Salem's Lot is just your average sleepy, rural small community. Despite it's funereal name, the 'Lot is so uneventful that it got its name when a mean and nasty pig escaped from its farmer's pen, taking permanent residence in a wooded lot near the farm. That lot became known as "Jerusalem's Lot", after the pig.
Nothing ever happens here. Except for that one time in '39 Old Hubie Marsten tortured and murdered his wife before killing himself in his large house overlooking Jerusalem's lot. Or the time back in '51 when a fire burned down a large section of the 'Lot, threatening to take the entire town.
The Old Marsten House has remained vacant since since Marsten died, leading the town's children to claim it was haunted. It's this reputation that has drawn novelist Ben Mears back to the town, to help him relive a childhood traumatic experience he had with the house to use as inspiration for a horror novel. And also to fully rebound from the recent death of his wife. Along the way he and local single gal Sue Norton become sweethearts and he befriends high school teacher Matt Burke.
The house is never far out of Ben's mind though, nor is the fact that it was recently sold. Who would possibly want to buy and live in that nasty old house? Enter Richard Straker.
Straker and his mysteriously absent partner Kurt Barlow have purchased the Marsten house and claim to want to retire in the Lot and open a small furniture shop. Straker goes about his business, setting up shop and presumably restoring the Marsten house, while Barlow is allegedly on a months long buying trip in New York.
Then little Ralphie Glick disappears. And a few days later his older brother Danny suddenly grows very ill. Pernicious anemia, is the diagnosis. The hospital nearly discharges him when he dies.
When local cemetery custodian (and gravedigger) Mike Ryerson starts displaying similar symptoms that little Danny had, Matt Burke grows suspicious. He can't bring himself to say it out loud, but he's thinking it nonetheless. Vampires.
What King does next is inspired. These characters live in modern society, see? We have modern medicine, electricity, incandescent lighting. There is nothing that exists in these modern times that can't be explained away by science. Vampires simply don't compute in that model of thought. This theme permeates most of the book, as people who, just a hundred years prior, may have taken up pitchforks and torches become hapless victims to a menace that can't possibly exist. It is a deliberate subversion of the Dracula formula put forth by Bram Stoker nearly eighty years prior, in which the terrible Count was brought down by forward thinking people of reason and technology. In King's universe, that same technology (and blind faith in it) would be our undoing.
The rest of the novel mirrors Stoker's earlier novel in many ways, including the forming of a small group of enlightened individuals from various backgrounds who coordinate to destroy the master vampire. The difference? In this story, the would-be heroes are an author, a 63 year old teacher, the town doctor, an almost-alcoholic priest, and a small school boy.
They are over matched from the start and don't really have a prayer.
salem's Lot, much like the previously reviewed Carrie, shows it's age in many ways, but still stands out very strongly as a great piece of fiction that could very easily have been written today. Change a few details and update some of the characters and the themes and tone are very relevant.
It's very refreshing to see what has sadly almost become a relic: a vampire story where the vampires are nasty, unholy, irredeemably evil creatures that must be stopped at all costs. These vampires don't want to be your boyfriend. They don't sparkle. They don't have a soul, nor do they want to be human. They want to destroy you and/or make you one of them. And feed.
The plot isn't without a few blemishes, not the least of which is the matter of how religious symbols, such as holy water and crucifixes work unfailingly until a crucial point where Father Callahan allegedly "loses faith" and his crucifix, which had been repelling Barlow just seconds before, stopped working. This, despite other characters who openly declare their disbelief of God and religion successfully using crucifixes throughout. I explained my position on this one sticking point in an earlier post and have yet to hear an explanation that is satisfactory, but in the end, it doesn't truly matter.
I thought salem's Lot was an excellent read, and very tense in places, particularly the end. I just couldn't stop reading until I knew the ultimate fate of all of the main characters.
Can't wait to see what Mr. King has in store for me next.
No comments:
Post a Comment