While boxing up books this week, I’ve had Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot on audiobook to keep me company. I think I’m right in saying that SL is actually the first of King’s novels I ever had contact with – not through the text, but through Tobe Hooper’s 1979 TV adaptation, starring David Soul and James Mason. I was thirteen at the time, and I don’t think I’m the only one who had the bejeezus scared out of me by the image of little Danny Glick, scraping at the window to be let in. I don’t know what it says about me that I forced myself against my will to watch Part 2, just to prove to myself that I could do it, but that’s how it was.
It was another twenty years before I read the novel. I remember being impressed by it, especially by King’s evocation of American small town life. Listening to the audiobook this past week I’ve found this aspect of the novel, if anything, even more impressive. In his essay on SL for his Rereading Stephen King series for The Guardian, James Smythe says:
When I was younger, it was the second half that enraptured me: the rush of the hunt (on both sides); the thrill of not knowing who would and wouldn’t survive; and the pain of how much this affected the characters… Now, it’s the start that I love most. It’s the slowest of slow burns, all hints and drip-feed. King infuses it with descriptions that start you thinking about vampires before they even factor in the novel. “She dipped her head to suck at the straw,” goess one passage, describing the drinking of a root beer. “Her neck was beautifully muscled.” Another, during a kiss, reads: “She thought: he’s tasting me.” When the chaos finally unfolds, it’s a real payoff. You care.
You certainly do. So much so that I’m still undecided about King’s decision to have Susan Norton turn vamp. Dramatically of course he has to – she’s the Lucy Westenra figure – but emotionally I still feel nooooo that’s so unfair. Such personal involvement on the part of the reader is a sure sign of a writer doing their job.
It’s more than that, though. This time around, I was even more captivated by some of King’s writing about the town – those little prologues at the beginning of each section, depicting the town waking up, or the Marsten house on its hill as the sun goes down. There are passages here that feel galvanised by inspiration, feverish with it. It’s the real deal.
King wrote this novel – his second – when he was just twenty-eight years old. His approach to vampires – the heavy Catholic iconography, the rigid adherence to the Stoker version of the mythos – feels dated now, but that’s not King’s fault. SL was published in 1975, decades before the vampire industry kicked into gear. At the time, what he was doing – recreating a nineteenth-century classic in a truly modern idiom – must have seemed very new to him, as indeed it was. The fact that the writing itself still stands up in spite of the narrative showing its age a little is sure proof of its quality.
Salem’s Lot is a novel of passion – for the story, and for the craft of story. This is what most communicates itself to readers, what makes the novel endure. We need more books like this. More twenty-eight-year-old writers with guts enough to slam down their soul on the table and dare us to take it or leave it, because that’s how it is.