Running on empty, with nothing left in me but doubt
I picked up a pen
And I wrote my way out

“Wrote My Way Out” from the Hamilton Mixtape

“No one writes a long novel alone,” Stephen King states at the beginning of his introduction to ‘Salem’s Lot. He’s officially referring to the other people involved in the drafting and publishing process, but on a deeper, more symbolic level, one might imagine he’s referring to all the people who have fundamentally influenced the novelist to become the person they are–constituted largely by their attendant emotional baggage. It often seems that the people who have the most fundamental influence in packing the emotional baggage are a person’s parents. Then there’s the question of how larger cultural factors influence and interact with an individual’s emotional baggage and/or upbringing–the whole nature-v.-nurture thing. 

Apparently the King doesn’t really “get” why his fans and readers would be interested in his personal life, and in what his personal baggage might be. It’s a defining difference of certain schools of academic literary criticism whether you read and analyze a fictional text through the gloss of its author’s biography, or ignore the person of the author entirely and focus solely on the text (Roland Barthes’ whole “death of the author” movement). But since King is an author whose work deals in the horrors of the mind in particular, reading that work through his biography could offer an interesting illumination of how the act of writing itself can serve to exorcise and/or exacerbate one’s personal demons. 

So what are the King’s demons? 

As I mentioned in a post on ‘Salem’s Lot, Joseph Reino dedicates the first chapter in his academic text Stephen King: The First Decade, Carrie to Pet Sematary (1988) to the representation of father-son relationships in King’s early work, mentioning that King’s father “left for cigarettes” when King was two years old–King was born in 1947–and was never heard from again. On top of this, a few years later, King discovered a cache of rejected horror manuscripts in the attic that his father had submitted to magazines. So…there’s a lot going on there. 

Lisa Rogak’s King biography Haunted Heart (2008) fills in more details, after opening with a prologue in which King notes himself to be a particularly fearful person–and those fears to be the fruitful engine of his fiction writing. King paints himself as someone who writes specifically to expel at least some of his excessive fears, which is interesting to think about from a therapeutic perspective and an idea I’ll return to. 

Once King’s father left, his mother Ruth had to move young Steve and his older brother Dave around constantly to try to support them. Frequently left to his own devices, King read and wrote often (devouring pulp magazines in particular) as an apparent escape from the impoverished and unstable circumstances he grew up in. Somehow, impressively, his mother found the time and energy to encourage her younger son’s writing–paying him a quarter for each story he wrote and thereby creating a possibly fundamental association between fiction-writing and earning potential, not to mention the cultivation of an ability to write not only in lieu of but in response to extreme and difficult circumstances that might help explain his consistently prolific output over a span of decades. In this way, perhaps the “gothic tendency” of the death drive leading to a new beginning defined by Julia Kristeva (mentioned in my last post) might apply to King’s career: the death drive tied to the loss of his father potentially led to the circumstances that cultivated his prolificacy. Could you have one without the other? We’ll never know for sure… 

Financial circumstances also dictated King’s choice of college, the University of Maine at Orono. According to the bios, by this point he’d been reading and writing fiction steadily for a decade. He wrote his first novel-length manuscript his freshmen year, railed against the English department for their literary snobbery and failure to teach Shirley Jackson, got swept up in anti-Vietnam War movements and demonstrations, and met Tabitha Spruce, his future wife, in a creative-writing workshop. Tabitha got pregnant and had their first child, Naomi, right after King graduated in the summer of 1970 and Tabitha had another year to go. He published his first story in Cavalier magazine in the fall of 1970, and married Tabby in 1971. He’d graduated with a teaching certificate, but had to work in an industrial laundry until a position opened up at the academy where he’d student-taught. It did not pay well. He managed to send a novel manuscript to the publisher Doubleday that ended up with editor Bill Thompson, who started corresponding with King about revisions, which King dutifully submitted, but after a long process, the novel was ultimately rejected. This same process happened with a second novel manuscript that also eventually culminated in rejection. In the meantime, he earned extra income from publishing short stories in “men’s magazines,” and a second child, Joe, came along in 1972. 

Here’s where things get (more) interesting. According to the Rogak biography, around this time a friend of King’s asked him why he “continued to write this macho crap for the titty magazines.” (Notably, King refused to show these stories to his mother.) His retort to his friend could be condensed into one word: money. These were the magazines that paid. (Rogak notes one instance where without a check from one of these magazines, King wouldn’t have been able to afford some necessary medication for his daughter.) Nonetheless, this friend bet King that he couldn’t write from a woman’s point of view. Thus motivated, King gave it a shot. But he ran into two problems as he began work on what would become Carrie: it was too long for a short story, and he couldn’t write from a woman’s point of view. So he threw it in the trash. 

Well, as the legend goes, Tabby fished the pages out of the wastebasket, told him the story was good, and encouraged him to keep working on it. (Here’s where we see that the modern word processor would have essentially aborted King’s career before it could get off the ground…) When he protested that he didn’t know anything about “girls,” she said that she would help him. 

Thanks, Tabby. 

With his wife’s assistance and his ongoing close-up high-school experience as a teacher, he dashed off the novella-length manuscript relatively quickly. Despite enduring anxiety that he’d get stuck as an English teacher for perpetuity, he didn’t send the manuscript to Bill Thompson, due to the previous two rounds of emotionally exhausting hope-then-rejection. Instead he stuck it in a drawer, started talking about a new idea with Tabby inspired by some books he was teaching in his English classes, and began work on what would become ‘Salem’s Lot. 

Tabby was always supportive and protective of her husband’s limited writing time: when an opportunity for extra cash came up coaching the debate team, she told him he couldn’t take it if it would interfere with his writing schedule, even though they desperately needed the money. King started drinking more in response to the financial stress. Rogak quotes King on this period: 

“It was a vicious circle: the more miserable and inadequate I felt about what I saw as my failure as a writer, the more I’d try to escape into the bottle, which would only exacerbate the domestic stress and make me even more depressed. Tabby was steamed about the booze, of course, but she told me she understood.”

Rogak, Lisa. Haunted Heart (p. 70). St. Martin’s Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Eventually Bill Thompson asked why King hadn’t sent him anything in awhile, and King sent him the Carrie manuscript. Thompson was more confident about his ability to sell this particular manuscript of King’s because it fell into the category of “horror,” while the first two manuscripts he’d sent had not. Horror was trending at the time, thanks to novels-turned-movies like Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist. King was reluctant to go through the cycle of publishing hell again, but he made Thompson’s suggested revisions, expanding the story from novella to full novel by interspersing it with epistolary snippets reflecting on the narrative’s major incident after the fact. This time, it worked. Doubleday bought Carrie with an advance of $2500 in March of 1973. 

I’d like to pause to note how it was always King’s motivation and goal to write for money–to make a living as a writer. He seems to have had an instinctual grasp from early on that what was touted as “literature” in his English classes was different from what made money in mass markets; when King was a teenager, the sci-fi pulp magazines (where Scientology founder and sci-fi writer L. Ron Hubbard got his start) were in their heyday. Yet King also seems to have appreciated a certain merit in pop cultural texts, other than their earning potential, that his literature professors refused to recognize, as evidenced by King’s petitioning the English department at the University of Maine to let him teach a class on pop culture when he was still an undergraduate (they let him co-teach it with a professor). At any rate, we can basically see in King’s early career trajectory how he was completely willing to make any revisions to his work demanded by an editor who was connected to a network that could pipe him a paycheck. (Rogak notes that the check that came through for his daughter’s medicine from Cavalier was for $500–that’s a significant sum to receive for a short story now, let alone in the early ’70s.) 

The stories for the men’s magazines reflect King’s willingness to adapt for paying markets, as do the revisions he made on the the novels that got rejected before Carrie and on Carrie itself. For the work in the men’s magazines in particular, that means the stories might be more reflective of cultural interests than King’s interests, though his successful ability to so easily write content for these markets (or so it would seem, since these are stories he’s frequently described as “churning out”) is probably reflective of his own interest in them…

The initial Carrie advance helped ease some financial burden, but King assumed he would have to continue teaching, until he got another call two months later. Bill Thompson had told King that Doubleday might sell the paperback rights to Carrie for $5-10k, of which King would get half. But the rights ended up going for $400k. 

The initial sale of Carrie must have felt significant, but this is really King’s critical, life-changing moment. When Bill Thompson relayed the figure over the phone, Steve initially thought he said “$40k.” It took a bit for the magnitude of the figure to sink in. Long enough for King to sink to the floor from where he’d been standing. Long enough to get up and go out to buy Tabby a hair dryer, worrying the whole time he’d be struck by a car and killed in the process. (This is definitely something I would think if something good had happened to me.) Shortly after came the sale of the movie rights. King was able to quit teaching (after only two years). He finished work on ‘Salem’s Lot, and Bill Thompson elected to publish that next over Roadwork, cultivating King’s brand as a mainstream horror writer. King’s mother was able to quit her job at a retirement home and move in with Steve’s brother, but she died of cancer in December of 1973, before Carrie could see official print in April of 1974. 

Despite finally being a published novelist who had signed a multi-book contract, King was depressed and drinking more after his mother’s death; in On Writing he says he was drunk when he delivered her eulogy (which, as a former drunk myself, I’m inclined to say I understand). King and the family decided to move, randomly choosing Colorado. Once there, he had trouble finding an idea for his next book, but struck gold when he and Tabby took a weekend trip to Estes Park and stayed in room 217 of the Stanley Hotel. 

In talking about The Shining, King describes consciously expressing the unexpected rage he felt in fatherhood (compounded by not having had a model of fatherhood himself). He would add later that he didn’t realize he was writing about his own drinking at the time, which was worsening despite the easing of the financial burdens that had plagued him his whole life and that had of course intensified with fatherhood. (Even though Carrie didn’t meet sales targets, the paperback rights for ‘Salem’s Lot still went for $500k.) During this Colorado interlude, King also finished The Stand, the one where most of humanity is killed off by a superflu. By 1975, the family was back in Maine, around the same time ‘Salem’s Lot was released, which should give you some idea of the lag in the publishing process (slash how fast King works). By the time his second novel was published, he had completed full drafts or his third and fourth, which are both gargantuan (The Stand perhaps more so). At this point, he is not even thirty years old. 

‘Salem’s Lot didn’t meet sales projections either, but all that changed when Brian De Palma’s film adaptation of Carrie was released in November of 1976, an unexpected box office hit that garnered Oscar nominations for lead actress Sissy Spacek and supporting actress Piper Laurie. Book sales shot up, and audiences were primed for the release of King’s third novel. His name was officially on the map. King loved pop culture, and it looked like pop culture loved him.

Of course, King already had much more up his sleeve, not just The Shining and The Stand, but manuscripts he’d written in college that he felt he now had the name recognition to publish. Problem was, Doubleday would only publish one book by an author per year, believing more than that would eat into other books’ sales. So King adopted a pseudonym, an author whose publisher would be the same one that had been cutting King fat checks for his paperback rights: New American Library. King’s first Richard Bachman novel, Rage, was published in 1977, the same year as The Shining, and the same year his third and final child, Owen, was born. 

The potential instability of the nuclear family unit is a major theme of King’s work that seems to spring directly from his own experiences. That his experiences in this regard are not unique is probably one key ingredient in the success of his work. And yet, this is a fairly common theme in literature. In considering why King’s take on the topic caught on with readers to such a degree, I recalled Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 book Outliers: The Story of Success, the basic premise of which is that success might be largely determined by when you were born. (Alexander Hamilton couldn’t have “written financial systems into existence” if he hadn’t been in the right place at the right time.) One of the examples Gladwell analyzes in support of this theory–or two, I guess–are Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, both born in 1955, eight years after King: 

By 1975, if you are too old, you would be working in some reputed company like IBM.. you might not take the risk of leaving the job, starting a new business and moving to a new, unfamiliar world. By 1975, if you were a few years out of college, you had just bought a house, recently married. Then you would be in no position to give up a job and try Altair. By 1975, If you were too young, in high school, then you cannot afford Altair. So, you could rule out people who were born before 1952 and after 1958. If you were born between 1952–58, you would be old enough to utilise the opportunity provided by Altair and become part of the computer revolution. Steve Jobs was born on February 24, 1955.

Quoted here.

In this case Gladwell seems to frame the importance of when you’re born on a willingness to take risks–which is largely dependent on being in a feasible financial position to take risks. In King’s case, timing also strikes me as integral to his success in a couple of ways: first, horror trending in popular culture (which according to Cohen’s monster theory analysis would be a product of larger historical/political/cultural fears at the time); second, the women’s movement being in full swing at the time of Carrie’s publication, and third, the success of the Carrie film adaptation. 

This will likely seem a strange metaphor, but I’ve been watching a lot of Project Runway lately, and it strikes me how a designer’s success in the challenges on that show, while largely a product of skill, are also frequently influenced by seemingly random factors: luck. King’s case strikes me similarly. I am not disputing the man’s skill, or his intelligence, or his insight into the human psyche, or his ability to translate those insights into striking, resonant images that stick with you. I’m merely entertaining the possibility that there might be other writers with a comparable skill set whose work hasn’t caught fire in the same way due to a convergence of circumstances beyond their control. 

I do think it’s important to consider how King’s impoverished upbringing was not only an influence on his using writing as a way to manage difficult circumstances, but on how it gave him first-hand experience with subject matter that might resonate with more people: manual labor. When you look at who writes “literature,” its writers frequently come from privileged backgrounds, and are educated at elite institutions. This to me really seems to be the key to King’s success at horror in particular: he was intimately familiar with, if not essentially defined by, the horrors of blue-collar small-town life. 

I also think it’s important to acknowledge that King worked his ass off, and a good thing for writers to remember that his first two novels were rejected. (What if Bill Thompson hadn’t bothered to go out of his way to call and ask for more of King’s work?) Another factor critical for King is his ego: while he probably went through periods of doubt, like most white men, it seems, he ultimately believed that his voice deserved to be heard, and he was willing to shout. 

Of course, this was all decades ago; the publishing industry works differently now (not only from when King was starting out, but from just a month ago, probably). King did not have an agent until after he had a book deal; an editor at a major publishing house read King’s unsolicited manuscript. I don’t think this would ever happen today. 

Perhaps one takeaway from all of this, at least for writers, is that rejection and failure to write your way from rags to riches might not necessarily mean you’re a talentless hack. You might have just been born under a bad sign. 

-SCR

Stephen King’s third novel, The Shining (1977), takes place in five Parts. Part 1, “Prefatory Matters,” begins with Jack Torrance interviewing for the job of winter caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, an isolated resort in the Rocky Mountains. While providing some of the more grandiose aspects of the hotel’s history, its manager Mr. Ullman bluntly relays that he wouldn’t hire Jack for the job due to the fact that Jack’s wife Wendy and five-year-old son Danny will be staying there with him; Ullman mentions that a previous Overlook caretaker named Grady ended up murdering his family and then killing himself. Ullman has to hire Jack, however, because he was ordered to by a board member, Al Shockley, an acquaintance of Jack’s from his job teaching at Stovington Academy in Vermont, which Ullman references Jack’s being fired from. Jack is shown around by the handyman Watson, whose grandfather founded the hotel, and who tells Jack the stories of a few of the people who have died at the hotel, including an older woman who overdosed on pills in her room’s bathtub after the young man she’d brought with her left. 

Back at the Torrance apartment in Boulder, Danny is waiting for his father’s return, knowing that his mother is worried his father has gone off drinking somewhere and also knowing that his father has not actually done this. He asks his mother why Jack lost his job at Stovington Academy, and Wendy tells him the truth: Jack assaulted a student he caught slashing his tires after Jack had cut this student, George Hatfield, from the debate team. Danny is aware his mother considered divorcing his father after his father broke Danny’s arm a couple of years earlier. Jack recalls this incident as he’s being shown around the hotel, and how he didn’t actually stop drinking until a couple of months after he broke Danny’s arm, when he and Al Shockley drunkenly hit a bike in the road and thought they might have killed a kid, though they never found any evidence of a body (the George Hatfield incident happened after that, when he was sober). 

At home, Danny’s invisible friend Tony shows him a vision of a building with a skull and crossbones over it, telling him it’s poison and that “redrum” will happen there, and when Jack arrives home, Danny sees a vision of a bloody mallet in the car’s front seat, and has another vision/nightmare of “redrum” that night.    

In Part II, “Closing Day,” the Torrance family arrives at the Overlook as it’s closing for the season, and Dick Halloran, the cook, shows them around the massive kitchen. When Halloran leaves, he asks Danny to help with his bags and tells him he “shines harder” than anyone he’s ever met, explaining how “shining” means you can sometimes read other people’s thoughts or see things happening other places or that might happen in the future. He tells Danny he’s seen some strange things around the hotel because of his shining, but that these things shouldn’t be able to actually hurt Danny, but that if they get into trouble, Danny should use his shining to call him. 

In Part III, “The Wasps’ Nest,” Jack finds a wasps’ nest while fixing shingles on the hotel’s roof and considers it an apt metaphor for his life at Stovington while drinking, thinking about his confrontation with George Hatfield in which George accused him of setting the timer ahead when it was his turn to speak, which Jack claims not to have done, though later thinks that if he did—though he didn’t—it would have been for George’s own good because George stuttered. He also thinks about the play he’s working on, The Little School, about a crotchety headmaster and an adversarial student, and how his writer’s block has improved since being at the hotel. He uses a bug bomb on the wasps’ nest and then gives it to Danny, since he enjoyed having one his father gave him as a kid, but that night, after Danny has a weird trance in the bathroom when Tony visits him, a bunch of live wasps come out of it and sting him. The next day they take Danny to a local doctor, who surmises that Danny’s trances and premonitions are simply the product of observation and intuition. Jack discovers a scrapbook in the Overlook’s basement collecting newspapers about its history, including its takeover at one point by mobsters and some violent deaths (including murder) that took place there. He calls Stuart Ullman to confront him with this information, threatening to write a book about it, and causing Al Shockley to call him and say he can’t write about it if he wants to keep his job. Despite reservations, after discussing it, Wendy and Danny opt not to try to leave the hotel before the snow closes them in. Working on the playground, Jack thinks he sees the hedge animals move but refuses to believe it. Overcome by curiosity, Danny finally enters the room Halloran told him not to, 217, and sees a corpse-like woman in the bathtub. He tries to convince himself she’s not really there when she gets out and comes after him, but then her hands close around his throat. 

In Part IV, “Snowbound,” Jack leafs through the historical documents about the Overlook in the basement, recalling his own alcoholic father and the night that his father randomly and viciously beat his mother with his walking cane. He dreams his father is telling him to kill Wendy and Danny through the radio, and destroys the radio in response in real life. Danny appears at the top of the stairs, catatonic and with bruises on his neck, and Wendy, assuming Jack has done it, locks herself in their quarters with Danny. Jack, increasingly angry about how Wendy is still holding his breaking Danny’s arm and his drinking days against him, wanders into the Colorado Room, where he imagines he is served twenty martinis by the bartender Lloyd.

Wendy confronts Jack about getting Danny off the mountain, and Danny comes out of his catatonic state and tells them everything about his “shining” and how the dead woman grabbed him in 217 and he passed out. Jack goes to check out 217, seeing nothing at first but then hearing the shower curtain being pulled as he’s leaving; he refuses to look though he thinks he can hear someone inside after he shuts and locks the door. He tells Wendy and Danny there’s nothing there. Working on his play a bit later, he realizes it’s terrible. He promises Wendy he’ll get Danny down the mountain via snowmobile, but processing what it will mean to give up the job that night, starts to think he should kill Wendy. He wakes up in 217 and sees George Hatfield floating in the bathtub with a knife in his chest. The next day in the equipment shed, Jack tosses the battery for the one functioning snowmobile far away out into the snow. A few days later when Danny goes to play on the playground, the hedge animals chase him back to the porch, and Jack tries to convince him it was a hallucination. That night the elevator starts running by itself, and is filled with streamers, confetti, and masks. Danny winds a clock in the ballroom with a key, tries to call Halloran with his shining, and sees some of the recurring visions Tony has shown him, this time with the word REDRUM reflected in a mirror so he realizes it spells “MURDER.” 

In Part V, “Matters of Life and Death,” Dick Hallorann hears Danny’s cries in his head in Florida and heads for Colorado as a massive snowstorm hits. In the Overlook’s basement, Jack considers letting the boiler blow after giving Wendy and Danny enough time to get out, but then doesn’t. Danny runs into a man in a dog costume in the hall who threatens to eat him and blocks his way to Jack. Jack drinks in the Colorado Room again, enjoying a party with a bunch of other people, including former Overlook owner Horace Derwent, who teases a man in a dog costume. Jack talks to the former caretaker Grady, who encourages him to “correct” his wife and son if they keep him from doing his job looking after the hotel. Hallorann endures a turbulent flight to Denver, then has to drive in horribly dangerous conditions until he manages to rent a snowmobile. Wendy finds Jack passed out behind the Colorado Room bar, and when he wakes and tries to strangle her, she knocks him out with a bottle on the bar right after Danny comes in. They drag him to the pantry and lock him in just as he wakes up. As Jack sits in the pantry, he starts to sympathize with why his father would have been a drunk and beaten his mother. Grady lets him out after he promises to kill Wendy to bring the “manager” Danny, and there’s a roque mallet and a bottle of gin sitting on the kitchen counter for him. Wendy hears voices and goes down to check that Jack is still locked up; the clock strikes midnight thought it’s only 8:00, and Jack attacks her. He hits her with the mallet a couple of times, but she manages to stab him in the back with a knife. He pursues her upstairs, where she discovers that Danny is gone from their quarters. She locks herself in the bathroom and just as Jack is about to break the door down, they hear the motor of Hallorann’s approaching snowmobile, causing Jack to leave. Hallorann is attacked by a hedge lion as he comes in but manages to burn it using the snowmobile’s spare gasoline, and manages to get past the other hedge animals to get inside, where Jack immediately knocks him out with the mallet. He goes to find Danny, whom Tony has guided to the third floor. Danny encounters some of the Overlook’s ghosts but makes them disappear by yelling at them that they’re “false faces.” He says the same to Jack when Jack finally finds him, adding that the Overlook is just using Jack and won’t keep any of its promises, which induces Jack (or the Overlook in Jack’s body) to start smashing himself in the face with the mallet. Then Danny reminds Jack/the Overlook that it forgot to dump the boiler, which is about to explode, and Jack/the Overlook runs to the basement while Danny rejoins his mother and Hallorann and says they need to get out; Hallorann picks them up and runs out the doors with them just in the nick of time as the boiler explodes, which helps deter the hedge animals out front waiting to attack them. The hotel burns and Hallorann puts Danny and Wendy on the snowmobile and goes to the equipment shed to get blankets so they won’t freeze, where he’s almost seduced into murdering them by the Overlook, but resists and gets them out safely. 

In the final chapter, Danny and Wendy say goodbye to Hallorann at the Maine camp where Hallorann’s been working as a chef, since Al Shockley has gotten Wendy a job in Maryland.

The End.       

Mom, I love you, but this trailer’s got to go, I cannot grow old in Salem’s lot

“Lose Yourself,” Eminem

Oozing Sex

The Catholic themes in both Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot discussed in my previous post connect directly to the treatment of sex in these texts, which isn’t terribly surprising, since the Catholics have a lot to (not) say about this subject.

For a college English class, I wrote a paper on Dracula entitled “Sex Fiend” about the vampire figure being a reflection/manifestation of the Victorian period’s repression of sexuality (which is a result/product of religion). (I remember this paper better than most from college because it’s the only one I ever got an A+ on, though technically it might have been an “A/A+.”) I don’t actually have a copy of the paper anymore, but for evidence in support of this thesis, take the first instance vampires appear as an overt threat/monstrous figure in Stoker’s text:

I was afraid to raise my eyelids, but looked out and saw perfectly under the lashes. The girl went on her knees, and bent over me, simply gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth. Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed about to fasten on my throat. Then she paused, and I could hear the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and could feel the hot breath on my neck. Then the skin of my throat began to tingle as one’s flesh does when the hand that is to tickle it approaches nearer—nearer. I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the super-sensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited—waited with beating heart.

This is the point where I would tell my students that even if the connection between the textual evidence and the point it’s supposed to support seems obvious, you still need to state the connection outright. But, I mean…come on. If reading this passage doesn’t turn you on, then… let me spell it out for you.

Stoker’s language in the above passage is overtly, deliberately sexual–“deliberate voluptuousness”–and the fact that it’s both “thrilling and repulsive” reminds me of the virgin/whore dichotomy perhaps best illustrated in this Amy Schumer sketch (“You’re like Maria from The Sound of Music but also the sex Nazi from Indiana Jones“).

King’s prose doesn’t really come close to expressing the sexual anxiety Stoker’s does here in the descriptions of overtly threatening encounters. King never draws out the suspense of a direct bite from Barlow, always opting for the strategy of depicting what could technically be termed Barlow’s seduction of his victims up to a point before cutting off and letting the readers imagine the moment of canine penetration (by which I mean teeth). If King were adhering to Stoker’s model more closely, he might have at least had one moment where he inched closer to depicting the bite, because the oozing-with-sexuality passage above is pretty much one of the only moments Stoker gets this close. But an actual bite doesn’t end up happening in this moment in Dracula because the Count himself sweeps in, declaring,

“How dare you touch him, any of you? How dare you cast eyes on him when I had forbidden it? Back, I tell you all! This man belongs to me!”

Which brings us to another aspect of the Lot that seems to exaggerate its source material. The passage from Dracula above certainly seems to contain homoerotic undertones, derived from the sexual overtones of the vampire/sex metaphor that for the rest of the novel remain pretty squarely in the realm of the hetero via the relationships of the main characters–Jonathan Harker and his wife Mina; vampire victim Lucy and her betrothed Arthur amid a couple of other of Lucy’s suitors. But then when you consider that the climax of the novel is Quincey Morris staking the Count–that is, one man penetrating another man–homoeroticism resurfaces, and then potentially homophobia, if the symbolic representation of male sex is figured as bloody destruction. (Though Dracula’s death being not just via Morris’ phallic staking but Jonathan Harker’s simultaneous throat-slashing might complicate this to some degree….)

Homos in Salem

King takes the latent homophobic symbolism of the vampire figure to another level in the Lot. While Stoker’s Count Dracula is generally depicted as hale and virile in a traditionally masculine hetero mode, King’s Barlow and Straker are hardly John Wayne (or hardly the hardened masculine exterior Wayne projected, anyway). First of all, there’s the fact that in Straker King has given the Dracula figure of Barlow a male companion who’s his “familiar,” his most loyal servant (with a name that would seem to be an homage to Stoker). The closest counterpart to Straker in Stoker’s version appears to be Renfield, the lunatic who eats spiders, and the smooth-talking Straker is hardly that, even if some locals consider him insane for attempting to institute an expensive antique furniture trade in an impoverished region laden with trailer parks. Renfield does go to a house apparently owned by Dracula every time he manages to flee the asylum, but this is hardly the same as shacking up the way Barlow and Straker apparently have, as several of the Lot’s townspeople comment on:

[Hank] looked up toward the Marsten House, which was dark and shuttered tonight. “I don’t like goin’ up there, and I ain’t afraid to say so. If there was ever a haunted house, that’s it. Those guys must be crazy, tryin’ to live there. Probably queer for each other anyway.”

“Like those fag interior decorators,” Royal agreed.

and:

“Straker is British by birth. Fifty-eight years old. His father was a cabinetmaker in Manchester. Left a fair amount of money to his son, apparently, and this Straker has done all right, too. Both of them applied for visas to spend an extended amount of time in the United States eighteen months ago. That’s all we have. Except that they may be queer for each other.”

Part of the inherent evil of the Marsten House is that it now houses an implicitly homosexual couple. Painting the relationship between the vampire master and his “familiar” in this light links the horrifying to the homosexual all but explicitly in what is potentially a pretty problematic comparison.

On the other hand, King never makes any sexual aspect of the relationship between Barlow and Straker explicit: it’s primarily–almost entirely–relayed via town gossip and assumptions, and the reader is likely to come away thinking that this gossip is misguided and incorrect: the explanation for why they’re living there together isn’t because they’re gay, but because they’re vampires. This idea connects to how part of the depiction of the small town is to represent how wary its citizens are of outsiders, as represented in another conversation between Ben and Matt Burke, which also happens to invoke small-town homophobia:

“They’ll turn your life into a nightmare. They’ll hound you out of town in six months.”

“They wouldn’t. They know me.”

Ben turned from the window. “Who do they know? A funny old duck who lives alone out on Taggart Stream Road. Just the fact that you’re not married is apt to make them believe you’ve got a screw loose anyway. And what backup can I give you? I saw the body but nothing else. Even if I had, they would just say I was an outsider. They would even get around to telling each other we were a couple of queers and this was the way we got our kicks.”

As I frequently tell my students, just because a character does something unethical, it doesn’t automatically make the text itself unethical. If the text here is unethical, King himself as the writer would be exhibiting homophobia in a way that would also encourage his readers to potentially do so as well: he would be endorsing/encouraging homophobia. If the text is ethical, King would be calling attention to small-town homophobia in a way that highlights how problematic and misguided it is and would thus encourage his readers to possibly check their own small-minded misguided homophobia: he would be discouraging homophobia.

In the above passage, Ben as a writer is almost like a surrogate voice for King, and Ben is pointing out the misguided nature of the town’s conceptions when he says the townspeople would claim he and Matt are queer when they (and the readers) know definitively that they are not. Which would be a point for the text on the ethical side.

But, the casual thread of homophobia in the text extends beyond just the townspeople’s apparently misguided conceptions of Barlow and Straker.

First, the reader does get to witness Straker in action directly, thus being allowed to make their own judgments rather than having to rely on a townsperson’s mediated version, and it would seem Straker wears his gayness on his presumably stylish sleeve:

“You tell Mr Barlow that I’m lookin’ forward.”

“I certainly will, Constable Gillespie. Ciao.”

Parkins looked back, startled. “Chow?”

Straker’s smile widened. “Good-by, Constable Gillespie. That is the familiar Italian expression for good-by.”

“Oh? Well, you learn somethin’ new every day, don’t you? ’By.” He stepped out into the rain and closed the door behind him. “Not familiar to me, it ain’t.” His cigarette was soaked. He threw it away.

Here the gay affect expressed via Straker’s use of the term “ciao” is conflated with the European–it’s a reminder that their origins are from Europe, in keeping with the vampiric narrative tradition (in Dracula the Count’s castle is in Transylvania, which is in Europe, near Hungary, and Stoker provides a detailed history of the region). European it may be, but it also reads pretty gay, especially with the “soaked” and discarded phallic cigarette capping off the passage. What might be interpreted as a marker of American patriotism/exceptionalism in Gillespie’s resistance to foreign vernacular–the contrast between his and Straker’s styles of speaking is quite marked here–is linked to an expression of homophobia latent in other aspects of the text. For instance, Dud the dump runner’s attitude about out-of-town visitors:

He’d found a splintered spool bed with a busted frame two years back and had sold it to a faggot from Wells for two hundred bucks. The faggot had gone into ecstasies about the New England authenticity of that bed, never knowing how carefully Dud had sanded off the Made in Grand Rapids on the back of the headboard.

You could potentially argue this is just another representation of small-town homophobia. But is it more condemning (ethical) than condoning (unethical)? There’s the use of a particular offending epithet twice when arguably once would have been sufficient. Maybe people in the 70s would not have considered the f-word quite as offensive as it’s considered today, or maybe they would have; regardless, the unadulterated vitriol with which it’s invoked here would seem to indicate it’s meant to be fairly offensive. Then there’s the object this denigrated individual from Wells bought, a bed frame whose headboard is specifically mentioned. In theory, this person could have been buying any number of objects Dud might have found and repurposed at the dump (as an antique, no less, an interesting tie-back to Barlow and Straker’s cover business, one of the factors that makes people gossip that they’re gay). But it’s a bed with a headboard, an object that invokes the specter of the (homo)sexual act itself, and now locating the site of that act on an object that is soiled in a way that would create negative associations for the reader with the homosexual rather than negative associations with Dud. Something else that potentially cements this (problematic) alliance of sympathies for the reader is how Dud plays the homo for a fool–this successful scam seems to be one of the moments King is potentially valorizing a small-town citizen rather than denigrating him, showing how they are more in-the-know about certain things than the outsiders they so disdain, as opposed to misguidedly judging outsiders. Point for unethical.

On the other hand, another way to read the success of Dud’s scam here is that Dud is economically screwing the “faggot”…which would, in a sense, figure Dud himself as a “faggot” (unless we want to get into nuances of the term that might suggest the “faggot” is only the one being penetrated, not the one doing the penetrating…). Dud is at the least figured in a scenario of “screwing” with another man, which potentially complicates the (anti)homophobic sentiment expressed here and how (un)ethical it is.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that when we see Straker through Dud’s eyes, he’s going to drop the f-bomb again:

The man turned toward [Dud]. The face that was discovered in the red glow of the dying fire was high-cheekboned and thoughtful. The hair was white, streaked with oddly virile slashes of iron gray. The guy had it swept back from his high, waxy forehead like one of those fag concert pianists.

Dud sees fags so many places I’m starting to think he might be one…

The Pen is Mightier

Another representation of homophobia in the Lot links back to the literary references the text is rife with and the ideations of masculinity represented by our protagonist, novelist Ben Mears, one of whose novels is specifically noted to contain a “homosexual rape scene.” Sue’s mother, in particular, is a character who has a problem with Ben (and his rape scene):

Ben Mears, on the other hand, had come out of nowhere and might disappear back there just as quickly, possibly with her daughter’s heart in his pocket. She distrusted the creative male with an instinctive small-town dislike (one that Edward Arlington Robinson or Sherwood Anderson would have recognized at once), and Ben suspected that down deep she had absorbed a maxim: either faggots or bull studs; sometimes homicidal, suicidal, or maniacal, tend to send young girls packages containing their left ears.

This is Ben’s projection of Susan’s mother’s projection of him. Even though the way it’s written seems to be from Susan’s mother’s point of view, we can tell we’re actually in Ben’s because of the literary references. Ben’s reading of Sue’s mother’s reading of him–which is a reading of the small-mindedness of the small-town perspective–is that she conflates artistic/creative types with homosexuals; Ben notes the problematic contradiction of this idea with what she perceives as the distinctly heterosexual threat he poses: screwing her daughter, both in the literal sense (fucking) and the figurative sense (eventually abandoning her). That Ben’s complex psychological projections are on point seems confirmed by what we see Susan’s mother yell at Susan during a fight about Ben:

“You listen to me! I won’t have you running around like a common trollop with some sissy boy who’s got your head all filled up with moonlight. Do you hear me?”

That she is accusing her daughter of being a “trollop” with a “sissy boy” would seem to indicate that the problem Sue’s mother has with him fucking her daughter, in essence, is that he’s gay.

So that’s a mind fuck.

This contradiction was so intriguing to me that I had to look up more about it. This is when I discovered that literary critics Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy have a chapter called “On Stephen King’s Phallus: or The Postmodern Gothic” in their book American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative (1998).

For a bit more context, the “gothic” is an academic category of fiction that encompasses horror writing and beyond–think Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner. In their introduction, Martin and Savoy quote Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982) to explain that the “gothic tendency” is

“…an alchemy that transforms death drive into a start of life, of new significance” (15).

American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative (1998), p. ix

King’s vampires certainly embody this death drive. How this particular embodiment of the death drive translates into “‘new significance,'” especially in light of his vampire figures’ link to homophobia, relates to gothic figures’ invocation of “otherness,” as Martin touches on in a brief summary of gothic criticism:

Thus it is no accident that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s entire project of mapping the epistemological regulations of the heteronormative subject in the social field–its predication on the terrible potentiality of otherness that is inflected through “homosexual panic”–originated in her work on the homoerotics of the “paranoid Gothic” (89).

American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative (1998), p. ix, quoting Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men: English Literature and Male
Homosocial Desire (1985)

To translate this turgid academic vocabulary, Sedgwick was apparently attempting to articulate the ways dudes felt they had to act and think to make sure everyone (including themselves, frequently) thought they were straight whether they were straight or not, because to be gay was to be other, different, cast out of the homogenously hetero group. To put it another way, terms of heteronormativity/masculinity–what it means to be a “man”–were (are) largely defined by what they were not. You might not know what you want to be–the “epistemological regulations” Sedgwick mentions above referring to knowledge, or perhaps more specifically limited knowledge, a sort of knowledge-neutering–but society has made it very clear what you don’t want to be: gay, different, other. To be these things is what is truly horrifying, making horror an apt genre to express them.

In psychoanalytic theory, this anxiety/horror over sexual otherness (or to put it another way, this conception of sexual inadequacy) is linked to an anxiety over language’s capacity (or inadequacy) to represent the self. Savoy and Martin apply this psychoanalytical concept to King by analyzing three of King’s main characters who are writers–Ben Mears from ‘Salem’s Lot (1975), Jack Torrance from The Shining (1977), and Thad Beaumont from The Dark Half (1989)–in the service of supporting the thesis that:

The contradictory implications of the search for knowledge are specifically rendered in King through the figure of the author.

American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative (1998), p. 76

They offer two epigraphs from King to denote the opposing poles of the contradictions King renders in searching for knowledge, the first from ‘Salem’s Lot noting the child’s capacity for horror precisely because of their youthful capacity for imagination that’s lost in adulthood (the loss of which in fact marks entry into adulthood), and the second from The Dark Half noting that the adult might be terrorized specifically by the knowledge gained in and through adulthood. All of which would seem to support the thesis put forth by the old man in Home Alone:

The chapter’s ultimate argument is a little more complex, connecting the writer’s “anxieties over language” to anxiety over “male heteroxexuality”:

Despite King’s own prolificacy, he connects the desire to write to the fearful repressions instituted by the act of writing itself.

This fixation on the vicissitudes of verbal productivity–its relation to madness and self, its pleasures and horrors–suggests an almost uncanny resemblance to the fixations of another theorist of language and desire, Jacques Lacan, who theorizes many of the same complexities and fixations of King’s postmodern gothic. … King is (or at least appears to be) remarkably in line with contemporary theories of psychoanalysis as he depicts the writing psychology. In a world after Lacan, the ego is no longer given the verbal mastery over the ineffable repository of instincts that is the id, but rather the id itself, that locus classicus of gothic activity, contains “the whole structure of language” (Lacan, Écrits 147). And as a definitively verbal site, this unconscious registers a crisis in the production of the self–and in particular the male self–that is documented in King’s fiction. Thus, I want to argue two things here: first, that Stephen King employs the anxieties over language as articulated by Lacan to discuss a postmodern condition, and second, that this deployment signals in King’s characters, as in Lacan, a crisis of male self-definition that throws into question the very category of male heterosexuality.

American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative (1998), p. 76-77

This will be an essay worth returning to later, but for now I’m interested in what this chapter has to stay about the Lot’s “faggots and bull studs” passage and the conflation of the artistic with the gay/other this passage denotes, which for these academic critics serves as evidence that for King, anxiety over language/(self-)expression and anxiety over sexuality are inextricably linked–which apparently reinforces a general idea of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan‘s that many of us (I guess necessarily men?) find language actually “castrating” as a form of self-expression due to its inadequacy. (As someone who just had to write their wedding vows, I can relate.)

Savoy and Martin go on to make a pretty sweeping claim related to King’s work:

For just as the literate is equated with the horrific in King, so is it repeatedly associated with the homosexual.

American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative (1998), p. 87

They also provide an interesting historical context for the vampire’s gayness as connected to the small-town mindset (a way that King potentially derives supernatural horror from natural fears):

Kurt Barlow’s homosexuality may signal rural Maine’s fear of pederastic invasion by gay men whose visibility has increased since Stonewall,[] but it also puts him (like Lacan) in a history that equates urbanity with effeminacy–one that even sees urbanity as the cause of effeminacy.

American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative (1998), p. 88

I’m still not completely sure why in all this literary-psychoanalytical theory the phallus and language are equated, but apparently they are:

Indeed, it seems that to play with words is at some level to play homoerotically with the phallus.

Thus it is the phallus–authorial and sexual–whose emergence troubles the heroes of King’s postmodern gothic. Traditionally, the gothic has been understood as the unveiling of repressed desires that “ought to have remained hidden,” as Freud says (“The Uncanny” 241), and that constitute the social order by virtue of remaining hidden. For Lacan, what remains hidden that constitutes order is precisely the phallus, in that it is the phallus-as-signifier of identity, wholeness, and unity that unconsciously structures the human subject and authorizes his relations with others (The Seminar 288). King’s gothic, however, unveils the phallus and brings it out of the closet in terrifying ways.

American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative (1998), p. 89

And:

While the phallus-as-signifier in Lacan does not equal the penis, it can never be divested of the penis; it must always signify the penis at the same time it transcends it. Language, the phallus-as-signifier, has it both ways (like Harry Derwent of The Shining), and its AC/DC nature troubles the straight male writer, who is, as Thad Beaumont knows, “passing some sort of baton” (437) in a phallic play that is pleasurable, homoerotic.

American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative (1998), p. 91

What follows that passage is the sort of abstract theoretical contortions that I find very difficult to follow, in which they explain how Lacan explains why male homosexuality and heterosexuality are essentially the same via the male’s origin desire of being his mother’s missing phallus, the first link in a convoluted chain whose endpoint is somehow that “heterosexual masculinity is predicated on desiring a phallus while already having one.”

At which point they finally get to the “bull-studs” quote:

Although Ben Mears suspects that the town sees writers as “either faggots or bull-studs” (106), we might now effect a grammatical shift of our own to “faggots as bull-studs” or, rather, “bull-studs as faggots.” For the prowess of phallic signification that characterizes the writer in King also characterizes the villainous vampire, the highly cultured Other who demonstrates the straight author’s ambivalence to the phallus. And this ambivalence, I want to conclude, characterizes a particularly postmodern gothic terrorism.

American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative (1998), p. 92

Well, that’s a mouthful. (This being written in 1998, so pre-9/11, it seems the term “terrorism” might have been used a little more broadly at the time–here, an abstract terror-inducing literary device rather than physical violence enacted by a specific group.) What they seem to be pointing out is that in the Lot there’s a parallel created in the treatment of the vampire figure and the writer figure in that both are attributed an ambivalent masculinity–a representation of masculinity that’s rendered ambivalent via its inflection with gayness. The vampire and writer both simultaneously embody a gay man and a virile straight man: Ben is a “sissy boy” yet still has the power to render Sue a “trollop.”

So it is that this idea of Savoy and Martin’s helped me get a better grasp on the contradiction of how Ben could be both of these things that started my reading on this in the first place: Ben’s being both reflects an ambivalent masculinity that’s apparently ultimately a product of anxiety over language; language’s failure to accurately represent the self in a sense “castrates” the self, a sense of castration that generates the ambivalence toward masculinity. But interestingly, Savoy and Martin didn’t seem to make this connection themselves:

And in Stephen King’s New England, this “effeminizing” is equated with the homoerotic: Jack Griffen of ‘Salem’s Lot is a “bookworm, Daddy’s pet,” while Mark Petrie is a “four-eyes queer boy” accused of a proclivity to “suck the old hairy root”; Ben Mears is, according to Ann Norton, no fitting suitor for her daughter Susan because he is a “sissy boy” whose novel Air Dance contains a “homosexual rape scene in the prison section,” “[b]oys getting together with boys”–although why Ben-as-sissy should then be a sexual threat to the daughter is not clear  (35, 46, 191, 21).

American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative (1998), p. 88

So I guess I must be smarter than these guys with the PhDs…

For Barlow, this embodiment of both straight and gay seems to be reinforced when Matt Burke interrogates Susan about her physical attraction to the figure of Barlow:

“Did you like him?” Matt asked, watching her closely.

“This is all a part of it, isn’t it?” she asked.

“It might be, yes.”

“All right, then. I’ll give you a woman’s reaction. I did and I didn’t. I was attracted to him in a mildly sexual way, I guess. Older man, very urbane, very charming, very courtly. You know looking at him that he could order from a French menu and know what wine would go with what, not just red or white but the year and even the vineyard. Very definitely not the run of fellow you see around here. But not effeminate in the least. Lithe, like a dancer. And of course there’s something attractive about a man who is so unabashedly bald.” She smiled a little defensively, knowing there was color in her cheeks, wondering if she had said more than she intended.

It’s a little weird that Susan is so definitive about Barlow being “not effeminate in the least,” as though again King is trying to underscore how off-base the townspeople’s gay theories are. Potential point for ethical, though Susan’s whole assessment here feels very stilted.

The vampire figure often has immense physical strength, and Straker gets this (straight) attribute as well despite an appearance that makes others think of him as a “fag”:

They watched the stranger lift the carton into the trunk. All of them knew that the carton must have weighed thirty pounds with the dry goods, and they had all seen [Straker] tuck it under his arm like a feather pillow going out.

Mark’s not a writer or vampire figure, technically, but he is one of the pair of masculine protagonists. I’d actually forgotten that Mark is referred to repeatedly by the bully he ends up besting as a “four-eyes queer boy”; since Mark’s masculinity is reinforced via both his physical and mental superiority over that bully, his association with queerness in this same battle potentially becomes a positive trait (unless it’s just meant to reinforce the stupidity of the bully who made the comment…).

This dual straight/gay identity represented in both the good guy(s) (the writer and his young assistant) and the bad guy(s) (the vampire and his assistant) would seem to complicate my initial impression of an overly simplistic good v. evil narrative, since it would seem to be showing that these seemingly diametrically opposed sides/binaries actually have something in common… this also complicates whether the text’s treatment of homosexuals/homophobia is ethical or unethical. I’d say that while they might have the gay/straight-slash-effeminate/masculine duality in common to some extent, ultimately Straker’s skews way gayer than Ben’s, which thereby skews the text toward unethical, since the embodiment of gayness in the villainous figures as something to be feared is more pervasive and therefore more likely to potentially influence the reader.

Pop Cultural Context

The text seems to reflect a(n unethical) homophobia present in the 1970s culture at the time that would only start to penetrate that boundary into the culture’s conscious from its unconscious–that is to say, permeate the mainstream–when I was coming of age in the late 90s.

As we’ve seen, the vampire figure embodies the horror of otherness as a figure that has the potential to literally convert the essence of your self/identity, and in so doing, to render you fundamentally different, other. In the Lot, the townspeople’s fear of the vampires is a fear of this otherness/difference that could be read as a parallel to their homophobia, which is also a fear of otherness/difference. But as with showing the Catholic iconography (and/or faith in it) to literally have the power to stop the evil force, by creating a parallel between a fear of homosexuals and a fear of vampires (a parallel created by Barlow/Straker reading as gay figures), a reading is created/possible where homosexuals themselves are figured as an evil force, and not just (illegitimate) fear of them. The small-minded small-town citizens don’t like outsiders, and in the scenario of the novel are proven entirely right to distrust them (even if they’re technically proven wrong about the reason Barlow and Straker have shacked up). A textual association is forged between homosexuality and evil/immorality.

Christopher Castellani writes in his book The Art of Perspective about a particular narrative about his own homosexual identity forged by an association with the indelible image of a prominent pop culture figure:

My first clear image of a gay man was a skeletal Rock Hudson on television in the summer of 1985, flashbulbs going off around him, while newscasters speculated on the cause of his rapid decline. I was thirteen. I don’t remember if I knew what AIDS was until that moment, or if I even understood that “gay” was an identity, but, from then on, one became synonymous with the other, and together they equaled that diseased, emaciated figure once so handsome and beloved.

pp. 125-126

This description resonates with the vampiric takeover of the town echoing a disease-like epidemic, especially in light of the post turned-vampire symptoms that so many of the townspeople initially interpret as the flu. As with the Lot‘s curious connection to the Catholic church’s sex abuse scandal discussed in my last post, this idea is ahead of its time, since the first AIDS patient in the U.S. would not be identified until 1981 and the Lot was published in 1975. Yet the connection is so salient it seems almost prescient…

In Castellani’s description, Hudson is “skeletal,” “diseased, emaciated”–horrific, to put it another way, though a different type of horrific than, say, a blood-sucking vampire. Both types of horror being associated with gayness seems reflective of the culture during this time period of the 70s and 80s and its refusal at the time to integrate the gay subculture, distancing it and rendering it “other.” An emblematic reflection of this in pop culture at the time (we’re in a house of mirrors now) would be The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the infamous film version of which, interestingly enough, came out in 1975, the same year as ‘Salem’s Lot. With the character of Dr. Frank-N-Furter, a “self-proclaimed ‘sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania,'” the film makes direct reference to Dracula, subverting the trope of homosexual-as-villain by putting it on absurd, flamboyant, fabulous display.

Yet texts like these remained on the margins as AIDS raged in the 80s, and even as it became more subdued in the 90s. Castellani’s description of his initial negative association with gayness–which he internalized to his own mental and emotional detriment, triggering episodes that Martin and Savoy would refer to as “self-splitting” caused by “the repression of desires” (American Gothic p. 79)–has stuck with me as a powerful encapsulation of the influence pop culture can have over our personal narratives, and it reminds me of a couple of prominent homophobic trends in popular culture that I grew up alongside of in the 90s and 00s: Disney villains and hip hop. Exposure to these demarcates two distinct periods in my life (and probably that of most millennials)–young childhood and adolescence. A third pop culture text creating a Venn diagram straddling these periods could also be Friends and the ongoing gag where Chandler Bing was implied to be gay.

The Harper’s Bazaar article here provides a fairly exhaustive history of Disney’s LGBTQ representation, including a helpful clarification of terms:

While “gay” refers to people who like members of their same sex, “queer” is a reclaimed term that sprang up in academic circles in the early 1990s. The word is used both as an umbrella term for the LGBT community and embodies a notion of difference. To be “queer” means to stand in for the Other, whether that’s in terms of your sexual orientation or a performance of gender outside the norm. It can be hard to define, but you know queerness when you see it.

“Disney’s Long, Complicated History with Queer Characters” by Nico Lang, March 21, 2017

I see it when Straker says “Ciao” to Parkins Gillespie, a gesture that encapsulates how the figure of Straker links two distinct types of otherness: gayness, and being a foreigner, so that Parkins’ reaction to the gesture reflects both homophobia and xenophobia. Again, since Straker is in fact helping abduct children to feed to a centuries-old blood-sucking monster, Parkins is shown to be right to be afraid, a connection that reinforces and thus seems to justify the homo- and xenophobia. Which would make the text unethical…

Lang’s article also tracks Disney’s adjustment to shifting cultural attitudes, as does an article from the academic journal Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture:

…while Disney has long employed evolutionarily explicable cues to villainy, such as a foreign accent and an unappealing exterior, the company is now reacting to challenges to norms of social representation that proscribe the linking of such overt traits with immorality. Consequently, recent Disney films do not employ socially stigmatizing cues.

from abstract for “Disney’s Shifting Visions of Villainy from the 1990s to the 2010s: A Biocultural Analysis” by Sarah Helene Schmidt and Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, Fall 2019

Both this quote and the journal it’s from reflect the power of visual texts from popular culture to foster ideas and associations in the viewer’s mind that have the power to impact the viewer’s actions in real life (which is something I harp on and on about in my freshmen composition classes). Based on this particular academic study that appears fairly comprehensive, it seems like Disney has accepted the reality of this “sociomoral” influence and is considering it responsibly. (The more I think about it, the more Barlow and Straker strike me as villains in a Disney mold, and the more King’s potentially less complex good v. evil narratives strike me as versions of Disney movies for adults.)

I was watching Disney movies during the 90s period, when no one was challenging linking gayness to immorality (least of all my mother). I got the most obsessed with The Little Mermaid, that narrative in which the female protagonist sacrifices both her voice and her body for a man. Back then, we had Ursula, Jafar, Scar, Governor Ratcliffe, and Hades, all of whom are attributed queerness in a manner similar to how King ascribes it to his vampiric villains, creating an algebraic equation of morality: if villains = immoral (automatically/inherently, for being the “bad guy”), and if villains are coded as queer, then queer = immoral.

Then I stopped watching Disney movies, and started listening to Eminem.

Bridging the gap during this period were two significant pop cultural moments for positive gay representation: The Simpsons episode “Homer’s Phobia,” airing February 16, 1997, guest starring openly gay filmmaker John Waters; and Ellen‘s “The Puppy Episode,” airing April 30, 1997, two weeks after Ellen DeGeneres herself came out as gay on the cover of Time magazine (further conflating pop-culture texts and their real-life counterparts…). The Simpsons episode is a classic example of a character’s unethical actions–Homer’s homophobia–being highlighted in a way that calls attention to their unethical nature (according to Wikipedia, the episode won a GLAAD award). Ellen, of course, was another ballgame entirely–a game-changer.

I am a bad queer and was unaware who John Waters even was until now, and have not seen what is apparently his most significant film (whatever that means), Pink Flamingos (1972), starring none other than Divine, who is apparently the inspiration for Ursula, the queer villain from my favorite Disney movie The Little Mermaid. Pink Flamingos is apparently an emblematic piece of abject art, a concept that was popularized by none other than Julia Kristeva in the book that Savoy and Martin quoted defining the “gothic tendency,” that idea of the death drive making way for new life, an academic way of describing that clichéd cloud’s silver lining and apparently reflected in abject art via stuff like the scatalogical. In her seminal work (so to speak), Kristeva defines the abject in relation to the symbolic order, thus invoking Jacques Lacan: the abject is primal, predating the symbolic order; it is “the place where meaning collapses” as a product of being “radically excluded”–something so marginalized from the symbolic order that it exists outside of it entirely. If society doesn’t accept you, then why should you accept society? Enacting the taboo–that which society shuns/renders unspeakable/unacceptable–is a way art can manifest the abject.

In Pink Flamingos, Divine’s character’s efforts to be the “‘filthiest person alive'” enact the taboo, while also almost seeming like an absurdist take on the queer villain trope, though that might be anachronistic (though there is Captain Hook from Disney’s Peter Pan in 1953, and probably others). Wikipedia’s list of the film’s taboo enactments–“exhibitionism, voyeurism, sodomy, masturbation, gluttony, vomiting, rape, incest, murder, cannibalism, castration, foot fetishism”–definitely reminded me of South Park. I guess sometimes things that seem like shock-value schlock are actually making a more significant point about what dictates the boundaries of cultural acceptance…

Since Pink Flamingos came out three years before the Lot was published, I am curious whether or not it was on King’s radar. In Alissa Burger’s Teaching Stephen King, she quotes him describing a different allegorical take entirely on the shadowy figure of the other represented by the vampire and the fear of its spreading influence:

I wrote Salem’s Lot during the period when the Ervin committee was sitting. That was also the period when we first learned of the Ellsberg break-in, the White House tapes, the shadowy, ominous connection between the CIA and Gordon Liddy, the news of enemies’ lists, of tax audits on antiwar protestors and other fearful intelligence… [T]he unspeakable obscenity in ‘Salem’s Lot has to do with my own disillusionment and consequent fear for the future. The secret room in ‘Salem’s Lot is paranoia, the prevailing spirit of [those] years. It’s a book about vampires; it’s also a book about all those silent houses, all those drawn shades, all those people who are no longer what they seem.

Teaching Stephen King by Alissa Burger (2016), p. 14

Perhaps this was the conscious comparison King had in mind, but his making the shadowy figure gay creates a lot of unconscious complications. Both King’s conscious intentions for his material diverging from what manifests unconsciously and this connection between the shadowy villainous figure and the government will manifest to an even greater degree in King’s next work, The Shining.

At any rate, John Waters actually strikes me as a significant figure embodying a lot of the intersectionalities that ‘Salem’s Lot itself does between academia and pop culture, while also reflecting and shaping changing attitudes toward mainstream gay representation between the 70s and 90s and beyond.

The cultural significance of Ellen’s coming out in 1997 can probably not be overstated; it strikes me as a version of Kristeva’s “eruption of the Real” concept related to her defining of the abject and its differentiation from the symbolic order (a bodily wound leaking blood is the Real erupting, a confrontation with mortality viscerally different than merely confronting “signified death,” as in hearing a flatlining heart-rate monitor). When society was confronted with a mainstream celebrity’s deviation from the norm, there was definitely a backlash, an eruption of once latent animosity toward the other daring to rear its ugly head.

I experienced this backlash most directly via my mother and via listening to Eminem, who sprinkled the f-word epithet in his lyrics as liberally as salt on processed snack foods. Of course this is likely a product of the hyper-masculine hip-hop culture that valorizes the virile male whose virility is defined, as Eve Sedgwick once pointed out about some much older dudes, by how not-gay they are, rather than a direct response to Ellen, but this is what it kind of felt like was the battle on mainstream airwaves: Ellen v. Eminem. Of course there’s much academic writing on this masculinity angle of hip hop that’s probably not so dissimilar from Lacan’s analysis of what makes the male homosexual and heterosexual essentially similar: the man must prove his masculinity by fucking women in a way that turns them into an object serving to define his masculinity to other men, so he’s really fucking women to please other men…

I’m just going to leave this again here:

Which is amusing (to me at least) because Brittany Murphy plays the love interest that Eminem has an extended sex scene with in his psuedo-biopic 8 Mile (2002), proving his sexual virility as a prelude to finally proving his verbal dexterity (and thus masculinity) in the film’s climactic rap battle. His character is shown to be sexually and verbally castrated in the film by his girlfriend leaving him and faking pregnancy, and his failure to perform in the first rap battle. The film seems to link verbal and sexual virility in a Lacanian way similar to King’s Ben Mears in the Lot, continuing a legacy of pop cultural verbal homosexual anxiety…

-SCR

“Easy for Ben to say I’m to tell you everything. Harder to do. But I will try.”

Stephen King. “Salem’s Lot.” iBooks.

A particular pleasure of King’s older novels is when he writes a new introduction for them decades later; my ebook actually has both an introduction and an afterword written by him at some point in the 2000s. He notes the origin of ‘Salem’s Lot (1975) being Dracula (1897), which he taught in his high school classes, and the “E.C. Comics” he used to read as a kid that were pulpier and more graphically violent than Stoker’s classier and comparatively restrained blood-sucking monster. ‘Salem’s Lot thus embodies that quintessential King combo of literary and genre, high art colliding with pop culture.

King calls his second novel his “coming-out party,” seeming to refer to his allowing a sense of humor to enter into the story. But another big element of King’s “coming out” here, so to speak, is his treatment of an ensemble cast wide-ranging and disparate enough to generate the page count of the so-called doorstopper, which will become a King trademark. If Carrie is a character study of a person, then ‘Salem’s Lot is a character study of a town, and once again the elements of supernatural horror underscore the horror inherent in the natural–in this case, King’s supernatural horror provides a thematic treatment of the horrors of living in a “dead” small town deepened by references to real-life current events that reflect the larger culture and mindset of the 1970s.

King notes in his ‘Salem’s Lot intro:

More of Stoker’s characters are around at the finish of Dracula than at the end of ’Salem’s Lot, and yet this is—against its young author’s will—a surprisingly optimistic book. I’m glad. I still see all the nicks and dings on its fenders, all the scars on its hide that were inflicted by the inexperience of a craftsman new at his trade, but I still find many passages of power here. And a few of grace.

Since he doesn’t specify what exactly these “nicks and dings” are or identify the passages of grace, I’ll have to do that for him.

The Ensemble Cast: “Trash”

King mentions his mother Ruth in his ‘Salem’s Lot intro, discussing her distinction between “trash” and “bad trash”:

Quite often she would hand us a book one of us had requested, adding, “That’s trash,” in a tone that suggested she knew that the news wouldn’t stop us–might, on the contrary, actually encourage us. Besides, she knew that trash has its place.

What exact place “trash” has is something I’m interested in exploring on this blog, as portions of King’s work splendidly exemplify this principle. At any rate, “trash” is what the King boys were allowed and even encouraged to read, while “bad trash” is the stuff they were not allowed to read, with Peyton Place cited as an example of the latter (as well as Lady Chatterly’s Lover). King then goes on to conclude that he knows his mother, who died while he was working on the book, would think ‘Salem’s Lot is “trash,” but hopefully wouldn’t think it “bad trash.”

A quick word on Peyton Place: this was a popular salacious 1956 novel turned into a “wildly successful” prime-time soap opera that ran through the second half of the 60s. Wikipedia claims (citing an academic text) that “the term ‘Peyton Place’ – an allusion to any small town or group that holds scandalous secrets – entered into the American lexicon.” This is before my time. The term “Peyton Place” is one that sounded vaguely familiar, but not one I would have been able to attribute a specific meaning to, and I did not know about the novel or the TV show before reading King’s intro. Which is interesting, because I’m familiar with a fair amount of television from that era thanks to my parents, but I guess my mother would have been too young to have watched something like that in her Catholic household; it was probably about ten years too early for her demographic, something she would have watched had it been on in the late 70s instead of 60s. (And something my father wouldn’t have watched at all.) But King, as it happens, is eleven years older than my mother. While he doesn’t specifically attribute Peyton Place influence the way he does Dracula, it’s interesting that it comes up separately in both his intro and his afterword.

King’s conclusion from his intro that ‘Salem’s Lot is trash but not bad trash is called into implicit conflict in his afterword, in which he describes meeting with his editor about which of two manuscripts to move forward with in the wake of Carrie–a manuscript that he considered more serious and would eventually publish as a Richard Bachman novel, and what would become ‘Salem’s Lot. The editor, declaring ‘Salem’s Lot “Peyton Place with vampires,” convinces King that it would be better to move forward with the latter–after voicing reservations that it will brand King as a horror writer, which King, uncaring, laughs off. Call him whatever you want, as long as you pay him.

King notes that ‘Salem’s Lot remains one of his favorites due to the surprising bravery his characters turned out to demonstrate after he initially assumed that they would be no match for the vampire. But for me, the exalted bravery the characters exhibit is one of the novel’s dings, not one of the assets that waxes over them. This is primarily because the characters’ bravery does not feel like it derives from any type of organic or satisfying character development. It seems, initially, like a classic genre case of character subverted and sacrificed to plot rather than plot originating due to the characters–the evil force of this vampire descending on this town is something that happens to the characters, nothing that it seems like they particularly called down upon themselves with their own foibles. As King has it, they might be confronting and overcoming their own foibles on this path to bravery in having to confront this external force, but this is where the character development falls short.

Since a big distinction between literary and genre is the link between character and plot, the pacing of the action here becomes an expression of the shortcomings of the ensemble cast that has the potential to put us in the realm of trash. (“Bad trash,” at least according to Ruth Pillsbury King’s definition, seems to be more about lurid content than execution, Peyton Place‘s laundry list including “incest, abortion, adultery, lust and murder.” ‘Salem’s Lot only really checks two of these boxes, adultery and murder. It seems relatively tame, by today’s standards certainly, but also presumably in comparison to Peyton Place.)

On first read, I found the pacing of the book tedious, and one can probably get a sense of this from reading the summary–characters keep going back and forth to the same places talking to each other about the same things. You can certainly pinpoint escalations in the rising action, but they frequently feel jerky and disjointed, with a lack of coherence, like when the good-ole boy gang stops to stock up on some of the “old protections” at a flower shop and discovers Barlow’s anticipated their move and bought them out. Then they fight over whether they should try to procure more protections or just go confront Barlow before they decide they should go confront him and then go confront him. This is a superficial sense of action and escalation–the conflict has been drawn out by inserting an obstacle and delay before getting to the confrontation, which in theory is supposed to create suspense. But this obstacle of Barlow’s beating them to the flower punch is not shown to be of any actual consequence later–the delay this caused them in getting to the house doesn’t matter in any material way (the exact same thing would have happened at the house whether they’d gone to the flower shop first or not), and the flowers never at any point come to play a role in the action.

That the action and the character development feel equally erratic is not a coincidence, because these two elements of the craft are inextricably related.

So in terms of characters, let’s start with our main one, Ben Mears, the initially nameless “tall man” from the prologue. As we meet “Ben” officially in the opening post-prologue chapter which has circled back in time, he’s driving back to ‘Salem’s Lot in an interesting recursive loop of his later return set up in the prologue. One of the first things he notices here is some teenagers on a motorcycle, triggering this:

Memories tried to crowd in on him, memories of a more recent vintage. He pushed them away. He hadn’t been on a motorcycle in two years. He planned never to ride on one again.

We will steadily get more information about the reason he intends never to ride again: his wife Miranda was killed in a motorcycle accident when he was driving. This provides a chronic tension for Ben that would give him the opportunity for character development, but ultimately it feels like a missed opportunity. (Chronic and acute tension are craft terms I use in my fiction-writing classes that I explain in more detail here.) King leans on Ben’s chronic tension a few times as the vampire situation in the acute tension mounts, but while one might be able to see how the acute vampire situation reminds Ben in ways of his chronic situation, especially in his wanting to protect and then avenge Susan, it doesn’t feel like his character actually develops, because he barely feels like he has a character.

(I will note that I am glad the female figure formative in Ben’s chronic tension actually gets a name, unlike Tim’s ex in The Institute. But also, it’s a little weird and seemingly lazy that King’s main female character here has the same name as one of the main female characters in Carrie.)

The issue seems to be that King uses references to Ben’s chronic tension to increase tension for the plot, not the character. For example, the Miranda chronic tension comes up during a conversation between Ben and Susan once they’ve explicitly started discussing the possibility of vampires:

“I suppose I do. But it all seems more real after dark, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” she said softly. “God, yes.”

For no reason at all he thought of Miranda and Miranda’s dying: the motorcycle hitting the wet patch, going into a skid, the sound of her scream, his own brute panic, and the side of the truck growing and growing as they approached it broadside.

But it’s not really “[f]or no reason at all” that he’s thinking of this here, obviously. The reason he’s thinking of it seems to be he’s feeling the specter of looming disaster in the gravity of what they’re about to encounter (that is, the vampires), which mirrors the deadly advancing truck from his past. But the disaster coming in the plot via the vampires won’t require anything actually that complicated on the part of Ben’s character. On the surface, yes, he has to do difficult things by maintaining his fight against Barlow while everyone around him is picked off like flies. He exhibits the bravery that apparently made King his creator so proud–but this bravery does not feel like it’s emerged from the acute situation forcing him to confront his chronic tension. There’s even a setup for more of a convergence of these tensions when Susan fights with her mother about the idea that Ben was drunk during the accident and thus potentially caused it–which apparently turns out not to be the case. If Ben didn’t cause the accident and it simply happened to him, much like the vampire situation is happening to him, I’m much less interested. It’s not even really a chronic tension if he’s not in some way responsible for it himself. At least, not a narratively strong chronic tension.

To be more narratively strong, the situation with Miranda should have more influence over one of the most critical things Ben has to do–stake Susan once she becomes a vampire. He “has” to do this for reasons that are left basically unexplained:

“Ben, had you slept with Susan? Forgive me, but—”

“Yes,” he said.

“Then you must pound the stake—first into Barlow, then into her. You are the only person in this little party who has been hurt personally. You will act as her husband. And you mustn’t falter. You’ll be releasing her.”

(The characters acting in response to vampire lore they’ve read is something I’ll go into more detail about in another post.) Ben’s staking Susan is portrayed as difficult for him on the surface:

“No,” Ben said, speaking quietly, as a man speaks a fact. “I can’t.”

“You must,” Father Callahan said. “I’m not telling you it will be easy, or for the best. Only that you must.”

“I can’t!” Ben cried, and this time the words echoed in the cellar.

But the reason Ben “can’t” (though of course he does) is ostensibly the same reason any man wouldn’t be able to do this to his lover; it does not feel specific to Ben. If we’d seen in his chronic tension that he’d failed to do something critical that needed to be done in his past, then this moment would feel more significant, but it doesn’t, because the motorcycle accident is a random thing that happened to him. The other issue is that on top of it not actually connecting to his chronic tension, it’s not even a difficult choice on the surface–he knows she’s undead, and it’s stated repeatedly that it won’t hurt her.

It’s not morally complex to fight pure evil, and so it’s really not that narratively interesting. But it also feels good to fight pure evil and have such pure and righteous moral high ground–it’s just more a sugary eating-candy high. Ironically, Ben’s direct and victorious confrontation with and eradication of Barlow is a form of escaping tough truths rather than actually facing them.

There is another element of Ben’s chronic tension (and that it’s more developed than the part connected to the female characters is something potentially unsurprising in the context of all of King’s work, but more surprising in the context of his only having published the female-centric Carrie by this point). When Ben was a boy he went in the Marsten House and saw the hanging body of Hubie Marsten open his eyes, something that’s haunted him ever since and made him more likely to believe in elements of the supernatural–and a willingness to believe is a big part of the book’s themes. This propensity toward belief is the main thing that qualifies Ben to be the one to stake Barlow (aside from his being unclean from premarital sex, apparently). But despite this, and despite the hanging body of Hubie Marsten opening its dead eyes being a great symbol for chronic tension/emotional baggage in general (the past is not dead…), I was still unsatisfied. Ben feels more brooding wounded male archetype than person–the lack of complication in his chronic tension essentially rendering him a pure if largely stoic force for good. Even Ben’s being sexually impure with Susan makes him more masculine and thus actually pure–a Hollywood hero. He’s like a hybrid John Wayne/James Dean figure, but even better–because he’s also a fiction writer. The pistol turned to pen(is). Or in this case, typewriter.

Taking into account the fact that the primary protagonists here are a fiction writer and an English teacher, we could probably indulge in some speculative psychoanalysis of the author at this point, King still having been both writer and teacher when working on this book. Matt’s role as a teacher means he can provide handy explanations of the lore that feel so heavy-handed even another character is forced to comment on it:

“Don’t underestimate him! And now, if you don’t mind, I’m very tired. I was reading most of the night. Call me the very minute the work is done.”

They left. In the hall Ben looked at Jimmy and said, “Did he remind you of anyone?”

“Yes,” Jimmy said. “Van Helsing.”

Ben’s writing about the Marsten House showcases a fiction writer’s fiction being a reflection/expression of their deepest fears and desires (their Jungian shadow selves), and the idea is hinted at that Ben’s previous books have specifically been avoiding his rather than engaging with them:

Neither Conway’s Daughter nor Air Dance hinted at such a morbid turn of mind. The former was about a minister’s daughter who runs away, joins the counterculture, and takes a long, rambling journey across the country by thumb. The latter was the story of Frank Buzzey, an escaped convict who begins a new life as a car mechanic in another state, and his eventual recapture. Both of them were bright, energetic books, and Hubie Marsten’s dangling shadow, mirrored in the eyes of a nine-year-old boy, did not seem to lie over either of them.

It’s interesting that the subject matter of Ben’s first two books appear to have no antecedents to any of the personal information we learn about him, while the book he’s writing that does confront his personal shit, he ends up destroying.

In light of King himself and what his writing the piece of fiction that is ‘Salem’s Lot potentially reveals about his shadow self, I’d say one thing would be the Romantic angle–his need to believe that good will win out over evil and the unexpected power and prevailing of the human “bravery” he vaunted in his intro. So perhaps another element of King coming out here is the emergence of the Romantic who really does believe good will win out over evil.

Going into the project, King’s conscious mind thought the vampire/monster would win, but as he let his unconscious take over in his writing process, human bravery won out. The thematic exploration of belief systems (more on this in a bit) bears out the narrative being a manifestation of King’s shadow struggle with his own beliefs. King himself notes that allowing Ben Mears to become the big bad–that is, good–man he truly wanted to be took, on King’s part, a fair amount of “courage,” and King further touts the learning to let go of his preconceptions regarding Ben’s weaknesses as a character being one of the most important battles he’s fought as a novelist. I’d say you’re being a bit dramatic there, Steve–except maybe not, because this being his first ensemble-cast novel is a pretty pivotal moment for him as a writer. His framing of this novelistic battle reveals a certain wrestling match with his ego that there will be more to say about… a kind of circle jerk wherein Ben’s bravery is a manifestation of King’s courage as a writer for making Ben brave…

Another potential instance of King’s ego wending/winding/threading its way into the novel via its twin writer and English-teacher protagonists is the explicit citing of literary passages:

Ben, a little amused, thought of Edward Albee’s line about monkey nipples.

And suddenly a line came to him from Dracula, that amusing bit of fiction that no longer amused him in the slightest. It was Van Helsing’s speech to Arthur Holmwood when Arthur had been faced with this same dreadful task: We must go through bitter waters before we reach the sweet.

Gaiety becomes hollow and brittle, as in Poe’s castle surrounded by the Red Death.

“Mark Twain said a novel was a confession to everything by a man who had never done anything.”

This last quotation is interesting in the context of the idea of what a writer’s fiction reveals about the writer, both for Ben and for King–the latter potentially more interesting due to King’s aversion to readers’ interest in his personal biography and how that has influenced his work. (Sorry-not-sorry, Steve.)

Then there are two literary-reference passages that directly invoke an epigraph for the section they appear in. The first is to horror writer Shirley Jackson:

“Do you know The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson?”

“Yes.”

He quoted softly, “‘And whatever walked there, walked alone.’ You asked what my book was about. Essentially, it’s about the recurrent power of evil.”

Ben here is articulating both the fact that his book and King’s book are “essentially” about the same thing, and that these books’ underlying principle–“the recurrent power of evil”; “the idea that the evil that men do lives after them”–is cribbed from Jackson’s novel. Jackson is quite an important influence for King, especially for the literary v. genre debate; she is someone whose literary reputation was slow to be accepted due to her working in the horror genre, but whose prowess has come to be acknowledged and even revered, and who is regularly taught in high-school English classes now (or at least “The Lottery” seems to be). But when King was in college at the University of Maine at Orono in the late 60s, he railed against the English Department for not putting Jackson on any of their classes’ syllabi (or any other pop-culture texts, for that matter), and it would seem that on this front, at least, he’s been vindicated. I will say that the “recurrent power of evil” idea having a literary antecedent helps for me, at least, because my initial reaction to Ben’s “‘idea that houses absorb the emotions that are spent in them, that they hold a kind of…dry charge’” initially sounded pretty ridiculous on a literal level, even if it sounds good figuratively.

The second epigraph reference is to Wallace Stevens:

It made [Ben] think of that Wallace Stevens poem about the dead woman. “Let it be the finale of seem,” he misquoted. “The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.”

Of course this particular section is named for this epigraph, but the direct invocation of these literary references that have already appeared in the epigraphs feels a bit heavy-handed for me. It feels like an English teacher explicating the relevance of the epigraphs–which in this case, since Matt Burke almost immediately puts in that this is “a poem about death,” it is, and which it also is since King was still an English teacher at the point he wrote this. But really this is work an external English teacher/reader should be doing, not something that should be directly explained by the writer. This particular instance feels like King is trying shoehorn a sliver of literary respectability into his trash pile.

Then there’s a direct reference to the E.C. Comics’ influence:

“That so?” Parkins said with no particular surprise. “Vampire, ain’t he? Just like in all the comic books they used to put out twenty years ago.”

Returning to Ben’s fiction-writing and its role in the novel, it felt like there was something more significant plot-wise going on with that book manuscript, especially in the scene where he’s hyper-sensitive when the constable wants to look at it–but then nothing happens with this. He burns his manuscript at the end and smashes the paperweight he used for it that he actually took from the Marsten House that time he went in when he was a kid, apparently symbolizing that now that he’s killed Barlow, the house has lost its power over him. But plot- and character-wise, this doesn’t really feel like enough of a payoff for as much emphasis as Ben’s manuscript gets. Again it feels like a missed opportunity for Ben’s character development, for his having finally written about this horrible thing from his past preparing him more specifically to face it in the flesh.

Another potential missed opportunity with Ben’s chronic tension relates to why he had to leave the Lot back when he was a kid. One thing I didn’t notice until second read–that is, until I knew the book ended with Ben starting a fire to eradicate the vampires–was all the references to the fire of ’51 that decimated so much of the town, and this is actually the reason Ben had to leave:

“I lived with my Aunt Cindy. Cynthia Stowens. My dad died, see, and my mom went through a…well, kind of a nervous breakdown. So she farmed me out to Aunt Cindy while she got her act back together. Aunt Cindy put me on a bus back to Long Island and my mom just about a month after the big fire.” He looked at his face in the mirror behind the soda fountain. “I cried on the bus going away from Mom, and I cried on the bus going away from Aunt Cindy and Jerusalem’s Lot.”

“I was born the year of the fire,” Susan said. “The biggest damn thing that ever happened to this town and I slept through it.”

Hmm, foreshadowing for Susan for sure. But for Ben, none of this ever comes into play or even comes up again at all. Whatever emotional baggage was generated by this childhood cycle of abandonment doesn’t visibly figure in the choices we see him make. It’s definitely cool that he’s got such a personal connection to the big fire, and him starting a version of this fire himself at the end would seem to symbolize that he’s now in control rather than a victim. It’s just ironic that this backstory isn’t developed enough to reinforce that connection or make Ben feel like a flesh-and-blood person, since he’s the one who emerges as the supposedly victorious flesh-and-blood force. It’s almost like he’s an intentional iteration of the living corpses of the turned vampires. The stuff with his mom and aunt Cindy is his real emotional baggage that the supernatural encounter with Hubie Marsten’s corpse is a narrative symbol for, but lurid descriptions of the latter are leaned on too much without developing what it’s supposed to symbolize, so it feels hollow, designed to titillate, not delve into real shit. It’s the soap-opera version of things, a brief melodramatic glimpse.

Ben is emphasized as an important–indeed, the main–character from the beginning, but as the narrative winds circuitously around the town, it’s hard to get a grip for quite awhile on who the other important characters will turn out to be. The characters who become the most critical in banding together to fight Barlow are Ben, Mark Petrie, Matt Burke, Jimmy Cody, and Father Callahan. (Susan is significant for awhile but then gets killed off so Ben can stake her.) Early on we get a couple of quick scenes of Mark, Matt, and Father Callahan; Jimmy Cody basically gets nothing. So when these characters rise to the surface in the second half of the book as the most prominent ones, it feels disjointed.

Mark is basically presented as preternaturally gifted, an adult in a boy’s body described at one point as “economical,” and doesn’t feel like a real person. Matt Burke spends the bulk of the narrative in a hospital bed reading books about vampires, and his death felt completely random and pointless and doesn’t even have a clear trigger. Jimmy Cody is the level-headed physician who basically gets no development at all, and so is easily sacrificed near the end to the forces Mark and Ben are able to overcome. Father Callahan potentially gets the most development in his arc (while still having the same problem of his arc not having enough initial setup): a priest with a drinking problem, he espouses to Matt Burke about the changing conception of evil in the Catholic church (thanks to that pesky Freud and his conception of the id), and his confrontation with Barlow is presented as a test of faith–which he fails, but with the consolation prize that Mark is let go. Callahan is then forced to drink Barlow’s blood and, rendered unclean, is thus banned from his own church; curiously, he doesn’t seem to then join the traditional ranks of the undead, but leaves town on a bus, and in the last scene we see of him, he’s demanding to buy booze–which, if he’s really been turned, he shouldn’t even be able to drink? So I’m not even sure what’s supposed to be going on with that. (King says in his intro that he figuratively sent Callahan off to the land of Nod.)

And a couple of the minor characters seemed like they deserved more airtime, especially Larry Crockett, whose capitalist greed is the chink through which Barlow penetrates the town. That Larry is also specifically mentioned in the long newspaper article at the beginning seems to set him up for more prominence than he ends up getting. He pops up fleetingly in the second half of the novel, but his being turned into a vampire happens in a way that seems too understated for his having played such a pivotal role in Barlow’s being there in the first place. Though it’s definitely interesting commentary that the man who allowed the vampire access is the man who facilitated the spread of the trailer park…

The Thematic Treatment: “But Not Bad Trash”

On second read, I found a new appreciation for the novel’s sweeping scope in its depiction of the town as an entity. It’s the character of the town that truly generates the engine of this plot rather than individual human characters.

While a handful of so-called main characters can be isolated, we get glimpses of tons more, dropping into different consciousnesses on a dime with brush strokes that further develop the panorama of the small town and its implicit horrors, like Sandy McDougal’s being driven to beat her baby and Larry Crockett’s trailer-park investment machinations. The quilt-like pastiche King weaves from these pieces to create a portrait of a small town is indisputably impressive.

The stools in front of the bar were held down by construction and mill workers, each drinking identical glasses of beer and all wearing nearly identical crepe-soled work boots, laced with rawhide.

A natural element mirroring the supernatural insidiousness of Barlow’s slow takeover of the town is the insidiousness of the gossip (not incidentally, about Barlow) that we see spreading outward in a similar manner (and I’m definitely sensing some echoes of this creepy electricity stuff in the Twin Peaks reboot):

The town has a sense, not of history, but of time, and the telephone poles seem to know this. If you lay your hand against one, you can feel the vibration from the wires deep in the wood, as if souls had been imprisoned in there and were struggling to get out.

“…and he paid with an old twenty, Mabel, one of the big ones. Clyde said he hadn’t seen one of those since the run on the Gates Bank and Trust in 1930. He was…”

“…yes, he is a peculiar sort of man, Evvie. I’ve seen him through my binocs, trundling around behind the house with a wheelbarrer. Is he up there alone, I wonder, or…”

And we get several more clipped quotes from there before this section concludes:

The wires hum. And hum. And hum.

King himself notes in one of his intros how this portrait of a dead small town having its blood slowly but steadily drained is a metaphor for the post-Vietnam America he lived in:

I saw more, as well: how Stoker’s aristocratic vampire might be combined with the fleshy leeches of the E.C. comics, creating a pop-cult hybrid that was part nobility and part bloodthirsty dope, like the zombies in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. And, in the post-Vietnam America I inhabited and still loved (often against my better instincts), I saw a metaphor for everything that was wrong with the society around me, where the rich got richer and the poor got welfare…if they were lucky.

Which is as good a place as any to point out Jeffrey Cohen’s monster theory tenet that vampire narratives are more prominent during Democratic administrations and zombie narratives during Republican. Night of the Living Dead was actually released in 1968, when LBJ, a Democrat, was president, and King must have written the bulk of ‘Salem’s Lot during the Republican Nixon administration, which would seem to invert Cohen’s tenet, but that tenet is generally complicated by how fast administrations turn over and how it might take the effects of their policies longer to be felt. The passage above certainly sounds like a dig at republicans, and King biographers note that, in college in the late 60s, King threw himself into political protests against Vietnam.

Especially in contrast to Carrie, direct references to Vietnam abound in ‘Salem’s Lot:

What ’salem’s Lot knew of wars and burnings and crises in government it got mostly from Walter Cronkite on TV. Oh, the Potter boy got killed in Vietnam and Claude Bowie’s son came back with a mechanical foot—stepped on a land mine—but he got a job with the post office helping Kenny Danles and so that was all right.

They walked around the War Memorial with its long lists of names, the oldest from the Revolutionary War, the newest from Vietnam, carved under the War of 1812. There were six hometown names from the most recent conflict, the new cuts in the brass gleaming like fresh wounds.

The only socially conscious priests he felt at ease with were the ones who had been militantly opposed to the war in Vietnam. Now that their cause had become obsolete, they sat around and discussed marches and rallies the way old married couples discuss their honeymoons or their first train rides.

“That doesn’t matter. It’s true.”

“Sure it is. And we won in Vietnam and Jesus Christ drives through the center of town in a go-cart every day at high noon.”

Something in her face—not stated but hinted at—made Jimmy think of the young Saigon girls, some not yet thirteen, who would kneel before soldiers in the alleys behind the bars, not for the first time or the hundredth. Yet with those girls, the corruption hadn’t been evil but only a knowledge of the world that had come too soon. The change in Susan’s face was quite different—but he could not have said just how.

He had been in Vietnam for seven months in 1968, a very hard year for American boys in Vietnam, and he had seen combat. In those days, coming awake had been as sudden as the snapping of fingers or the clicking on of a lamp; one minute you were a stone, the next you were awake in the dark. The habit had died in him almost as soon as he had been shipped back to the States, and he had been proud of that, although he never spoke of it. He was no machine, by Jesus. Push button A and Johnny wakes up, push button B and Johnny kills some slants.

This last passage is about Reggie Sawyer, and it does a surprisingly good job of at least partially humanizing someone who’s basically shown to be a monster via repeatedly beating and raping his wife after he catches her having an affair in what seems like it must be the most Peyton-Place-like sequence in the book. There is a subtle implication that his combat experience might in some way be related to his brutal treatment of his wife now. (Of course, his combat experience won’t help him much against the undead cuckolder about to take his revenge.)

The shapes of the bodies under the cover were undeniable and unmistakable, making him think of news photos from Vietnam—battlefield dead and soldiers carrying dreadful burdens in black rubber sacks that looked absurdly like golf bags.

This last passage definitely reminded me of “Autopsy Room 4,” King’s story about a Vietnam vet-turned-business titan who mistakenly winds up in a body bag after getting bitten by a poisonous paralysis-inducing snake on a golf course–another juxtaposition of body bags and golf that’s symbolic of the gulf between the conscious and subconscious, that is, the subconscious awareness of mortality masked by the comparatively silly surface things we distract ourselves with.

And, tracking an interest in JFK that popped up in Carrie and will culminate in 11/22/63, there is a fleeting Kennedy reference in the Lot that probes a different angle from the assassination and which comes up during a fight Sue has with her mother about Ben:

“These famous fellows always know people,” she said with calm certainty. “There are ways to get out of everything, if you’re rich enough. Just look at what those Kennedy boys have gotten away with.”

“Was he tried in court?”

“I told you, they gave him a—”

“You said that, Mother. But was he drunk?”

“I told you he was drunk!” Spots of color had begun to creep into her cheeks. “They don’t give you a breathalyzer test if you’re sober! His wife died! It was just like that Chappaquiddick business! Just like it!”

But we get to know that it was not “just like it,” because when we get the memories of the incident from Ben’s perspective, there’s no indication that he had been drinking–even if it would have been more interesting both for his character and for the potential political commentary here if he had, since the definitive knowledge that Ben is not guilty of this accusation leads to an implication that the Kennedys were not guilty of such things even if people think they were, and that doesn’t really seem like the point King’s trying to make here. The larger point might be about Sue’s mother’s general ignorance, but again, there’s an implication that that ignorance extends to the Kennedys…

Dazed and Malaised

A Rolling Stone article recently dissected the 1970s “malaise days” mood as exemplified by the 1977 hockey movie Slap Shot:

Fleetwood Mac’s “Rhiannon” is blasting from the radio, and she fixes her husband with a glare as toxic as the fumes rising from the mill’s smoke stacks. “Will you ever win?” Stevie Nicks asks, and there were quite a few blue-collar workers during the Nixon/Ford/Carter years who were asking themselves the same question.

The vampire metaphor captures this historical mood quite effectively, while the fleeting portraits of the different characters across the town maintain a sympathetic perspective that valorizes small-town citizens as frequently as it denigrates them. This sympathetic effect is achieved both through representations of these various characters’ interiority, but also through balancing that interiority with the external camera angles of a more distant narrator:

[Eva Miller] was a big woman, but not precisely fat; she worked too hard at keeping her place up to ever be fat. The curves of her body were heroic, Rabelaisian. Watching her in motion at her eight-burner electric stove was like watching the restless movements of the tide, or the migration of sand dunes.

But in this particular scene, the boarding-house proprietor Eva Miller is cooking alone; no one is actually there watching her. Describing her as though someone is watching her when that is patently not the case calls even more attention to the fact of her aloneness, the fact that no one is there (but the reader) to appreciate it. I’d say it’s in this type of passage, acknowledging the beauty and grace of the unacknowledged domestic labors necessary to maintain daily life and thereby elevating that daily life (while also implicitly highlighting the power of fiction to do this by indirectly referencing the reader’s position as fly-on-the-wall), that the novel achieves the grace King mentioned in his intro.

Eva Miller provides a handy narrative gateway in hosting Barlow in her basement, but also in hosting the type of mill worker represented in Slap Shot:

Her boarders had the use of the stove and the refrigerator—that, like the weekly change of linen, came with their rent—and shortly the peace would be broken as Grover Verrill and Mickey Sylvester came down to slop up their cereal before leaving for the textile mill over in Gates Falls where they both worked.

As if her thought had summoned a messenger of their coming, the toilet on the second floor flushed and she heard Sylvester’s heavy work boots on the stairs.

Such workers are the life blood of the town, as we saw in that description of them lining Dell’s bar, and now they’re slowly being picked off by a vampire. What King ends up representing through his rotation through the ensemble cast is a small-town economy at work. In the first chapter that represents “The Lot” rather than focusing on a single character (and which culminates with Ralphie Glick’s disappearance), we rotate through characters as time steadily passes through the day. We start when the town starts to come to life:

The town is not slow to wake—chores won’t wait. Even while the edge of the sun lies below the horizon and darkness is on the land, activity has begun.

So we start at 4am then move through:
-boys doing chores on a farm
-the milkman making deliveries
-Eva Miller’s boarding house (when her milk is delivered)
-a stay-at-home wife discontent with taking care of her baby
-the cemetery groundskeeper finding a dead dog
-the school-bus driver
-a boarder at Eva Miller’s (through which we learn her husband died in a sawmill accident when he fell into a shredding machine, even though he was actually an executive and not a worker)
-Mark Petrie fighting a bully on the school playground
-the guy who runs the town dump (lusting after Larry Crockett’s daughter)
-Larry Crockett (“proprietor of Crockett’s Southern Maine Insurance and Realty”)
-Sue getting her hair done
-the affair between Bonnie and Corey (a phone-company employee)
-Ben looking at the Marsten House
-Matt Burke leaving school
-Ben having dinner with Sue and her parents
-Floyd at Dell’s bar finding out about his uncle’s dead dog on the cemetery gates
-Danny and Ralphie Glick going through the woods to Mark Petrie’s
-Mabel Werts eavesdropping on the phone lines and overhearing about the dead dog
-a mysterious figure offering a sacrifice of a child

The second half of this rotation gets a lot more plot-oriented as it circles main characters and builds toward the pivotal development of Ralphie’s disappearance, while the first half seems to represent marginal characters reflecting the town’s economy at work, but both plot development and small-town-economy repping are spread through the whole thing in a pretty masterful way.

I did wonder what was being offered plot-wise by the boys on the farm in the opening sequence; they do turn up again near the end when the school bus driver also repped here is taken by vampire teens on his own bus. And a search for their last name, Griffen, reveals that the farm being repped here in a clear local small-town-economy chain–we see the boys milking cows on a farm, then the milkman delivering milk that came from the farm, then the boarding house where that milk is delivered and consumed as breakfast fuel for a slew of mill workers, and we eventually see these millworkers patronize the town bar–was devoured in its own right:

The farm, a local landmark on Schoolyard Hill, was previously owned by Charles Griffen. Griffen’s father was the owner of Sunshine Dairy, Inc., which was absorbed by the Slewfoot Dairy Corporation in 1962.

While mill workers are repped in the narrative, King rarely explicitly references the economically endangered state of local mills. The vampire narrative essentially does this work for him: playing out the literal slow but steady death of a small town once it’s penetrated by an insidious force (that has to be invited in) represents the figurative economic death of the small town via the death of its economic engines–its mills and factories. This is what a town lives or dies by: its economy. The Lot chapter outlined above does a superb job of demonstrating this principle by figuring the town as an interconnected chain of its inhabitants’ economic positions (that is, their jobs) in such a way that one can start to see the scale of potential disruption–the vampire picks off one link in the chain, and the chain is broken: pick off the farm boys and there’s no milk to deliver, and on from there. The vampire disruption echoes economic disruption–shut down the mill and disrupt those economically dependent on it, which turns out to be the whole town, because if the mill workers don’t have jobs they can’t support the rest of the economy by patronizing the bars and the hairdressers and the boarding houses…

The death of Eva Miller’s husband, who was supposedly “in line for the mill’s presidency,” also seems representative of the economic destruction of the small town, adding the layer of its destruction being at its own hand, albeit accidentally:

What had happened to him was sort of funny because Ralph Miller hadn’t touched a bit of machinery since 1952, seven years before, when he stepped up from foreman to the front office. …

…he had fallen into a shredding machine while he was talking to some visiting brass from a Massachusetts company. He had been taking them around the plant, hoping to convince them to buy in. His foot slipped in a puddle of water and son of a bitch, right into the shredder before their very eyes. Needless to say, any possibility of a deal went right down the chute with Ralph Miller. The sawmill that he had saved in 1951 closed for good in February of 1960.

And the book takes place in 1975, so this slow death has been happening for awhile.

Another sequence I noted that reflected a larger cultural and economic discontent was when Mike Ryerson was trying to bury Danny Glick but steadily falling under the spell of vampiric hypnotism:

That coffin was another waste. Nice mahogany coffin, worth a thousand bucks at least, and here he was shoveling dirt over it. The Glicks didn’t have no more money than anyone else, and who puts burial insurance on kids? They were probably six miles in hock, all for a box to shovel in the ground.

Here you can almost sense Mike trying to resist the force he senses preying on him by clinging to these concrete economic complaints–a dynamic seemingly captured in Slap Shot via the mode of exorcising economic discontent via athletics and a team unified in their anger against a larger essentially invisible force.

King also undeniably excels at suspense-building and setting a dark mood, as this sequence with Mike demonstrates. The sense of fearful anticipation is heightened by a strategic juxtaposition of mundane and creepy detail:

The sandwich was bologna and cheese, his favorite. All the sandwiches he made were his favorites; that was one of the advantages to being single. He finished up and dusted his hands, spraying a few bread crumbs down on the coffin.

Someone was watching him.

King uses that image of the mundane (bread crumbs) next to the creepy (coffin) to pivot and create an escalation of tension–Mike is just going about his normal day, enjoying his sandwich, when–boom–he very suddenly and very creepily feels himself being watched. The literal bread crumbs here are a figurative bread-crumb trail of tension.

A similar tension-building juxtaposition of mundane and creepy detail occurs when Father Callahan is hearing Ben’s confession to purify him for his confrontation with Barlow:

[Ben’s] eye fell on something in the corner of the confessional, and he picked it up curiously. It was an empty Junior Mints box, fallen from the pocket of some little boy, perhaps. A touch of reality that was undeniable. The cardboard was real and tangible under his fingers. This nightmare was real.

Another highly suspenseful sequence is the one where Ralphie Glick is taken in the woods–it’s important to note that you don’t actually see him get taken: that section concludes:

But Ralphie trembled beside him in a paralysis of fear. His grip on Danny’s hand was as tight as baling wire. His eyes stared into the woods, and then began to widen.

“Danny?”

A branch snapped.

Danny turned and looked where his brother was looking.

The darkness enfolded them.

King has noted the importance of leaving some things to the imagination. Not depicting on the page what should be in theory the scariest part of the sequence actually gives it more power.

So, ultimately, the Lot is a mixed bag, but certainly an impressive effort and play on both literary and pop cultural antecedents. King had it right–trash, but not bad trash.

-SCR