Books: 'Salem's Lot By Stephen King (1975)

After reading The Stand, I think the second book I read by Stephen King was The Shinning followed by ‘Salem’s Lot (it would be a while before I ever read Carrie, his first book though). But while I’ve re-read both The Stand and The Shinning several times over the last three decades, for some reason, I’ve never took up ‘Salem’s Lot.

This tale of vampires set in a small rural town in Maine was King’s second novel. What strikes me now is how fully formed a writer King seemed to be at this early stage of his career. Yes, the book is not perfect, it takes a bit to get going, the exposition too obvious and too detailed, but this would become a hallmark of King’s works as well –the slow build up of terror; the plain-spoken people of the small towns he does in his world building mode, people who very obviously choose to ignore the malice and the utter dysfunction that simmers on low just below the surface of the town. It is also here, I think, that King begins carting out a lot of the same ideas he would reuse in later novels, in particular I see the foundations for both Needful Things and IT (he thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts) running through this novel. There is also the character of Father Callahan, a ruin of a Catholic priest who vanishes from the Lot after drinking the blood of Barlow the vampire only to reappear decades later in King’s Dark Tower novel The Wolves of Calla. While I can’t be sure, but I think when King wrote this book he had no idea he would reuse this character in those later year; and one can be cynical and say the writers attempt to connect all his books to his DT is a huge bit of retconning, but like all artists, you can never really second guess their motives for doing this. It can be called clever or just an attempt to get people to buy other tales. Also, Barlow is described in the DT novels as a shape-shifting level one vampire.

The 1979 miniseries version of the book is excellent, generally following the same story as the novel, but it was forced to take some liberties. As with most of King’s long books, some characters are deleted, while others are combined; some subplots have been excised as well; scenes are also rearranged and Barlow is based on the classic German expressionist film Nosferatu than the suave, handsome Eastern European creature King creates in the book (which is an improvement. This version of Barlow is probably, as well, the last time on screen a vampire was truly presented as evil, and not some creature of the night who looked like a male model). Also, a lot of the violence and many graphic scenes were curbed –or dropped (the scene where Sandy McDougall discovers the body of her baby boy Randy is fairly gruesome for 1975 [“The small body, still clad in wash-faded Dr. Dentons, had been flung into the corner like a piece of garbage. One leg stuck up grotesquely, like an inverted exclamation point”] and still gruesome in 1979 and even 2017) - due to broadcast restrictions of the period. Still, that version, directed by Tobe Hooper (who eerily passed away the day after I began re-reading this book) creates an atmospheric, almost old-style Gothic horror film of the book which works just as well (in many ways, it’s a cousin to the classic soap opera Dark Shadows).  Of note is the scenes involving Ralphie Glick (who is the first preteen vampire ever presented on screen, a character that predates Anne Rice’s Claudia in 1976’s Interview With a Vampire as well as that novels screen adaptation in 1994), the first person taken and then killed by Barlow. Hooper is able to capture the spookiness of the scenes in the novel, as Ralphie floats outside the bedroom window of his brother Danny, trying to lure him into "letting him in" to be bitten.  It was chilling in the novel and even creepier on screen. Those scenes alone became hallmarks, immortalized in several other media enterprises, including a segment of The Treehouse of Horror on the long-running animated series The Simpsons

Much like motion picture version of The Dead Zone, this TV movie (which was remade in 2004) seems underappreciated by many for whatever reason. The acting is fine, with David Soul playing the befuddled writer Ben Mears that is light-years away from his role on Starsky & Hutch. Then there is the legendary James Mason, who is wonderfully sublime as Straker, the thrall of the vampire Barlow.

The book, despite the 1970s pop culture references, still holds up in 2017. It may be hard to believe in this day and age of Google mapping and 24 hour news cycle, a town like Jerusalem’s Lot, haunted by evil, could go unnoticed, but there are many ghost towns not only here in the US, but across the world. Who knows, maybe somewhere deep in the woods of Washington State, Oregon, Colorado, and even Maine, there can be a town that holds back time. A town where people only come out a night for some fine dining on anyone curious enough to step across the line between light and darkness.

Books: IT by Stephen King (1986)

One question that really appears to have been sort of answered in Stephen King’s 1986 best-seller IT is whether the fictional town of Derry, Maine he creates here is haunted because of the IT creature or did that creature take up residence there because it found a town that contained more cruelty than any other place –a town where a lot of horrible things happen and yet the people who are born there, who live and work there seem to exist in the ether of indifference?

It’s something King does touch on, though near the end of this book, when the reader is taken on the horrible ride that is Patrick Hockstetter’s death, King implies somewhat that maybe what haunts Derry is nothing more than human failure, the fact the we grown up and stop believing in a magical world, and then our inability to try and fix it, so we bury it: “In other words, Derry Elementary School was the typical confused educational carnival, a circus with so many rings that Pennywise himself might have gone unnoticed.”

I originally read this book back when it was released in 1986. And I took it up again, if I remember right, around 1990 when ABC aired the 2-part version of the novel. I may have read it again sometime in the 90’s, but I’m not sure. I have seen the TV movies version several times, and like many will note, the first half is much better than the second half. In the end, like many King adaptations, IT can be chalked up to the perpetual difficulty of translating his works to the screen, both TV and silver. Part of the problem with the 1990 version is that aired on broadcast TV in an era when broadcast standards were still super strict (though they still are today). A lot of what happens in the book –the extreme description of death, the foul language and the bullies lighting their farts on fire could never been shown on ABC.

But the TV movie also left a lot of reasons why things happen Derry, why the people ignore its own past, why the world ignored the fact that Derry’s long history of child deaths and other murders were well outside the per-capita of the rest of the world. It also condensed too much, left out more interesting plot points in favor of the larger set pieces. It made odd choices in what to keep and what to excise, I'm saying.

With a new version of IT scheduled to be released next month, I took up the book again to remind me what King can do when given a wide palette.  He sometimes can do off the rails, detailing the lives of minor characters that do not have any connection to the main plot, but it’s also this sort of world building that does not go on very much anymore. He creates hundreds of minor characters, breathes life into them, gives them a back-story, and then moves on. 

The book was, in many ways, another trip to King’s life of growing up in the late 1950’s and early 60s (an affinity shared with Peter Straub). Here he creates small town life that is hardscrabble, yet filled with plain spoken people (and King would revisit 1958 and Derry again in his 2011 novel 11/22/63), but all of it is just smoke and mirrors, covering the dysfunction and malice that lives just below the surface. Sure, like the novels  released prior to this and the many ones that came after, King continues his endless ability to recycle the same tropes (2009’s Under the Dome in particular), yet for me it’s the sharp sizzle of his language that makes me continue reading his works, and mostly because he can bring these age-old stereotypes alive. Whatever weakness he may have, this ability alone makes him worth reading. It’s a talent many authors of today can never come close too achieving. 

This re-read also gave me a chance to discover again the early beginnings of his shared universe with the Dark Tower novels. Most strikingly is the turtle, a “long time enemy of the creature, It. In 1958, the Turtle communicates with Bill Denbrough for a moment while he is under an illusion created by IT. Bill pleads for help from the Turtle in defeating IT but the Turtle says he does not get involved with those matters. Pleading again, the Turtle simply gives some advice in that he must stand by his friends and perform the Ritual of Chüd. In 1985, when Bill and the remaining member of the Losers Club returned to finally kill IT, Bill is told that the Turtle has died sometime after their last meeting in 1958.”

The lore of King’s series, the turtle is one of the guardians of the Beams that support the Dark Tower. Where the IT creature came from can be implied somewhat, as well. King calls it the macroverse, though it could be one of the many universes that exist within the Dark Tower itself. We also get a cameo appearance from Dick Hollarann, the caretaker who takes on the ghosts of the Overlook Hotel in The Shinning. Here, we meet him in 1930, who is an Army cook and member of the African-American army nightclub in Derry called "The Black Spot", which was burned down by the Legion of White Decency. Dick's Shining allowed him to save the lives of several other clubgoers, including Mike Hanlon’s father. He is also notable for being one of the only sane adults able to see IT in one of its varying forms. The town of Haven is name checked, which would be the focus of a non-supernatural book called The Colorado Kid and a fantasy series that would air on the cable network Syfy. 

The book remains for me, one of King’s best (and certainly the best of the 1980s work) and re-reading filled me with happiness. I have hope that the theatrical remake coming in September will be able to capture the essence of the story without defaulting to word soup. King’s adapters (and even himself doing Pet Semetary) seem unable to get out a proper explanation for things, instead those descriptions fall short of making any sense or are dropped like a rock into the ocean, never to seen again. 

Time will tell. It always does!

Books: The Waste Lands (The Dark Tower III) By Stephen King (1991)

For the 2017 re-read of The Waste Lands, book III of The Dark Tower, I think I understood it better. I do remember that this third book was the best of the series so far, and today I still think it is –despite the slow pacing and the much meandering about of the first hundred plus pages or so (which I admit is somewhat of a pattern in all of King’s books that are over 500 pages, which is many). King drops a lot of new stuff here, especially the temporal paradox created in book two, which I seemed to have forgotten about. I loved the idea that both Jake and Roland were slowly going mad and how King created and made this paradox believable. 

When I read this back in 1991, like many, I was frustrated that it ended on such a huge cliffhanger. But knowing that Stephen King was such a prolific writer, it stood reason that maybe two, or at least three years might go by before we got the next book. But six long years went by before Wizards and Glass, six years where King would release nine other novels, including The Dark Half, Needful Things, Gerald’s Game, Dolores Claiborne, Insomnia (which introduced protagonist of that book, The Crimson King, who would go on to have a major role in this series), Rose Madder, The Green Mile, Desperation, and The Regulators, in that same period, and by the time book four had come out in 1997 I was hoping to remember what went down in The Waste Lands (I was not in the mood then to re-read the three previous books). What I do remember of this period was me trying to shift away from series books that had a long wait between releases. A lot had to do with Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, which began in 1992. The first three books came out in rapid succession, only to slow down as the writer began to go off in tangents and slow down. When working for Borders at the time, I remember not a day went by when some asked when the next book in Jordan’s series was coming out.

To be honest, I don’t know what I remembered about my initial reading of the book way back then. However, now in this re-read, I began to see how The Waste Lands would really began setting up everything came before and would follow, and how long time Constant Readers of King began to see and understand that all of his previous and future works would be connected to the Dark Tower universe. There were two very subtle references to The Stand and one to It. I think I missed all of them back in 1991, but caught them very clearly this time around. 

As a fantasy novel –another writer inspired by Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series, but also Spanish director Sergio Leon and Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name western series - the Dark Tower novels do sit on the same genre shelf, but what King does here is he blends fantasy with horror, science fiction, alternate-universe, thriller, psychological terror (which King really took to after he completed this series in 2004), and some dark humor. Yes, the books go on longer than they should (in the revised version of The Gunslinger, in his forward, he mentions his desire to write the longest book ever), but the layers the writer creates do have a tendency to play out later. So while at times I do wonder if King needs a better editor to put a foot down and ask him if we need these 20 or 30 pages of exposition that has little to do with the main thrust of the story, I do trust him that some of it will be seen later (if not in this book, then the next).

Books: The Drawing Of The Three: The Dark Tower II By Stephen King (1987/1990)

I can see why now that Stephen King revised The Gunslinger, as The Drawing of the Three becomes a more traditional fantasy novel than the five short stories that made up the first novel in The Dark Tower series. Here the scope of King’s vision grows, even if the book is overlong. But here he brings the first two of the people whom the man in black mentioned Roland will need in his epic voyage to The Dark Tower. 

A little over seven hours have passed since the end of the first book, and Roland wakes up on a beach, where he is suddenly attacked by a strange, lobster-like creatures which he dubs a "lobstrosity" (Did-a-chick? Dum-a-chum? Dad-a-cham? Ded-a-check?) whom quickly takes a few chunks out Roland (an index and middle finger of his right hand, and his right big toe) before he kills it and –of course-  the wounds quickly become infected. But his despite his feverish body and loss of strength, Roland continues his journey, searching for the three doors that the people he needs. Each door opens onto New York City at different periods in time (1987, 1964 and 1977, respectively) and, as Roland passes through these doors, he brings back the companions who will join him on his quest to the Dark Tower. So with the majority of the action taking place in New York, Mid-World largely only appears in framing sequences, and is propelled by a mind-sharing conceit that King sets up early and explores the ramifications of deliberately for the rest of the book (something I think Wesley Chu borrowed for his Tao series).

What I remember about the book from the first time around was Eddie Dean, the young drug addict that (like many King characters) has a heart of gold. Also, there is Odetta Holmes, a black woman with dissociative identity disorder who is active in the civil rights movement. She is wealthy and missing her legs below the knees after being pushed in front of a subway train. Odetta is completely unaware that she has an alternate personality, the violent, predatory woman named Detta Walker.

I did not like Detta. Not back then and still not today. Part of the reason, I think comes from not liking a writer –a white writer- use that kind of language, in particular the N word and the slang. I can’t explain why I dislike it, but I do. 

Like I said, I do think the book goes on way too long. I give credit to King to write much longer, much linear novel than the first one, a book that essentially takes place in just a day or two. He also does a bit of retcon here, as it’s implied in The Gunslinger that the man in black killed Jake, but now we meet Jack Mort, a sociopath who –coincidentally- is the man who pushed Jake into traffic and who injured Odetta a few times over the years.  I missed that the first time around. I wonder how much I’ve really missed in these early books.