Blog-o-ween 2024: Day 5

Lots of ‘Salem’s Lot

Part One

Chapter 4: Danny Glick and Others

Sections 1-7

Sunrise: 6:50 AM

Sunset: 6:30 PM

Danny and Ralphie Glick do not return from their sojourn to Mark Petrie’s house. Their parents are at turns furious and terrified. Mr. Glick begins to retrace his sons’ steps when Danny stumbles out of the woods. He seems drugged, but unharmed. He does not remember anything, only that something bad happened. A week later, Danny is found collapsed in the hallway of his house. He is rushed to the hospital. Meanwhile, a search party combs the woods and surrounding area. There is no sign of Ralphie to be found.

Straker pays Larry Crockett a visit. He gives the real estate man orders to pick up a collection of antiques that are to be taken to the store in the middle of town. Included in the haul is a valuable Hepplewhite sideboard that is to be taken to the Marsten House and locked in the basement. Larry sends Hank Peters and Royal Snow in a truck to do the work. At the Marsten House, Hank Peters sees something he wished he hadn’t.

Short and sweet selection today, no?

Danny Glick’s mystery “illness” is a standard trope of the vampire novel. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, poor Lucy Westenra is fretted over and diagnosed with any number of causes for her paleness, lethargy, and giant canine teeth before Doc Van Helsing shows up. We, the readers, of course, know the cause, and we spend page after page yelling at the characters to throw garlic and crucifixes around the room, and if Lucy doesn’t like it, tell her to lump it! We’ll see if Danny Glick fares better than ol’ Lucy. Maybe he’s just a little anemic.

You know…if I haven’t missed my guess, then Larry Crockett is not 100% on the up and up, is he? In Section 3, we get a detailed look at Larry’s finances and how he accrued his money. Whenever I see a trailer park, I often think of this section and how Larry skirted around not only the Lot’s zoning laws, but also the general business ethics of selling homes to the elderly at usurious rates. Watching Larry sweat it out when Straker comes calling is always enjoyable. What a jerk!

The section detailing the picking up and delivering of the furniture is another of those classic moments where the reader is ahead of the characters. That’s not just a sideboard that Hank and Royal have to take to the Marsten House, is it? I don’t think so. Hank Peters doesn’t really think so either. He notices that the big box and the invoice are missing their custom stamps. I wonder how they get into the country then?

One detail that the keen reader may notice is showing up here and there throughout the novel so far is the presence of rats. Dud Rogers, the custodian of the town dump, shoots rats by the truckload in the hills of trash. Here, Hank Peters and Royal Snow are warned by the guard at the docks to take care of the rats in the warehouse:

“You want to watch out when you go in there. Turn on the lights. There’s rats.” 

“I’ve never seen a rat that wouldn’t run from one of these,” Royal said, and swung his work-booted foot in an arc. 

“These are wharf rats, sonny,” the watchman said dryly. “They’ve run off with bigger men than you.”

Later, after delivering the sideboard (yeah…right…a sideboard), Hank thinks he sees a pile of clothing that matches the description of what Ralphie Glick was wearing when he vanished. He tells Larry about it, but ol’ Lar calms Hank’s nerves with 50 bucks and a shot of Johnny Walker. That night, in bed, Hank has a dream of giant rats pouring out of Hubie Marsden’s open grave.

Keep an eye out for more rat references.

One last thing before I dismiss class for the day — I love the mention of “girlie books from Sweden.” It’s part of a joke that Royal plays on Hank at the warehouse. He reads the invoice aloud, stating that the boxes they are picking up contain, amongst other things, Scandinavian pornography. This was a longstanding trope in American books, movies, and TV. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, movies began to flow out of Sweden that were much more sexually liberated than what Hollywood was putting out. (Pun intended!) These movies offered audiences views of nudity and sexual mores that they just couldn’t get elsewhere. Magazines like Time also painted a portrait of Sweden as sexually hip by reporting on the so-called epidemic of unwed mothers, abortion, and sexual promiscuity happening in the fjords. (Here's a link to the 25 April 1955 story.) After a while, the stereotype of “Swedish porn” was ingrained in the American consciousness, and it became ubiquitous in pop culture.

That’s it for today. As I said, we kept it short and sweet. Tomorrow is the first of our “free days,” so no reading to do. Instead let’s talk about the influences on Stephen King’s decision to drop vampires into small town America.

See all you Blog-o-weeners tomorrow…and remember…