Cast of Characters

Ben Mears – author who return to the Lot in his Citroen car to write a book about the old Marsten house.

Susan Norton – fresh faced girl who falls in love easy and is ready to make her way in the world.

Kurt Barlow – the vampire. Yes his name is Kurt.

Richard Throckett Straker – Barlow’s charming, tall, bald human familiar and helpmate. Seems pretty gay.

Mathew Burke – the too cool and smart for this town school teacher. I have thoughts on Burke.

Father Donald Callahan – Catholic priest, alcoholic, man who wrestles with his own soul most nights.

Jimmy Cody – fresh faced young doctor.

Mark Petrie – this 12 year old has the emotional fortitude and wisdom of a mystical warrior. The glow that holds the entire posse together. #legend.

Parkins Gillespie – Constable of the Lot. Real hands off and detached. Likes to smoke. Relatable.

Nolly Gardener – Deputy Constable. Eager and useless.

Floyd Tibbits – Susan’s discarded back burner F-buddy.

Hubert Marsten – original inhabitant of the old Marsten house. Mob ties, hoarder, possible serial killer. Killed his wife and hung himself in the house. Barlow’s tie to the town somehow.

Birdie Marsten – Hubert’s wife who wanted none of this.

Eva Miller Rabelaisian – runs the boarding house that Ben stays at, robust, bawdy, extravagant, sensual. Loves Weasel.

Weasel – Eva’s right hand man and drunken boarder. Loves Eva.

Sandy McDougal, her infant son Randy, and husband Roy – a family trapped in a hell of their own making, in a trailer, naturally.

Dud Rogers – runs the dump, hunchback, lives in a shack at said dump, kills rats with a gun he wears on his hip, sets fires at the dump, intense guy.

Lawrence Crockett – realtor and selectman who does a dirty deal with Straker/Barlow then kind of fades into the curtains.

Bonnie Sawyer and Reg – Bonnie is a bit of a slut, and Reg is a violent man with complex PTSD from nam.

Danny and Ralphie Glick – boys 12 & 9, early adopters to the vampiric ways. Known to tap on second story windows.

Marjorie and Tony Glick – devastated parents.

Mabel Werts – hugely fat, 74, town gossip, uses binoculars to spy on the town. #goals

The Marsten House – big old haunted house sitting on the hill overlooking the town, acts as a beacon for the darkness.

Jerusalem’s Lot – incorporated in 1765, known as ‘salem’s Lot, the Lot; all the people, buildings, history, and the land itself.

“Things have gone bad in the Lot now.”

Father Callahan, pg. 368 signet mass market paperback

Vocab

• Malefic – something that causes harms, exerts evil influence
• Necrology – list or record of people that have died
• Expostulated – protest, argue against, reason earnestly
• Jahoobies – what Larry Crockett calls boobs
• Portentous – ominous sign of future events
• Locomotor Ataxia – loss of coordination in voluntary movements
• Concupiscent – intense uncontrollable longing and desire
• Vulpine – characteristic of a fox, cunning, sly
• Desultory – aimless conversation/action
• Attenuation – gradual reduction in intensity
• Inimical – harmful, adverse, hostile
• gris-gris – Voodoo talisman, charm
• Tenebrous – dark, gloomy, obscure
• Repple Depple – military slang for replacement depot, housed soldiers waiting to be assigned to front line
• Propitiation – appeasing, pacifying, gaining favor
• Waters of Lethe – mythical river of forgetfulness in the Underworld, enables release from earthly memories and sorrow

“…promises to keep.”

‘Salem’s Lot was published in October of 1975, King’s second novel. Moving from Carrie to the Lot was invigorating. Carrie is a glorified short story, really the story of one event, the massacre at prom, whereas ‘Salem’s Lot is a NOVEL, a rich, gorgeous, layered and complex saga of an entire town. From the prologue I was taken with the writing, which has leveled up dramatically. The prose is broad, beautiful, with a clarity that hits the face like cold clear water; it’s bracing. Clear and gorgeous, King’s vision is sweeping and elegant. The book is dedicated to his Daughter Naomi, using the Frost line, “…promises to keep,” alluding to his commitment to balancing his creative life and his duties to her and his family. I’d be curious how she frames that promise looking back.

We get a stark and graceful prologue showing us a man and a boy traveling the United States. We don’t know who they are yet, but they are clearly on the run, outliers, bidding their time. The writing here is very stripped down and powerful. The first chapter opens with Ben Mears returns to the Lot, a town he spent a few years in as a kid, when he lived with his Aunt Cindy. His return is part of a seeking in him. He is a middling author, whose wife died in a motorcycle accident, which haunts him. It seems he is also haunted by the old Marsten house, and so he tries to rent the old heap, but he’s too late, some gentlemen buy the names of Barlow and Straker have already bought it, and plan to renovate and set up an antique store in town. So Ben heads over to the boarding house and grabs a room. He then almost immediately meets Susan in the park, and “That was the beginning of it.”

We meet a lot of people in this book, and there is a real beauty to the way King does this, sweeping over the town and showing you little sips of everybody’s life, showing you who they are. I won’t go beat by beat, but only to say that I loved this about the book more than the main narrative itself. You see the fabric of the town through its residents. Mabel Werts, the town gossip who weights a ton and sits by the window with her phone and her binoculars; and Dud Rogers, an actual hunchback who lives and works at the dump (King of the Dump is how I think of him) and shoots rats with a gun at his hip, and sits back at night watching the trash fires he sets, are a few of my favorites. Most people remember Sandy McDougall with a lot of clarity, the young mother who beats her little baby Randy; and Bonnie Sawyer who greets various workmen at the door in lingerie as her husband is out of town. We see that darkness is already here, in the Lot, before Barlow even arrives.

My Favorite Paragraph

Chapter Ten, The Lot (III), page 208-210

Danny and Ralphie Glick are the first to get infected, snatched while walking through the woods to Mark Petrie’s house. Ralphie only 9, disappears, and Danny, 12, gets bit, to later “die”in the hospital. The idea of children vampires knocking on second story windows is so delicious and chilling. We get a harrowing scene at Danny’s funeral, where his father Tony looses his mind in grief and throws himself into the open grave on top of the tiny coffin. Later Mike Ryerson is tasked with burying the coffin alone, in the growing dusk. Needless to say Danny is not resting easy. And so the wave of infection begins.

The posse that forms in response to the vampire wave starts with Ben Mears and Matt Burke. Matt is a local high school English teacher and he befriends Ben when he invites him to speak to his class. Matt ends up bringing Mike Ryerson (the grave digger) into his home. Matt realizes too late that something is up, but Mike “dies” in his house after some shenanigans with a sweet, giggling, evil vampire child. Matt is hot on this case now. He has sussed it out and he calls Ben and lays it out. Then he has a heart attack and spends the rest of the book in the hospital, furiously researching and directing the group, à la Van Helsing. I don’t like Matt. There are some skeletons in that closet, and the way Ben just falls in love with him, like oh good, a smart person, annoys me. It’s not him, it’s me, but I don’t trust this dude. Anyway, Ben ends up joining up with Jimmy Cody the doctor who has examined all these mysterious deaths in the Lot and who is squinting real hard at it. Then they rope in Callahan because it seems they are dealing in dark things of the spiritual world, and a Catholic Priest seems like a powerful alliance. Callahan’s faith will be tested. And finally, a bit later Mark Petrie will round out the crew and become its beating heart.

Susan, who never really joins the posse completely, (it’s a sausage party anyway,) makes a decision that echoes Sue Snell getting her boyfriend to take Carrie to the Prom in its complete wrongness. Susan decides to just go up to the Marsten House, ALONE, and sniff around, knock on doors, ask questions. Ben and Matt had been thinking of doing this a few beats back, but like ten terrible things have come down the hatch, and it’s clear that a friendly chat is no longer appropriate. Well tell that to Susan. This is how Mark Petrie, our young hero, gets in the mix. He runs into Susan up at the Marsten house, in the woods out back, and they go in there together. Mark is foolhardy and naive but gets a pass as he is 12 and basing things around some vampire comic books he’s glanced at, but Susan should goddamn know better, and she gets bit right quick in there, by Barlow himself. Mark is captured, but uses his brilliant mind and steady nerves to escape. It’s like he’s been training for this for decades.

And so the book unfolds from there in a dark and ravishing ribbon. I again won’t go beat by beat as it’s too intricate, but one of my favorite (and I think the scariest) scenes comes when the old bus driver wakes in the night and hears his big yellow school bus, parked in his yard, honking away. Kids! he thinks in a huff and marches out there, only to find a half dozen vampire kids inside the bus. Doors close and lock, and the tiny pale children are on him. Blood chilling! We loose members of the posse one by one until only Ben the writer, and Mark the stoic, are left standing. Things have gone bad in the Lot now. There is another amazing scene where Ben and Mark roll in at dusk and find Gillespie the Constable, one of few actual unturned human people left, smoking a butt on the porch and getting ready to drive on out of the town and never look back. He is checked out. And I have never related harder to a person. That would be me. I am Gillespie. He is like, vampires right?, you can have my riot gun, and he gets in his car and nopes right out of there. Ben and Mark shake their heads in disgust and get back to the dead serious work of finding and killing Barlow.

In the end it seems another great fire will come down upon the Lot, one to rival the fire of ’51. Pitch perfect. I loved this book. There are paragraphs and chunks of this book where the writing is so elevated, so breathtaking in its beauty and clarity, like diving into cold water on a hot day. The book is so much more than the sum of its parts, like the Lot itself. When I read this at 15 I remember being annoyed with Susan and Ben as a couple. They were a bit flat and good guy coded to me. But this reading brought a very different experience. Susan and Ben are fine, their story is one of possibilities, and was a tiny slice of the cake that I didn’t get too hung up on. I loved the town this time. I was there for the side characters, and the houses, and the language. The writing is threaded with gold throughout. After a cold snap one night King alludes to – the blood coming into the leaves. And the line, “…if the only sound is the slow beat of your own heart, you can hear another sound, and that is the sound of life winding down to its cyclic close, waiting for the first winter snow to preform last rights,” cut me to the bone. Who among us has not stood in a silent autumn wood and heard that sound, felt that dark tunnel barreling down. The writing! What a masterpiece.

‘Salem’s Lot stands as a cornerstone in literary horror; shoulder to shoulder with Poe and Jackson and Hawthorn, King found the magic, it is really something more than a good book. What a profound pleasure it was to revisit this. And coming up next we’ll be traveling to an empty hotel high on a mountaintop, The Shining is waiting in the wings. Find the reading list here: Reading List.

Highly recommend this podcast for those wanting more of the Lot:

The Secret Life of Books, American Horror III, ‘Salem’s Lot: https://www.patreon.com/posts/american-horror-142723198