Blog-o-ween 2024: Day 26

Lots of ‘Salem’s Lot

Part Three

Chapter 14: The Lot (IV)

Sections 21-32

Sunrise: 7:07 AM

Sunset: 6:05 PM

Ann Norton, who doesn’t seem to be quite herself, arrives at the hospital disheveled and seemingly hypnotized. Mrs. Norton has been sent to kill Matt Burke by Barlow. She enters the hospital armed with a .38 special. She is subdued before she gets very far. It seems a boy entering the hospital warned a man visiting his sister of Ann Norton’s intentions. 

That boy is Mark Petrie. He arrives at Matt’s room with the terrible news of the deaths of his parents. He does not know what became of Father Callahan. 

But we do. 

Father Callahan wanders the streets of the Lot. He stumbles about in a daze, but he is unfrightened. He knows that because he carries Barlow’s mark, no other vampire would dare attack him. He attempts to enter his church, but a bright flash of light throws him back when he touches the doorknob. He is unclean. 

The Fearless Vampire Killers grill Mark over his encounter with Barlow. Mark can remember nothing but a smear of blue chalk on Barlow’s sleeve. It ain’t much, but it’s a clue to the vampire’s hiding spot. In the morning, the FVKs will begin making stakes — hundreds of them — and start the thankless task of hunting down each and every member of the Undead. 

Father Callahan buys a one-way ticket out of the Lot at Spencer’s. He tells Miss Coogan to go straight home after casino up for the night. “Things have gone bad in the Lot now,” he says. 

He isn’t the only one who senses what is happening under cover of darkness in the Lot. Bill Norton is informed that his wife has passed away at the hospital. Mabel Werts sits in her house not looking out the window and, for the first time in a long time, not wanting to. Parkins Gillespie, wearing a cross, a St. Christopher’s medal, and a peace sign, sits up playing solitaire trying hard not to hear the screams in the night. Charlie Rhodes, the school bus driver, is visited by the children whose lives he made a living hell. Reggie Sawyer, too, receives a visitor in the middle of the night, a visitor more interested in saying hello to his wife Bonnie.

Wow! That was a lot, wasn’t it, Blog-o-weeners? Or should I say, “That was the Lot”—heh-heh-heh!

Gotta say, I did not care for Mrs. Norton, but to see her used as an assassin by Barlow is not a pretty picture. As she steps out of her car in the hospital parking lot, King’s description of her is rather heartbreaking:

“She was a very different-looking woman from the lady Ben Mears had met on the first evening Susan had invited him to take dinner with her family. That lady had been medium-tall, dressed in a Greenwood dress that did not scream of money but spoke of material comfort. That lady had not been beautiful but she had been well groomed and pleasant to look at; her graying hair had been permed not long since. 

This woman wore only carpet slippers on her feet. Her legs were bare, and with no Supp-hose to mask them, the varicose veins bulged prominently (although not as prominently as before; some of the pressure had been taken off them). She was wearing a ragged yellow dressing gown over her negligee; her hair was blown in errant sheafs by the rising wind. Her face was pallid, and heavy brown circles lay beneath her eyes.”

Part of the horror that ‘Salem’s Lot exudes is similar to the horror of one of King’s favorite books—Invasion of the Body Snatchers by Jack Finney.

Finney’s novel is about an outside evil that takes over Mill Valley, a small town in Marin County, California. Aliens have landed and begun to assume the form of the humans living in town. They are near perfect simulacra, but for one key difference that the book’s hero notes:

“…the look of Throckmorton Street depressed me. It seemed littered and shabby in the morning sun, a city trash basket stood heaped and unemptied from the day before, the globe of an overhead streetlight was broken, and a few doors down…a shop stood empty. The windows were whitened, and a clumsily painted For Rent sign stood leaning against the glass. It didn’t say where to apply, though, and I had a feeling no one cared whether the store was ever rented again. A smashed wine bottle lay in the entranceway of my building, and the brass nameplate set in the gray stone of the building was mottle and unpolished.”

In other words, the aliens don’t care about keeping up appearances. They are dirty, messy slobs at heart—if they even have a heart!

The appearance of ‘salem’s Lot is very much the same. We’ve been told in the book’s Prologue, that Jerusalem’s Lot is a ghost town. There are empty businesses and boarded up windows all over the place. The Lot, like pleasant little Mill Valley, has been allowed to deteriorate and become run-down and grubby-looking. The town’s residents are very much the same.

As I’ve stated before, these vampires aren’t sexy. They aren’t looking to boogie down at the discotheque. They don’t care about looking pretty and dressing in the latest haute couture. In fact, they don’t seem to care much about anything except satiating their undying hunger. They are, like the buildings on Brock Street, grubby, run-down, and, as Sheriff McClelland from Night of the Living Dead would say…

My favorite moments from today’s reading are the fates of Charlie Rhodes and Reggie Sawyer.  Similar to the way in which the scene of Sandy McDougall feeding her dead son Randy seemed to recall the spirit of those old horror comics of the 1950s — Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, and The Haunt of Fear — their deaths are filled to overflowing with the kind of black-as-midnight, poetic justice that would have made EC Comics publisher William Gaines proud.

Charlie Rhodes’s demise is especially delicious given that he was such a fascist jerk. Thinking he’s going to catch the little creeps who are desecrating his beloved school bus in the act redhanded, he instead stumbles upon a waking nightmare:

“The kid sitting in the driver’s seat with both hands plastered on the horn ring turned to him and smiled crazily. Charlie felt a sickening drop in his gut. It was Richie Boddin. He was white—just as white as a sheet—except for the black chips of coal that were his eyes, and his lips, which were ruby red. 

And his teeth— 

Charlie Rhodes looked down the aisle. 

Was that Mike Philbrook? Audie James? God Almighty, the Griffen boys were down there! Hal and Jack, sitting near the back with hay in their hair. But they don’t ride on my bus! Mary Kate Greigson and Brent Tenney, sitting side by side. She as in a nightgown, he in blue jeans and a flannel shirt that was on backward and inside out, as if he had forgotten how to dress himself. 

And Danny Glick. But—oh, Christ—he was dead; dead for weeks!”

As the children of the Lot descend upon good ol’ Charlie, one can almost hear the Crypt Keeper cackling in the background and maybe saying something about how the kids in ‘salem’s Lot really show a lot of...school spirit…heh-heh-heh! They really believe you should be cruel to your school…heh-heh-heh!

That’s the end of class for today, kiddies. Tomorrow is Sunday, and that means it is another “free day.” In fact, it is our last free day of Blog-o-ween 2024. No reading to do, but we will be discussing ‘Salem’s Lot. We will be talking about the many adaptations that have been made of Stephen King’s 1975 novel. And when it comes to these adaptations, it is best to…

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…

Blog-o-ween 2023: "The Thing from the Grave!" by Al Feldstein

Life is unfair. Things may seem bad now — and they are pretty terrible — but believe me when I tell you that what we are living through now is nothing new, nothing out of the ordinary. Things have always been bad. Prejudice, war, pogroms, and sheer, mindless brutality have been the way of the world from time immemorial. The scales of justice have always been off-balance, and they’ve never tipped in favor of the innocent. Any gains that have been made by the victims of our collective bloody history have had to be torn from the breast of the powerful, the wealthy, and the comfortable. And those gains are never won once and for all. They have to be fought for again and again and again.

Two quotes that I think succinctly sum up the above are from Henrik Ibsen and, my personal favorite writer, Harlan Ellison (and we’ll be hearing more from ol’ Uncle Harlan in a future Blog-o-ween post):

“To live is to war with trolls.”

—Henrik Ibsen

and

“The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.”

—Harlan Ellison

In other words, living is exhausting work, folks. You have to fight for it every step of the way. And the people you have to fight against are just a bunch of dumb brutes. Get used to it.

But we can’t be at war with the stupidity of the world twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, can we? Heck, no! So where can we find a place to rest our heads awhile in between battles? Who can give us succor in these trying times? What can give our batteries the recharge they need so we can get back to the barricades and fight on?

Sure, a trip to Rick’s Café Américain would do you wonders. I hear they have a helluva band. But Rick’s is all the way over in Casablanca. Might I suggest something closer to home? What would you say to a visit to your local comic books store? And once there, what would you say when I tell you that the relief you seek is to be found in the pages of a seventy-year-old horror comic?

Begun in the 1940s by Max Gaines, Educational Comics was meant to market comics about science, history, and the Bible to schools and churches. Following his death in a boating accident in 1947, Max Gaines’s place at the head of the company was taken over by his son, William. And that’s when things really started to cook.

Under William Gaines’s guidance Educational Comics became Entertaining Comics — or EC for short — and the company collected a stable of writers and artists that I don’t think has really been equalled since. Editors Al Feldstein and Harvey Kurtzman (who also served as writers and artists) led a ragtag group of freelancers that included Johnny Craig, Reed Crandall, Jack Davis, Graham Ingels, Joe Orlando, and Wally Wood. Beginning in 1950, they started what was known as “The New Trend.”

The comics of this New Trend dealt with more mature matters. Titles like Tales from the Crypt, Frontline Combat, Shock SuspenStories, and Weird Science brought the kids who feverishly read them under the covers at night or tucked into the center of more acceptable reading fare stories about racial equality, anti-war advocacy, nuclear disarmament, and environmentalism. Heady stuff for the children of pre-Civil Rights Era America!

It was in EC’s horror line — Tales from the Crypt, The Haunt of Fear, and The Vault of Horror — that these social issues were melded with a sense of (midnight) black humor and poetic justice. The baddies in these comics were usually greedy jerks who killed innocent people in order to get what they wanted. In turn, their cupidity was rewarded by the universe through the most ironic means. If that didn’t work, then the universe wasn’t above sending in a supernatural agent to rebalance the scales. Anything to get the job done, amirite?

Take, for instance, today’s story. Written and drawn by Al Feldstein (with colors done by Joshua G. Jones), “The Thing from the Grave” is the quintessential Tales from the Crypt story. It’s just the kind of tale to give the heart a lift...right out of your chest! Heh-heh-heh!

It’s a tale as old as time: Bill and Jim are in love with the same woman. Laura, much to Bill’s chagrin, marries Jim. Determined to have her, Bill waylays Jim one night on a dark and lonely road. And he isn’t looking for a ride into town either. Bill kills Jim, buries his body, and dumps his car into a ravine. Now, all Bill has to do is sit back and wait for Laura to get over Jim’s disappearance, and then it’s a one-way trip for the two of them to Smooch City, if you know what I mean.

And I think you do.

Unfortunately for Bill, Laura isn’t giving up on Jim. She just knows that something terrible has happened to him. What’s a fella to do when all his best laid plans have failed? You guessed it — it’s time to confess everything to the woman whose husband you’ve murdered, lock her in a cabin, and set fire to it!

Granted, it’s a strange solution, but this is a complex problem. Bill doesn’t have time to think things through!

How is Laura going to get out of this predicament? Did Jim really mean it when he said that if Laura was ever in any danger then he would save her...no matter what? Who — or what — is the thing that comes shambling out of the forest and chases Bill over hill and dale? Well, I’ll give you a hint, kiddies: it ain’t a woodchuck, that’s for sure.

“The Thing from the Grave” has got it all: a lover’s triangle, deceit, murder, shallow graves, arson, and retribution in the form of an undead corpse with love in its heart...if not skin on its face. You can’t have everything, I suppose.

The poetic justice of “The Thing from the Grave” is very tasty. As is the simplicity of the way the story unfolds. Over each of the seven pages (eight, really, but the first one is just a full-page intro), Feldstein uses the seven panels per page at his disposal to tell his story in the most economical way imaginable. Page one: Laura chooses Jim, Bill gets mad, Jim heads off in his car. Page two: Bill meets Jim in the dark, Bill kills Jim, Bill gets rid of the body and the car. Page three: Laura refuses to give up on Jim, Bill knows he’s beat and confesses. And so on. Boom-boom-boom. All killer and no filler.

Sure this doesn’t give the writer much time or space to deliver characters of the greatest depth and gravitas, but look at it this way: what Feldstein is telling us is simply another version of a campfire tale. A tale remarkably like “The Hook.” Go back to the first day of this year’s Blog-o-ween and refamiliarize yourself with that little ditty. Who are the boy and the girl in that story, what are their dreams, their desires, their fears? What about the killer? How did he end up losing his hand? How did he end up in an insane asylum? How did he escape? There’s no answer to any of those questions (except, perhaps, for the boy’s desire, which is a trip to Smoochville with his girl), and we don’t need ‘em. All we need is for the story, painted in broad strokes, to move ahead smoothly on its rails to its dénouement. The end. I think the best horror stories tend to be the shortest and sharpest ones. Ending them with the baddie getting buried alive don’t hurt either.

So, that’s our Blog-o-ween story for today. You can find EC’s comics at your local library. Services like Hoopla make it easy to pick up electronic versions of nearly the entire EC catalog. Check ‘em out today to stoke your inner flame until it’s an out-of-control conflagration. Winter is coming, and we all need a little something to remind us that it is possible to upset the order of things and to get a little of our own back, plus the vigorish. I mean, how else are we to have...pleasant—GOOD LORD! CHOKE...