King Country: Salem's Lot

or, Dickensian horror

Not sure what I expected when I decided to pick up Stephen King for the first time, but I trusted a sort of curriculum created by

Jayson Young

to lead me through the immense oeuvre.

And perhaps it’ll surprise those here to know that I’ve never given Stephen King a chance. When I was younger, I was under the impression that I was too good for King, that the only authors worth my time were the ones you’d see on a Nobel Laureate list or who had entered the ever expanding catalogue of The Classics.

By the time I got over and past this reductive kind of thinking, I also just didn’t ever get around to King.

See, part of this is that horror has never been my thing. I’m a real scaredy cat. However, at a certain point, you learn that he wrote a vampire novel and so you start eyeing it and then someone tells you that that’s where you should start and your ears end up gobbling it up greedily like a little goblin trapped in a van in a storm in Tennessee where you can barely see through your windshield while you’re driving the speed limit to a meeting that you’re already an hour late for which is dangerously fast when you can only tell where cars are by their tail lights.

What surprised me about finally reading Stephen King is that, I guess, I didn’t expect the human factor to measure so tall. But I suppose that makes sense, yeah? You need to care about these people before you can feel scared for them, which in turn scares and unsettles you.

And we get that. The novel is really in no hurry to scare you. Rather, he establishes a small town and its inhabitants and even sets up a bit of a romance. It’s all a misdirect, which I imagine hit harder and more interestingly when this first landed on bookshelves in 1975 when Stephen King wasn’t yet who he became and now is for horror fans.

Rather than dig right in, he instead plants a seed right at the start, letting you know that things didn’t go well, which gives even the mundane scenes a tint of dread. Then, after you’ve come to know a few of these people, he plants a seed and you watch him do it in plain sight. You know exactly what this means. You know where it’s headed.

But then he pulls back and lets us spend our time in this small town. And it really is a story of a place and the people that choose to inhabit such a place. There are local legends, rivalries, legacies. Even a place small as this becomes its own world. An entire world as rich and vibrant as anything epic fantasy oriented. Because the trick we all learned from James Joyce, whether we like to admit it or not, is that the small every day occurrences are the epic and grand moments we’ve been waiting for.

Because they’re about us, and no matter how high minded we might like to be, we are primarily interested in ourselves.

We want to be told, given permission to believe, that our lives mattered so very much. That our every day toils and trials were as monumental as they felt at the time.

But this is a strength to the novel. Its intense and close focus on a place, a town, on people with their own concerns which seem grand and all-important. Their petty rivalries and failed relationships. The decision to move out of your parents’ house feels like a meaningful declaration and we feel it too. We feel the strain and how leaving home is not a declaration of war but one of independence. How choosing one man over another is the most important choice of your life.

Until, well, vampires come to town.

King also takes an interesting step to give us the full shape and texture of the town. Panoramic and polyphonic, he dips in and out of houses, in and out of heads, and fills in the town, full of drunks and vagrants, of good parents and abusive ones, of teachers and students.

And he takes his time. That’s what impressed me here.

King lets us hangout in Salem’s Lot with these people, coming to know them, to understand them.

This is where the horror comes from, after all.

We only root for our Final Girls because we met them when their friends and families were still alive. Came to know them in their natural habitat, before deranged killers or supernatural monsters hunted them.

However, that fear never really hit me in this novel. Call it a matter of temperament or perhaps a lingering after effect of some of the absurdity of it all, but I just never really felt the terror I expected.

I think some of this comes down to the rationalization happening within the characters as the horror rises. It was a bit silly, honestly, to have them outline the logic in why believing in vampires was rational, given the circumstances.

The novel may have needed this leap of logic, of faith, in order to function, but I think it would have worked better for me had we not spent any time philosophizing or rationalizing the monsters.

Though, if I take a moment:

King makes the vampires monsters with the intention of terrifying. All well and good. I like a good monster to be monstrous as much as I like them to be elegiac and beautiful.

And so I like the path King takes here and I love his final vampiric lord. But since he demands I rationalize all this, I fear that the logic, for me, breaks down when I consider how quickly the vampires spread in this little town.

Feels like the whole world would be vampires in no time! Once our vampires makes his move, the whole town fills with vampires real fast! This concept of vampiric universality gets explored in The Passage by Justin Cronin, which was both magnificent and deliriously disappointing.

And so while I found much to like and appreciate here, there are also aspects that fell flat.

However, I’m a big boy wearing his good times hat so I was all aboard, ready to take the train to the end of the tracks.

And I’m glad I did because I found something both bleak and beautiful in the framing of the novel. Rather than give us the eternal sorrow of Anne Rice’s vampires, he gives us a different kind of eternal sorrow.

And, call me a sucker, but I sure do love sorrow that hits you in the diaphragm hard enough to make me gasp.

So consider this the opening to an irregularly published exploration of the novels of Stephen King.

Here’s the order I’ll be tackling them. I’d like to give you a reason why this is the order and not some other order or why only these books and not a bunch of other ones, but I’m trusting to Jayson Young as my guide.

1. Salem’s Lot

2. The Shining

3. Cujo

4. It

5. 11/22/63

6. From a Buick 8

7. Revival

8. Firestarter

9. The Eyes of the Dragon

10. Misery

11. Pet Sematary

12. The Long Walk

13. The Stand

14. The Dark Tower I-VII