'salem's lot

it's actually not about witches

Last Halloween, I wrote about Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, one of my all-time favorite books that I re-read each spooky season. With three (3!) editions of Paraphrasing in October this year, I wanted to do more chaotic fun spooky Halloween book reports. Each issue this month will feature horror book reviews, all written by an internationally renowned author whose work I have never read: Stephen King.

This week, I read ‘Salem’s Lot, originally released in 1975. Unlike Carrie, I knew nothing about the plot or characters before cracking open the cover; I assumed it was about witches, based on the title. Spoiler alert, it is not about witches. It’s a Kinder egg tale of horror, where the “haunted house” trope is the outer chocolate concealing the secret toy at the story’s heart: vampires.

first, the first paragraph

Salem’s Lot actually begins with the first paragraph of The Haunting of Hill House, which King reveres as one of the “great supernatural novels” ever written. You can read that very paragraph in last year’s spooky book report.

The book then begins with a prologue that jumps forward past most of the events of the book, introducing readers to two nameless characters: A tall man and a boy.

Almost everyone thought the man and the boy were father and son.

They crossed the country on a rambling southwest line in an old Citroen sedan, keeping mostly to secondary roads, traveling in fits and starts. They stopped in three places along the way before reaching their final destination: first in Rhode Island, where the tall man with the black hair worked in a textile mill; then in Youngstown, Ohio, where he worked for three months on a tractor assembly line; and finally in a small California town near the Mexican border, where he pumped gas and worked at repairing small foreign cars with an amount of success that was, to him, surprising and gratifying.

Wherever they stopped, he got a Maine newspaper called the Portland Press-Herald and watched it for items concerning a small southern Maine town named Jerusalem’s Lot and the surrounding area. There were such items from time to time.

King is two for two in hooking readers (like me) from the first paragraph. He provides mysterious details like breadcrumbs, leading the reader on through the story in search of answers. Who are the man and the boy, naturally; but also, what are they running from? Why are they interested in a small southern Maine town? Are we meeting these characters at the beginning of the main action, or at the end?

then, the plot

Benjamin Mears rolls into the small town of Jerusalem’s Lot, aka ‘Salem’s Lot or “The Lot”, as summer melts into fall. He spent part of his childhood here, and carries a traumatic memory from that time involving the Marsten House that looms over the town on top of a hill (just like…Hill House). He has come back to work on a new novel and maybe confront those fears. 

But then strange things start happening, as they always do. Someone is renting out the Marsten House for the first time since its residents died tragically several years ago. A child disappears in the woods, and his brother dies mysteriously days later. Can Ben and pals figure out what evil hangs over the town, and stop it before it’s too late?

elaborate ensemble & exposition, perhaps too much

At almost double the length of Carrie, we get to know many, many residents of The Lot with all their histories and troubles. The town is a character within itself, and the town itself is full of characters. At times it felt like almost too much exposition, but I think this was a craft choice. While Carrie is tight and hurried, a bullet train towards tragedy, Salem’s Lot is a slow burn. Readers don’t even see the word “vampire” until 300 pages in, over halfway through the book. King is a vulture, his story circling and circling in ever tighter spirals that builds into an explosive climax.

There’s Susan Norton, the love interest/girl-next-door who dreams of life outside the Lot; Matt Burke, the kindly intellectual English teacher; Jacob Cody, the beloved acerbic rural doctor; Father Callahan, the drunk priest with a crisis of faith; and even a Columbo-type sheriff named Parkins Gillepsie and his dumb sidekick, Nolly. There’s more, of course, but I don’t want to bore you with a list of (admittedly fun) character names.

And naturally, being Stephen King, there are beautiful depictions of New England scenery sprinkled throughout the text.

even better spooky suspense

Vampires seem more fantastical than telekinesis, but the horror and trauma in this book felt much more visceral and real. Some of it is gory and involves blood and wooden stakes, sure, but a lot of the ickiness came from more “everyday” evils: a mother hitting her baby, a husband raping his wife, functioning alcoholics, harmful gossip, swindler realtors. We are left wondering, was it these small evils that ultimately destroyed the town? How much are the vampires to blame here?

Regardless, this is how you write good horror:

A great hush had fallen over the woods; but it was a malefic hush. Shadows, urged by the wind, twisted languorously around them. And Danny smelled something savage, but not with his nose.

He was looking up at the Marsten House, not really listening. The shutters were closed; they would open up later on. After dark. The shutters would open after dark. He felt a morbid chill at the thought and its nearly incantatory quality.

As the stranger came closer, Dud understood everything and welcomed it, and when the pain came, it was as sweet as silver, as green as still water at dark fathoms.

final thoughts

I didn’t like this as much as Carrie, but I also prefer vampires of the Twilight variety. I do want to continue reading King (and will be back with a new review in 2 weeks), but I don’t think I would pick this up again.

Though I hate how her arc ended (I am once again asking men to write better female protagonists), I do appreciate that Susan gets one of my favorite lines:

She had consciously or unconsciously formed fear into a simple equation: fears = unknown. And to solve the equation, one simply reduced the problem to simple algebraic terms, thus unknown = creaky board (or whatever), creaky board = nothing to be afraid of. In the modern world all terrors could be gutted by simple use of the transitive axiom of equality. Some fears were justified, of course (you don’t drive when you’re too plowed to see, don’t extend the hand of friendship to snarling dogs, don’t go parking with boys you don’t know - how did the old joke go? Screw or walk?), but until now she had not believed that some fears were larger than comprehension, apocalyptic and nearly paralyzing. This equation was insoluble. The act of moving forward at all became heroism.

In the face of evils big and small, all we can do is move forward - and that is heroic.

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good things on the internet

• I purchased this light-up haunted house from Target for spooky season and I regret to inform you it brings me immense joy 🎃

• Delia Deetz’s best line in Beetlejuice 💚

currently reading

• Madwoman by Chelsea Bieker: Gripping and thrilling for sure, with some biting sentences that had me viciously underlining; but ultimately the ending didn’t land for me, and there were some themes I thought merited further interrogation.

• Anne Therese Gennari on climate optimism: “Agency looks like feeling grounded and connected in the moment, feeling connected to the environment, to other people. It's this sense of embodiment and the choice of like, “I’m well aware that not everything is alright in this world, but at least I feel like I'm centered in myself”. It's coming back to oneself. Because when we act from a place of being grounded, we have the strength to continuously question what can be done and we have the strength to go down hard paths.”

this week’s jam

photo of my cats

Image description: Kerouac lays on his back with his white paws up below a paper bag piece of art. This masterpiece was drawn by the child of my favorite vintage store owners and features the different characters from SpiderMan: Into the Spiderverse and I cannot adequately describe in words how much I love it.