Blog-o-ween 2024: Day 6

Lots of ‘Salem’s Lot

Free Day #1

Dracula & Peyton Place:

Two Great Tastes that Taste Great Together!

Sunrise: 6:51 AM

Sunset: 6:29 PM

Well, kiddies, we’ve made it to the first milestone of Blog-o-ween 2024. I promised when I handed out the syllabus for this year’s Spooky Season get-together that we’d take a little break from the action every Sunday. We’d put the goings-on in ‘salem’s Lot on pause and take a look at the novel from some other, outside perspectives. Well…today’s Sunday…and the ongoing search for Ralphie Glick can wait until tomorrow (something tells me, however, that the search might be in vain, that something other than quicksand or sex “preeverts” got a hold of him)…so let’s take a breather and talk about how and why America’s favorite storyteller decided to write ‘Salem’s Lot.

I love genre. One of the things I love about it is how malleable it can be. Sure, by definition, genre is a set of agreed-upon conventions developed over time. There are certain rules you have to follow in order for a piece of music, a short story, or a film to be considered a member of a certain genre. However, those rules and conventions that separate two genres can also be combined to give rise to new genres and sub-genres. I mean, if you bring together a group of people who ride horses, carry six-shooters, and are planning on robbing a train, you’ve probably got yourself something in the “Western” genre. But…if what our band of outlaws steals from the train isn’t gold like they thought but is a casket carrying the corpse of a bloodsucking vampire…well, then you’ve taken the “Horror” genre and mushed it into the “Western” to make something new. They’re two great tastes that taste great together!

‘Salem’s Lot is a lot like those Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. In the early 1970s, Stephen King was a high school teacher. Teaching a class on fantasy and science fiction (where were such classes when I was in high school?!), King returned to a novel he hadn’t read since he was a boy: Bram Stoker’s Dracula. He was delighted to find that the book still had teeth. (Pun intended! Heh-heh-heh!) One night, he mused aloud to his wife Tabitha about how the story would have been different had the Count shown up in the present-day United States. “Probably he’d land in New York and be killed by a taxicab, like Margaret Mitchell in Atlanta,” King joked.

Tabitha took the idea seriously, however. “What if he came here, to Maine?” she asked. “What if he came to the country? After all, isn’t that where his castle was? In the Transylvanian countryside.”

(That’s at least two of King’s books that owe a deep gratitude to Tabitha King for either saving — as in the case of Carrie, when she pulled it out of the trash and told him to keep working on it — or getting the literary ball rolling. Thank you, Mrs. King!)

So, King set to work, using the rules and conventions of the vampire genre as set forth by Bram Stoker to weave his own tale. There are scenes and characters throughout the book (some we’ve already read) that are neat facsimiles of events in Stoker’s novel. As the story develops, you’ll hear echoes of Stoker’s band of Fearless Vampire Killers in the men and women who gather around Ben Mears, Matthew Burke, and Susan Norton in ‘Salem’s Lot.

Dracula wasn’t the only horror reference point King used in writing. Ol’ Stevie grew up in the 1950s during the boom period of the American horror comic. Titles such as EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, and The Haunt of Fear were filled with werewolves, shambling corpses, and vampires. These were morality tales in which the ne’er-do-wells got it in the end in the most gruesome way possible. Many of these poetic justice endings were so gruesome that the government decided to get involved…you know…for the sake of the children.

There is another work of art that King referred to while writing. We are talking about the blending of genre, after all. The construction of ‘salem’s Lot and its population owes a debt to a novel written in the 1950s. Almost completely forgotten today, it and its sequel were the bases of two major motion pictures, a primetime television series, a daytime soap opera, and two made-for-tv movies. It’s name entered the lexicon to denote any picturesque small town that held disturbing and scandalous secrets.

The novel was Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place.

Peyton Place is the story of a small New England town that seems picture perfect on the outside, but when the surface is scratched just a little, ugliness in the form of incest, adultery, abortion, and murder seep forth.

“Incest…adultery…abortion…and murder…Oh, my!”

You can see how such a story was used by King. ‘Salem’s Lot looks like any other cute, small New England town sitting just off the interstate. But, as we’ve already seen, even small towns can hold big secrets. We’ve got adultery with Bonnie Sawyer and her young telephone lineman Corey Bryant. We’ve got the murder and suicide of Hubert Marsten and his wife Birdie. We’ve got child abuse in the McDougall trailer. We’ve got the bad business dealings of Larry Crockett. As we continue to read the novel, we’ll find out more and more terrible secrets. All of these characters and their shortcomings — if not out-and-out crimes — were midwifed by King from Metalious’s novel.

That, in a nutshell, is a look at Stephen King’s influences while writing ‘Salem’s Lot. Next Sunday, we will look at a couple of short stories that are “Lot adjacent.” This novel wasn’t the only time King wrote about that little New England town. But, as I said, that’s for next Sunday. For tomorrow, it’s back to the books for you! You’ll need to finish Chapter 4 — specifically Part 1, Chapter 4: Danny Glick and Others, Sections 8-14. It’s only 13 pages.

I’ll see all you Blog-o-weeners tomorrow bright and early…and remember…