I have mostly enjoyed my delve Stephen King’s books and their adaptations. They’re not the greatest things ever, nor particularly deep, but they’re good enough to be enjoyable. However, they were helped in the past by low expectations going into them, and after exceeding these exceptions multiple times, the next book down the line doesn’t benefit from them anymore. Not that it would have helped ‘Salem’s Lot much.
Jerusalem’s Lot is a small town in Maine (big surprise). Ben Mears is a writer (ditto) who had spent a few of his childhood years there and, after a person tragedy, returns to the town to write his next book. He’s fascinated by the Marsten House, a place that seems to exude evil and sits on a hill visible from almost any place in town. To his surprise, the house is no longer abandoned but has been purchased by a pair who are setting up an antique shop in town. Of the two, only Straker has been seen by the townsfolk. The other, Barlow, always seems to be away on business.
Slowly (very slowly) strange things begin to happen in town. A dog is killed and hung from the cemetery gates. A boy goes missing, and his brother dies shortly thereafter. Then more and more people begin to die. Their bodies disappear.
Ben, while working on his novel, has begun courting a local girl, Susan, and struck up a friendship with an old teacher named Matt. Matt asks for Ben’s help when another man dies at Matt’s house. Matt becomes convinced that he was killed by a vampire. Soon he’s convinced both Ben and his doctor. They’re joined by Mark, a twelve year old horror aficionado, who has already had to fend one of his undead classmates off with a cross. After making some stakes and recruiting the local Catholic priest, the gang heads up to the Marsten house to confront the vampire.
After watching the 1979 TV miniseries version of Salem’s Lot, I thought this might be one of those rare cases where reading the book first would have helped. The TV version has a serious pacing problem. It meanders episodically through various scenes which feel plucked from the book but slightly disconnected from each other. For a 3+ hour production, it doesn’t do much to develop it’s characters, and the only one who leaves a particular impression is Straker, no doubt through the grace of being played by James Mason, who brings a sort of cherubic evil to the role. The horror is only sporadic but is fairly effective when it finally shows up. David Soul (Ben) acts like he hasn’t been given any direction other than reading his lines, which could have been what Ben’s character was except that most of the others aren’t much better. Soul does redeem himself, however, in scene where he’s in the morgue with one of the townsfolk coming back from the dead. It’s one of the best scenes, and it’s parts like that make you understand why people like this.
I kept thinking while watching there must be more to this or that scene, that the book would flesh it out more and build up the characters. Unfortunately, as it turns out, the 1979 version is a rather faithful adaptation, but so much better because it’s over with in three hours rather than in 439 pages. I hated this book. I wouldn’t have finished it if I hadn’t gone into it intending to write something and even then I almost gave up. ‘Salem’s Lot is dull and stupid.
The book and the miniseries start similarly with an odd prologue in Mexico. The miniseries wisely keeps this short, but the book goes on too long, showing that not only are Ben and Mark on the run but that ‘Salem’s Lot is toast based on newspaper articles about it. This leads to a major problem further in when I realized all these characters that were being added to the narrative, they weren’t going to make it. I didn’t even like them much but that made them all the more pointless.
Ben Mears is main character by default. He makes it to the end and is there more than Mark is throughout the book, but he has nothing to suggest that Soul’s portrayal of him is off. He doesn’t discover the vampires or lead the group against them; Matt does. Nothing stands out about him except that his insistence of forcing a traumatized twelve year old to come with him to stake Barlow is creepy and weird. He didn’t need Mark with him. Mark, meanwhile, is barely in the book except at the end.
I got the impression that King was trying to have ‘Salem’s Lot be the main character. The book jumps from character to character all over town, showing the nasty secrets of their crummy lives but without spending too much time on any particular person. It would sometimes take so long to come back to one of the lesser characters that I had forgotten who they were. In the worse case, I got confused and thought the woman having an affair and the woman who beat her baby were the same person. It’s a sordid, bland little town without much to recommend it. Like an earlier version of every small town in modern America with a sign advertising an “historical downtown” which really means nothing interesting is there, just that some of the buildings are old and maybe rundown, that no one in their right mind would seek out for their own sake.
As for the other, more prominent characters, most of Ben’s gang don’t do much until towards the end and get killed before you have much chance to get to like them. Susan, who probably in more of the book than anybody else but Ben, is dull and stupid and gets what she deserves.
I was surprised by the early indications that King was going to treat Christian objects seriously. There are far too many examples nowadays of people just needing to believe in something to have it ward off a vampire, so having non-Christian/agnostic characters using crosses to protect themselves and then running to a Catholic priest for help was surprising and a definite point in the book’s favor. Or it was until he ruined it.
Father Callahan is introduced a drunk but also as a priest who is struggling with a modern, banal concept of evil. When Matt explains about the vampires, Callahan is only minorly resistant to the idea and quickly joins the group. He seems like he’s going to be the real stand out character of the book until he takes Mark back to convince his parents that they are in danger from the vampires and then it all falls apart. Barlow appears and challenges Callahan to throw away his cross. Callahan does not but in doing so somehow, for some inexplicable reason, its power fails and the vampire is able to get him. Barlow says,
“You have forgotten the doctrine of your own church, is it not so? The cross… the bread and wine… the confessional.., only symbols. Without faith, the cross is only wood, the bread bakes wheat, the wine sour grapes. If you had cast the cross away, you should have beaten me another night.”
Look, Steve, you retarded cretin, don’t you understand your own story? I know you don’t get Catholicism obviously with this load of “symbols” bullshit. If these things were just symbols then the people who don’t even believe in God couldn’t use them to ward off vampires now could they? Matt and Ben have faith only in the sense that, well, these are what the folk tales says works so here we go. But this raises another problem with the whole idea that “just faith in the object” repels vampires…. faith in what? If the faith isn’t objective, if there isn’t anything real backing it up, why does that bother vampires? If I deeply believed in a nonexistent Turnip God, could I ward them off with turnips? But if they can just challenge you to toss your object away and “face me on even terms–black against white? Your faith against my own?” then the objects are useless and instantly negated. So why didn’t Barlow use that trick on anyone else? It’s like the priest, by virtue of being a priest, has to be shown up. He can’t be allowed to be an example of anything good here, despite his ability to smite open the doors of the Marsten house and then seal it against evil, despite it being holy water that he blessed that protects Ben and Mark later on. King was trying to have it both ways, and his already weak plotting ability failed him completely, leaving an illogically mess instead.
Then there is another problem, yet another which other modern vampire stories have run into. Apex predators cannot breed like rabbits. If a single vampire can swing into town and turn three hundred people into other vampires before anyone notices what’s going on, then the entire world would have been overrun long ago. I had a similar thought when watching John Carpenter’s Vampires, but at least in that, there’s people actively, violently working to wipe them out. Here we have Ben and a kid who run away instead of staying and fighting. There’s mentions too in the book of a similar fate of another little town in the past, where everyone disappeared and no one knew what happened to them. Why would the vampires stop spreading after taking over a town? Why not the next and the next and the next? Clearly, they have the ability to do so–or if not, this limit is never explained in the book.
‘Salem’s Lot doesn’t have a plot which I would lament as wasted potential. It’s a run of the mill, modern vampire story trying to get by on a small town vibe which doesn’t work. It’s the sort of story which succeeds by writing talent more than anything else and thus stumbles badly given the lackluster abilities of its author, in both character development and plotting. It probably doesn’t help that this was his second book. There are, however, a few touches which hint frustratingly at something which could have been much better. The Marsten House, for instance, gets repeated mention as being something evil in of itself, not just because of the evil people who lived there before and now. I kept imagining what Lovecraft or one of his contemporaries could have done with that and the set up with its former owner’s gruesome history. King doesn’t do anything at all, except as an atmosphere building device. Barlow’s choice of coming to Jerusalem’s Lot is somehow tied to Marsten being his “servant” but Marsten’s death is years removed from his appearance, and the connection isn’t explored or deepened.
It’s never good when you’re reading something and wishing you were reading something by a different author. ‘Salem’s Lot provided a tiny spark which I think a better author could have written something interesting with, but the book itself is primarily boring. The characters are unlikable because there’s little to nothing to like. The town is just a mishmash of nasty secrets and dull, little lives which are ultimately meaningless as they are snuffed out and I couldn’t care less. I wanted to give up on it because it wasn’t interesting and then I wanted to give up on it because I was mad about Father Callahan and then the ending just infuriated me more. It sucks through and through.
Even before reading ‘Salem’s Lot, I had a premonition of sorts of being done with King. I stopped and looked at his other books on the shelf at the library. Nothing else looked appealing. I couldn’t, at that moment, imagine reading any of them unless it was because of an adaptation, and I couldn’t think of another one in particular I wanted to watch. There is another one which I had already seen and which I need to write something about, but that is based on a short story, which may end up being the last thing of King’s I ever read if I get around to it.
Nixon Now 