Blog-o-ween 2024: Day 8

Lots of ‘Salem’s Lot

Part One

Chapter 5: Ben (II)

Sunrise: 6:53 AM

Sunset: 6:26 PM

It is 25 September. It has been three weeks since Ben returned to ‘salem’s Lot. He is having dinner with the Nortons again. Talk turns to the troubles that the Glicks are experiencing. Unbeknownst to Bill and Ben, it isn’t just the disappearance of their son, Ralphie, that Ann and Susan are talking about. The gossip mill has passed around the information that the Glicks’ other son, Danny, died in the hospital.

Susan and Ben go for a walk…and a little more (if you catch my meaning)…and afterwards Ben tells Susan more about his book. He talks about what he discovered about Hubert Marsten. The man was a contract killer for the mob who was “retired” to ‘salem’s Lot. Soon after he and his wife built and moved into the house that bears their name, four children disappeared under mysterious circumstances. None were ever found.

Later, Ben heads out to Dell’s, the local watering hole. There, he meets Weasel Craig and Matt Burke. Matt invites Ben to speak to his students. Matt and Ben discuss the Marsten House while poor Weasel passes out in the John.

While Ben and Bill Norton seem to get along just fine (they are hard and fast beer-drinkin’, badminton-playin’, Boston Red Sox-watchin’ buddies by now), Mrs. Norton just does not cotton to the new man in her daughter’s life. King says of Ann Norton: “She distrusted the creative male with an instinctive small-town dislike (one that Edward Arlington Robinson or Sherwood Anderson would have recognized at once)…”

Who now?

Edwin Arlington Robinson (not Edward — who the heck fact-checked this thing?!) was a Pulitzer Prize winning poet and playwright. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize four times, and lost out four times. He’s like the Buffalo Bills of literature. Born in small-town Maine, Robinson described his childhood as “stark and unhappy,” which may be why his later work is laced with pessimism and paints a portrait of “an American dream gone awry.” Robinson created the fictional village of “Tilbery Town” in which many of poems are set.

Sherwood Anderson may be more well-known than Edwin Arlington Robinson. He is best known for his collection of short stories entitled Winesburg, Ohio, although the man also wrote novels, poetry, drama, and non-fiction. Anderson, like Robinson, was born in a small town. Born in 1876, he was a businessman for much of his early life. This life came to an end, however, in November, 1912, when Anderson, after dictating several letters, mumbled aloud to his secretary “I feel as though my feet were wet, and they keep getting wetter.” He left the office and four days later stumbled into a pharmacist’s asking the man to help him figure out his identity. This breakdown led him to give up his previous identity as a businessman and to try his hand at the creative life. His first novel was published four years later, and three years after that, he published the story cycle he is most remembered for.

Later in this scene, Susan mentions something rather vague about an event that took place in Texas.

“Do you think the other Glick boy will ever show up alive?” Bill asked Ben. 

“No,” Ben said. “I think he’s dead, too.” 

“Like that thing in Houston two years ago,” Susan said. “If he’s dead, I almost hope they don’t find him. Whoever could do something like that to a little, defenseless boy—”

Susan is referring to a real-life series of murders by Dean Arnold Corll, an American serial killer and sex offender who abducted, raped, tortured, and murdered a minimum of twenty-eight teenage boys and young men between 1970 and 1973 in Houston and Pasadena, Texas. Corll, also known as “The Candy Man” and “The Pied Piper” because he and his family had previously owned and operated a candy factory, worked with two teenaged accomplices, one of whom finally killed him on 8 August 1973.

Susan’s mentioning of those murders may be closer to the truth than she realizes. Ben, however, has already thought of the connections between the Ralphie Glick’s disappearance and the Marsten House’s newest owners. Ol’ Hubie, it seems, wasn’t just a retired businessman looking to live the simple life. Ben’s research has revealed Marsten to be a contract killer for the mob who was put out to pasture. After moving to ‘salem’s Lot, four children went missing like Ralphie Glick.

Susan is unaware of these rumors, but Matt Burke later confirms that he, too, had begun to make the connections. Others in the town have also put two and two together. The town has its secrets, and there are those in the Lot who know them, who keep them, who tend to them.

One last little tidbit before we call it a day. Weasel Craig, the town drunk, has his secrets, too. In an earlier chapter (Chapter 3: The Lot (I), Section 8), it is revealed that he and Eva Miller shared a bed for years after the death of her husband. Weasel, Matt says, “won a Silver Star at Anzio in World War II.”

The Silver Star is the United States Armed Forces' third-highest military decoration for valor in combat. It is awarded for gallantry in action and/or for singular acts of valor or heroism over a brief period, such as one or two days of a battle.

Weasel’s Silver Star came while fighting in the Battle of Anzio. Anzio is a small village around 32 miles south of Rome, Italy. The is battle commenced on 22 January 1944, and concluded with the taking of Rome on 4 June 1944. Other notable people who took part in the battle were James Arness (who portrayed Marshal Matt Dillon on TV’s Gunsmoke), Christopher Lee (do I have to tell you who Chris Lee was?), Audie Murphy (Medal of Honor winner who went on to have a career in Hollywood), and Ernie Pyle (Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and war correspondent).

Weasel Craig, it seems, was in good company.

That’s all for today, class. Let’s pick things back up with Part 1, Chapter 6: The Lot (II): Sections 1-4. Tomorrow, we have one of the more famous scenes in ‘Salem’s Lot. It takes place in the cemetery after Danny Glick’s funeral. It’s doozy!

Try to get to sleep if you can afterwards, and remember even in dreams you must…