read by Ron McLarty
(New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2004)
MP3 Audiobook, 868.2 MB, 17½ Hours, Fiction
From the Cover: A dark wind is blowing into Jerusalem’s Lot, Maine, in the guise of antique furniture dealers R.T. Straker and Kurt Barlow. Novelist Benjamin Mears has returned to the village near Portland to exorcise his childhood demons. Immediately, townspeople begin suffering from strange flu symptoms, or disappearing altogether. Mears and local high school teacher Matt Burke understand the peril the town faces. Soon they’re joined by an artist, a doctor, an alcoholic priest, and an 11-year old boy, forming a modern-day team of vampire hunters.
My Redux Review: Stephen King’s ‘salem’s Lot is a story that holds a lot nostalgia and fond memories for me. It was one of the first novels I ever owned, it was the first Stephen King story I ever read at the tender age of eleven (with the blessing of my Mother though—looking back—I have no idea what she was thinking when she okayed that, I don’t think I’d let my son read it when he turns eleven), and it is one that even now never fails to induce chills and thrills. I have even used it to make arguments for my ever-evolving academic paper on passive-sexism in Stephen King’s The Shining (showing how ‘salem’s Lot is a kind of “run up” to what he does in The Shining).
I find so much about ‘salem’s Lot to be so very fascinating, that it is difficult to know where to start. Well, perhaps it is best to start with something small. This time through the book I was struck by just how dated ‘salem’s Lot is. It really is a relic from the early- to mid-1970s when it was written. So much of the novel is so outdated that I found myself wondering just how well Mssrs. Barlow and Straker would fair if they were to plunk down in Jerusalem’s Lot in an era of cell phones and the internet. This is addressed, somewhat, in the 2004 TV miniseries which is, all things considered, not a bad adaptation, given the problems of updating such material. Still, as I said, I am struck at just how dated the book is.
Another “theme” of the novel (for lack of a better word) that I have been dealing with (mostly because it jives with my paper on Stephen King) is just how passively sexist the works of Stephen King are, and ‘salem’s Lot is no exception. In fact, it is a pretty good example of what I am talking about. Two characters come to mind as I have run this through my mind: Susan Norton, of course, and Bonnie Sawyer. Susan is, to all appearances, a pretty “liberated” and “strong” female figure, holding her own with man and vampire alike, and yet, looking a little deeper she is a “shackled” character; very one-dimensional when compared to the male characters in the novel. She plays little more than the role of girlfriend and tragic victim. Susan makes some very poor decision in the course of the novel (the kind that would have you shouting DON’T GO DOWN THERE to the screen if this were a movie) and as a result of these decisions (and, I would argue, due to King’s indifference to his female characters) she pays the price.
The same could be said for the character of Bonnie Sawyer, a bit player in the overall drama, but one that King keeps coming back to. She is the “Jezebel” character type; the “wanton woman” who is having an affair with a younger man, but when they are caught by her husband, she is literally beaten into submission and—as King puts it—raped by her husband regularly, until their end comes in the final third of the book. I bring up their characters because they both are women who initially seem liberated and in control of their destinies, but ultimately are brought down by their inability to listen to the male authorities in their lives (in the case of Susan it is Matt Burke and Ben Mears and even the teenage Mark Petrie whom she ignores, and for Bonnie, of course, it is her husband whom she disobeys) and as a result they are brought to ruin.
This passive-sexism (as I’ve chosen to call it) and assertion of male dominance (culminating in the staking of the vampiric Susan (which Freud would undoubtedly call “phallic” and a violent sexual act in and of itself, a rape of a kind) and the beating and raping of Bonnie Sawyer) really show King’s true colors as a closet-conservative in spite of all his trappings and claims of open-mindedness and liberalism. He falls back on the conservative world view whenever a female comes into the pages of his novels (they are usually either a milquetoast hausfrau or a wanton jezebel) that bucks the male authority structure and have to be either saved or dispatched (in the case of Susan, they come to one and the same). It is true of Susan Norton and Bonnie Sawyer in ‘salem’s Lot, it is true of Wendy Torrance in The Shining, it is true of Rose Daniels in Rose Madder, it is true of Emily in “The Gingerbread Girl” and it is true of Lisey Landon in Lisey’s Story.
But enough theorizing. In spite of these “flaws” (for lack of a better word) I still think that ‘salem’s Lot is one of Stephen King’s finest, and is certainly in the Top 5 of my favorite King books. King has crafted a very believable world in ‘salem’s Lot, one that is described as Peyton Place meets Dracula, and I think that that is a pretty fair assessment. It is hard to imagine which the greater evil in the township is: the external force of Barlow and his vampirism, or the internal forces of the town and its small-town insularism. King has stated in interviews that ‘salem’s Lot was written at a time of great social and political upheaval: the Ellsberg break-in, Nixon’s tapes and enemies’ list, Liddy and the CIA, Watergate, the invasive federal investigations of war protestors, Vietnam … and so it is no wonder that these feelings of paranoia bled over (no pun intended) into ‘salem’s Lot and informed the novel; paranoia of vampires, paranoia of outsiders, paranoia of the unknown, paranoia of the future … it’s all there in the pages, and makes for one hell of an atmospheric novel.
Atmospheric and arguably one of the scariest of King’s tales (his early ones are so much better than his later). I’ve mentioned it in my prior review of this audiobook, but the scenes with Mike Ryerson in Matt Burke’s house (both times) and then the scene with Marjorie Glick’s body in the mortuary are some of the scariest scenes that have even been penned. They never fail to give me the chills (and this time around, it didn’t help that I was listening to the Marjorie Glick scene as I was taking a late night walk to clear my head after a stressful day and as a thunderstorm passed overhead, I have to admit that I looked over my shoulder more than once as I walked the storm-darkened streets).
Also, what makes this such a great audiobook is Ron McLarty’s reading. If you have never experienced a book read by Ron McLarty you need to, and ‘salem’s Lot is as good a place as any to start. It is amazing how much the story comes to life in McLarty’s capable hands. It really brings an already great book to an even more sublime level.
You don’t have to be a Stephen King fan to enjoy ‘salem’s Lot, and since vampires are very much in vogue right now, take the time to listen to (or read) a real vampire story. Yes, it borrows heavily from Dracula (with Matt Burke playing Van Helsing, Susan playing Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker, Dr. Cody as Dr. Seward, Ben Mears playing Arthur Holmwood and Jonathan Harker, Straker as Renfield and, of course, Barlow as the Count) but I would say that that is intentional, since the idea behind ‘salem’s Lot was what would happen if Count Dracula came to America and settled not in New York City (where, in King’s words, he’d “be killed by a taxi cab like, Margaret Mitchell in Atlanta”) but in rural, small-town Maine.
It is a question that I think King has answered well. As I said, in spite of its “flaws” ‘salem’s Lot is a stellar novel and one that every vampire groupie needs to have under their belt, and if you’re going to try it, why not pick up the audio edition, since Ron McLarty’s reading is nothing short of amazing.
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