thousand dollars on Wall Street, and even if they had known, they would not have known the compulsion that drove him to it or the way it ate at his mind for the next twenty years of his life, until a brain embolism hustled him into his grave at the age of forty-six.”

The town has its secrets, and many of those secrets seem intent on remaining hidden. The town will, so to speak, take them to its grave…heh-heh-heh!

Standing on the hills, Ben opens a pack of Pall Mall cigarettes. Back in the day, when I was a smoker, I was a Marlboro man. Most of the cigarettes for sale in the 1990s were filtered brands. I did on occasion, however, mix it up with unfiltered Lucky Strikes and Pall Malls.

Filters were introduced in the 1930s by Viceroy, which was produced by Brown & Williamson. The first really popular filtered brand of cigarettes came out in the 1950s. Kent, produced by Lorillard Tobacco Company, found success thanks to a series of Reader’s Digest articles entitled “Cancer by the Carton.” These articles scared America’s smokers straight…or at least scared them straight to their local tobacconist’s to pick up a carton of filtered ciggies. Unfortunately, America’s smokers were unaware that Kent’s filters contained blue asbestos, the most carcinogenic type of asbestos. 

Whoops!

As he puffs away on all that tasty nicotine goodness (and I hope for the sake of the conflagration he is about to set off, Ben chose unfiltered Pall Malls—they just taste better), Ben looks at the emblem on the package of Pall Malls. Below the crest that features two lions facing each other is a banner with the Latin phrase “in hoc signs vinces” written upon it. This means “In this sign thou shalt conquer.” A rather fitting motto to have at the moment, wouldn’t you say?

People like to poke fun at the endings of King’s books. It: Chapter 2 (2019) made this a running joke as multiple people pointed out to King surrogate Bill Denbrough (James McAvoy) that the endings of his books suck. The ending to ‘Salem’s Lot, however, is perfect in its open-ended ambiguity. Ben and Mark standing on the hill watching the fire spread, knowing that the job ahead of them may be too much for them, but agreeing to do it anyways?

Of course, we know that they may not have succeeded. It is unclear when the events of the short story “One for the Road” take place. At one point, a character says that “Jerusalem’s Lot burned out three years back.” A couple of paragraphs later, another character says, “…two years ago in the span of one dark October month, the Lot went bad.” So either Booth and Tookey go out to help Gerard Lumley find his family in a blizzard in January of 1977 or 1979. Regardless, it would seem that Ben and Mark were not altogether successful in ridding the Lot of its vampire infestation.

I wonder what happened in the months or years that followed the fire…

And that’s it, Blog-o-weeners. That’s all she wrote…or…all that I wrote, at least.

It’s been a blast sitting down everyday and writing about my favorite Halloween reading material. What I hoped would happen happened—by reading the book at a slower pace and picking it a part page by page I learned some new things about how it works as a whole. I also learned some interesting trivia about the real-life events and people and products that King mentioned. I hope you learned a little, too.

Man, I feel like the cowboy in The Big Lebowski…

This month has given me a little more confidence in using this space for future month-long, book-length read-a-long/write-a-longs. Maybe we don’t have to wait twelve months for Blog-o-ween to come around to enjoy each other’s company and a good book again? It would be fun to read another horror classic together. Or, maybe, a classic mystery novel? (I adore the works of Patricia Wentworth.) Keep your eyes peeled for more details…

I am still making my way through tv shows like Wings and Tucker’s Witch. I plan on posting more reviews on a more regular basis in the coming months…

Also, keep your eyes peeled for some original fiction by yours truly. I’ve got some short stories that I think would make a good fit for LARPing Real Life. I am also very, very close to having a completed first draft of a giallo novel in the bank. (There’s always room for giallo!) Maybe a follow-a-long of putting it into shape would be fun to share? Who knows!

All I do know is that when I talk about publishing posts on a more regular schedule, you all should…

Oh…and one more thing before I forget…