Laura’s Favourite Book #9: ’Salem’s Lot
The town has a sense, not of history, but of time, and the telephone poles seem to know this. If you lay your hand against one, you can feel the vibration from the wires deep within the wood, as if souls had been imprisoned in there and were struggling to get out. – Stephen King, ’Salem’s Lot
Why ’Salem’s Lot?
It’s not my first Stephen King. It’s not even my fifth. In fact, I think I’d done IT, The Shining, Doctor Sleep, Carrie, and The Bazaar of Bad Dreams before I even got to ’Salem’s Lot, despite the fact that I love vampires. I actually came to the novel via the excellent series Midnight Mass, which owes a lot to the Lot.
Now ’Salem’s Lot is not only one of my favourite Stephen King books, it’s one of my favourite vampire books. The characters are deeply sympathetic and well-rounded, the pacing is tight (the page count’s on the modest side for a King), the atmosphere is Pervasive Dread ™, and the vampires …
They’re proper vampires.
Story
’Salem’s Lot is what I would call a classic vampire story. Everything’s normal – vampire comes to town – all hell breaks loose. It doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel, it doesn’t give the vampire a tragic backstory, it just unleashes chaos that our plucky team (who semi-consciously model themselves after the gang in Dracula) are always one step behind.
King, like Stoker, does play with narrative conventions: the prologue is both a framing device and set after the main events of the novel. It also sets the scene with various newspaper clippings and so on, slowly hinting at something amiss in this strange, distant town called Jerusalem’s Lot (just like Dracula is a mish-mash of collated documents that together are greater than the sum of their parts).
When the plot gets going, it’s half love story, half ghost story, with the occasional occult event thrown in – until bodies start dropping. And getting back up. Which they really shouldn’t do.
Character
Unlike the eponymous Count in Dracula, I’d argue that our vampire here, Barlow, isn’t that important as a personality. We only directly see him a couple of times and some of his most impactful moments (cursing Father Callahan, killing Straker, turning Susan) happen off-page. He’s most chilling in his taunting letter to the group, which he’s kindly left behind. There’s no big final confrontation – yes, it’s a struggle to stake him, but it’s not the cross-continental odyssey that occurs in the finale of Dracula.
What’s more important is Ben and his relationships with the likes of Susan, Mark, Matt, and Jimmy. They really are a motley crew, especially with Father Callahan thrown in later on. We grow to care for all of them as we (and they) see that they’re totally out of their depth but they’re going to try and stop the contagion anyway. Susan and Jimmy’s demises are particularly poignant – such good characters don’t deserve such horrible deaths.
I should also mention our background cast – King does a great job at humanising a town’s worth of characters, as usual, which makes their surrender to vampirism more awful as we watch them being picked off one by one. I would also say that they’re more sympathetic than his later background characters – I DNFed Under the Dome halfway through, for example, because so many of the townspeople were irredeemably awful and not just deeply flawed.
Setting
Ah, the Lot. I often cite it as one of my influences, because I love a Stephen King small town in Maine. Some of my favourite chapters are actually the ones that employ omniscient narration (these chapters are aptly named ‘The Lot’) and explore what’s going on with various citizens throughout the book, usually mundane, sometimes chilling, full of dramatic irony and tension.
It really is just an ordinary town – a bit on the decline, yes, in the sense that young people often move away. Susan, for instance, has aspirations of going to New York City and has been saving up by selling her art. Ben is treated as a bit of an anomaly for having left and now come back, albeit temporarily.
But then there’s the Marsten House, haunted in more ways than one. It overlooks the Lot ‘like a ruined king’ and is the locus for all that’s bad about the town. It’s plagued Ben’s psyche since he was a child, it’s a murder scene, it’s a haven for evil. In our pop culture schema, it really should be higher up on the haunted house list.
Coldharbour: A Town Under Siege
Another sneak peek!
Closed until further notice:
Flu outbreak
Alex stepped back from Luigi’s and into a steady hand that warned her of the icy patch in the gutter.
“Now,” Elizabeth said, “there is flu going around.”
“Oh yeah,” Alex replied, “Father Warner definitely died of the flu. Cos the flu tends to make blood spurt out of people’s necks.”
“A vampire didn’t do this,” Elizabeth said, pulling down her scarf to reveal the pink slash across her throat, “did it?”
Alex pointed out that someone who was possessed had.
Elizabeth “pointed out” that it had been impossible to tell under all that blood what had actually happened to the priest.
Coldharbour II: The Dead Land comes out on Halloween and you can pre-order the e-book and standard paperback here. Read the first in the series, Coldharbour: A Gothic Tale of Love and Death, now.
