Rereading Stephen King: week two – Salem's Lot

Second novels are tough. The expectations of what you'll deliver – especially off a success – are phenomenal. Readers of the debut want to be satisfied by the follow-up; readers who heard about the first but didn't bite want to be wowed by the concept enough to pick it up; and those who hated the debut want you to fail. So, when Stephen King went from the quasi-plausible abuse-terror of Carrie to vampires, there must have been some worried readers (and, probably, publishers). Good job that Salem's Lot was – and still is – a hugely impressive novel, then.

The most impressive thing about the book is how long it takes for anything really to happen. After a short prologue, where it's established that a tall man and a young boy survive whatever it is we're about to read (and end up in the far sunnier climes of Mexico), we meet the town itself. Jerusalem's Lot is the main character here, a warm-up for what King would later do with his beloved fictional towns of Derry and Castle Rock. We're given a vivid description, details and foibles, before the town is populated with a cast of characters to rival any soap opera. All human life is here, as the saying goes: and they all want to know who the stranger is that's just moved to town.

He's Ben Mears, and he's a writer. He grew up in the titular town, and he has some bad memories of it. In particular, of the Marsten house, which seems to loom over everything, the perennial gothic house on the hill, where bad things happen and bad men have lived. Ben has written a few novels (with excellent fake-real names, like Air Dance), but they weren't exactly to small-town tastes: "Miss Coogan at the drugstore says that [Billy Said Keep Going] is pretty racy," Susan tells Ben early in the book; while another character remembers being perturbed when reading a homosexual rape scene in Conway's Daughter. Regardless, Ben has come to Salem's Lot to write his next book. We never learn exactly what it's about, despite numerous characters pestering him for information: but he does, at a later point in the novel, give away that it concerns "the recurrent power of evil", and the spooky events he once witnessed at the Marsten house.

So Ben does all the things you would do as a writer, stomping around your old turf and trying to put off the act of writing itself: he meets a girl who is in thrall of his talents, Susan; he visits a school, befriending a nice older teacher, Matt; he visits a doctor, Jimmy; he encounters a priest with a drinking problem, Father Callahan; he crosses paths with Mark Petrie, a kid with a penchant for classic Universal monster movies; and he remembers the time he went to the Marsten house when he himself was a child, and saw something inexplicable and pretty horrifying involving the ghost of the previous owner. King spends half the novel establishing the town, Ben, and his would-be gang of vampire hunters. The vampires themselves? For much of the first half, they're only hinted at.

The biggest hint comes in the form of a certain Mr Straker, along with his absentee business partner Mr Barlow. They decide to open an antique shop in a town that doesn't need one, and they buy the Marsten house to live in while they're there. Alarm bells ring all over, but nobody really cares because there are too many other things going on. Women nearly beat their babies to death because of the stress of motherhood; men drink too much and rape their wives; and gossip is everywhere, like rats behind the walls. Nobody stops to notice that, between Straker and Barlow, you've got – nearly, if you flip the W upside down – an anagram of Bram Stoker. When a young boy then dies in mysterious circumstances, the only person who really pays attention outside his family is the inept local lawman. As a reader, you want them all to care more than they do, because you can see what's coming: the inevitability of death.

It's almost exactly halfway through the novel that the blood hits the fan. More people die. Infant babies come back to life, and need to feed on more than milk. Being outside at night is no longer safe. After a deliberately hazy and meandering first half – one that lulls both reader and characters into a false sense of security – the second part of the novel barely breathes. It takes place over roughly two days and two nights, as Ben and his new friends – or what's left of them – try to end the rapidly spreading vampire menace and take Salem's Lot back.For better or worse, the book ends pretty much where it began: with the tall man and the boy in Mexico, trying to work out their next move.

When I was younger, it was this second half that enraptured me: the rush of the hunt (on both sides); the thrill of not knowing who would and wouldn't survive; and the pain of how much this affected the characters. Where Carrie paints emotion in one very broad (red) stroke, there is far more subtlety here. Characters you don't like still engender pity. Back then it amazed me, once I got past the – as I erroneously thought – dragged-out beginning.

Now, it's the start that I love most. It's the slowest of slow burns, all hints and drip-feed. King infuses it with descriptions that start you thinking about vampires before they even factor in the novel. "She dipped her head to suck at the straw," goess one passage, describing the drinking of a root beer. "Her neck was beautifully muscled." Another, during a kiss, reads: "She thought: he's tasting me." When the chaos finally unfolds, it's a real payoff. You care. I can't reasonably claim this is the greatest vampire novel ever written, but it certainly provides the most outright entertainment. It takes an archetype, puts it in a situation you wouldn't expect, and watches the damage unfurl.

Of course, the novel itself can be read as metaphor: the small-town American way of life, being bled dry by outside influences, left as a hollow shell of its former being. But I actually prefer to see it as what it is: a story about the evil that's always there, lurking in the darkness, waiting for a moment to return.

Kingisms

It's easy to see all these early novels as dry runs for ideas King would later develop. Salem's Lot as proxy for EveryTown USA (twinned with Hidden Darkness); Mark as the overly bright kid we all wish we'd been at his age; and, biggest of all, Ben Mears as the hampered writer, ruined by life, trying to write but faced with a reality that's more dangerous than anything in his mind. We get descriptions of Mears's books; we see how the writing is jammed inside Mears, unable to come out; and we see more of an obsession with the bleeding between life and art that King would return to again and again.

King likes writing writers. It's easy to dismiss this as him writing what he knows, but I think it's something else. I think he knows that a writer – or, at least, his type of writer – can imagine the things King's small-town sheriffs and doctors can't (or won't). They can take leaps of logic, bounding alongside the narrative. They can be ciphers for King himself in the novel. They don't need to explain why they know something: they just know it. This was simply the first example of his life-long obsession with writers, why they write, and how the action of writing serves the story being told; an obsession that would, I think, culminate in the best book about writing ever written, On Writing.

Connections

There are connections between a lot of King's books, usually using the Dark Tower series as their central hub. While Salem's Lot is definitely its own novel, it wouldn't be the last time King would write about the tainted priest Father Callahan, or these particular vampires: they would both crop up in Wolves of the Calla. There, the vampire mythos would be expanded upon, with Barlow given an origin; and (the now) Pere Callahan would tag along with the main group of characters (known in the Dark Tower stories as the "Ka-Tet") on their journey to a very different New York than the one for which he leaves in Salem's Lot.

There also exist two short stories that directly tie into Salem's Lot: a prequel, Jerusalem's Lot (set in the town in 1850, heavily Lovecraftian in tone and subject matter); and a sequel, One for the Road (set a couple of years after the novel, and more a bookend than new story outright). Both can be found in the Night Shift collection, which we'll get to soon enough.

Next up

In a fortnight we're at the Overlook Hotel, confusing ourselves about what was King and what was Kubrick, for The Shining.