by George Beahm
The manuscript’s dedication page read: “This is for my mother, Ruth Pillsbury King.” When eventually published in 2007, the book’s dedication was “For Tommy and Lori Spruce / And thinking of James T. Farrell.” (The Spruces are part of Tabitha’s family tree, and James Thomas Farrell was a novelist best known for his Studs Lonigan trilogy.)
‘SALEM’S LOT
King’s fans who enjoyed Carrie may have been surprised when they saw the mature writing in ’Salem’s Lot, but they shouldn’t have been—not if they had known about King’s history. As Burton Hatlen pointed out in his review of Carrie, by his count it was preceded by five other novels. Excluding the juvenilia (“The Aftermath”), King’s then unpublished novels included “Sword in the Darkness” (still unpublished, and likely to remain so), and four novels eventually published under the Richard Bachman pen name: Getting It On (published as Rage, in 1977), The Long Walk (published in 1979), The Running Man (published in 1982), and Blaze (published in 2007).
If Carrie can be considered a simple meal, then ’Salem’s Lot is a Thanksgiving feast with all the trimmings.
The story behind the story, recalled King, goes back to a conversation he, Tabitha, and Chris Chesley discussed at the kitchen table in their trailer at Hermon, Maine.
King writes about it in detail in his essay, “On Becoming a Brand Name.” As he explained:
There are so many small towns in Maine, towns which remain so isolated that almost anything could happen there. People could drop out of sight, disappear, perhaps even come back as the living dead.
I began to turn the idea over in my mind, and it began to coalesce into a possible novel. I thought it would make a good one, if I could create a fictional town with enough prosaic reality about it to offset the comic-book menace of a bunch of vampires.
The key, King thought, was to follow Bram Stoker’s device of keeping the vampire off-stage. “Stoker,” wrote King in his nonfiction examination of the field, in Danse Macabre, “creates his fearsome, immortal monster much the way a child can create the shadow of a giant rabbit on the wall simply by wiggling his fingers in front of a light.”
King is correct in thinking that, in the wrong hands, vampires can be cartoony caricatures, but in the right hands, their malevolent evil will strike fear—as it should—in any reader’s heart.
Though numerous horror films over the years have featured Dracula, and the vampire himself has become a staple in pop culture—the breakfast cereal Count Chocula and his pal Franken Berry come to mind—Stoker’s Dracula inspired Anne Rice’s seminal novel about Lestat, Interview with the Vampire (1976), with its many sequels, including 2014’s Prince Lestat; it also inspired George R. R. Martin to write Fevre Dream (1982), a darkly erotic, atmospheric novel set in the Louisiana bayou and redolent of decadence and the ennui of near-immortal vampires that live only to feed upon humans, whom they term “cattle.”
Just as Richard Matheson brought horror home in I Am Legend, King transplanted vampires to rural Maine to great effect. Clearly more in tune with a Grimms’ fairy tale instead of one reimagined by Disney, King’s vampire story bites deep. There is hidden evil among some of the small town’s residents, who harbor their own dark secrets; and there is external evil in the form of the vampire, Barlow, and his faithful servant, R. T. Straker, with long fingers, sunken eye sockets, and a bald pate.
In an introduction to the Stephen King Collectors Edition of ’Salem’s Lot (1991), Clive Barker explains that “[t]he story of ’Salem’s Lot and its battle to survive the evil that comes to nest in its midst is, it seems to me, one of the finest examples of Mr. King’s extraordinary story-telling talents, and is likely to remain both popular and persuasive for many years to come.”
Clive called that one right.
Whether or not the vampire is drawn to Jerusalem’s Lot, or whether the town drew the vampire, is immaterial. The fact is, the classic vampire has come to small-town Maine to feed, though the town is already sickened from within. As Barker explains,
It is not, finally, the vampires that kill ’Salem’s Lot, but rather a corruption in the town itself, or more correctly, in its people; a number of little sins that allow the greater villainy it holds upon the town’s soul. Perhaps it’s this, more than any other element, which so distinguishes the book for me: the sense that ’Salem’s Lot is complicit, by dint of its apathy and obtuseness, in its own destruction. The novel, after all, is not named after the vampire, but after the meat upon which the vampire feasts.
The evil, Barker suggests, and King reaffirms in interviews about the book, is freefloating and will find residence elsewhere:
There can be no blithely happy ending. Though there is a purifying conflagration, it too is a devourer, and in the act of cleansing the town it will also destroy it. ’Salem’s Lot is eradicated, along with Barlow, but while the town will never be recreated, the legendary evil will reappear—if not in the next town, then in the next state: if not this year, then the one after—and the form it takes will be much like the form that perished in the Marsten House.
’Salem’s Lot was adapted for the visual medium as a television movie in 1979, and again in 2004. The first version was directed by Tobe Hooper, who hewed closely to the original novel. It is regarded as far superior to the second, directed by Mikael Salomon, which is based on a screenplay that took far too many liberties with major plot points and characters. Given that Hollywood periodically revisits King’s major books with new versions, we may yet see a major motion picture of King’s classic vampire tale. But in the interim, Hooper’s TV version still satisfies; it is a solid, honest piece of work, even with the limitations inherent in bringing the novel to television.
Of Hooper’s version, King has said, in an interview conducted by Paul Gagné in 1980, in Famous Monsters of Filmland:
Let me sum up by saying that when I first learned the book was being done for television, rather than as a theatrical release, I was very disappointed. Television does tend to take quite a bit out of a story to avoid the risk of offending the “average” viewer. But that initial disappointment did not extend to the finished product. It was done for television, but it was done well for television. It’s funny because most of the reviewers I’ve talked to since the thing was shown on TV seem to be expecting me to really come out against it, but I just didn’t feel that way. Sure, it probably would have been better if it wasn’t done for television, but I’m certainly not gonna run around screaming, “They wrecked my fuckin’ book!” I have a lot of respect for Richard Kobritz [producer], Tobe Hooper [director], and the ’Salem’s Lot production crew, because they made what is definitely one of the best horror films that has ever been made for television.
As with Carrie, ’Salem’s Lot sold to New American Library for a princely sum—$500,000, of which King got (again) half the proceeds. With two supernatural novels attached to his name, King knew that he was a brand name in the making, a realization shared by his publishers, who were happy to find a convenient marketing hook on which to hang his work. “Horror was big in those days,” King recalled (in “On Becoming a Brand Name”), “and I showed no signs with my second book of exchanging my fright wig and Lon Chaney makeup for a pipe and tweed jacket and writing something Deep and Meaningful.”
In Horror: 100 Best Books (1988), novelist Al Sarrantonio was clearly bitten, if not smitten, by ’Salem’s Lot:
While Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist mined supernatural niches in the bestseller list, I would argue that ’Salem’s Lot, because of its genuineness, its verve, its originality, its willingness to reflect, expand and celebrate its sources, and, most importantly, its establishment of Stephen King, after the sincere but unseminal Carrie, not as an interloper but as a pioneer in a field ripe for reinvention, was germinal and originative of the entire boom in horror fiction we find ourselves in the middle of—with no culmination in sight.
Of course, a bust always follows a boom, which is what inevitably happened.
Michael Collin
gs, writing in The Stephen King Companion (1995), observed that
’Salem’s Lot stands today as one of the finest treatments of the traditional vampire since Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and one of the last serious treatments of the mythos surrounding the vampire that has developed over the course of the preceding century. In a period when vampire lore was already moving from a source of horror to fodder for parody, and when most conventional vampire stories looked to the past not only for inspiration but also for settings and characters, ’Salem’s Lot infuses vitality into a tired tradition while simultaneously attempting to re-create in a contemporary American idiom the atmosphere of evil that characterizes Stoker’s Dracula. Just as Stoker’s tale of the walking undead was set in then-contemporary late Victorian England, so King’s tale unfolds in a small New England American community, at once typical and unique.
…’Salem’s Lot (which remains one of King’s favorites among his works) demonstrates his ability to write complex, multileveled narratives; to create extraordinary but ultimately believable, memorable characters; to make full use of his increasingly symbolic landscape, eventually building from the rough blueprints for the Lot his own private landscape for horror in Castle Rock and its haunted environs; and to write fictions that, while making full use of horror motifs, nonetheless touch readers on levels transcending mere horror.
On ‘Salem’s Lot as the Great American Novel
Oh, man—I hope it would be the Great American Novel. But, you know what this is—the idea of the Great American Novel—it’s like when you’re driving on the interstate, and it’s a hot summer day and on the horizon you see this quicksilver—it looks like a puddle; and you get up to where it was, but you can just see it farther on. Nobody’s ever going to write the Great American Novel.
What you do is stand out there, or you try to maintain integrity, whatever that is. You try not to say the cheap thing and the easy thing. You have to ask yourself, do you have the intellect—and if you have the intellect, do you have the talent to support an idea for the Great American Novel? You can’t answer it. All you can do is do the best you can.
—Stephen King, Penobscot Review, 1977
Kurt Barlow, the vampire, from ’Salem’s Lot
Stephen King and Frank Darabont on Limited Edition Books
2007
The signed, limited edition of The Stand.
Stephen King, in an interview with Hans-Åke Lilja, from Lilja’s Library: The World of Stephen King (2009):
Frank Darabont is really high on the idea of doing a limited edition of “The Mist.” I don’t like them, I don’t like them. I think they are books for rich people and they’re elitist and the whole idea of limiteds … there’s something wrong with it, you know. The idea that people want a book that they can kind of drool over or masturbate on … I don’t know what it is they want with these things, but it’s like they get this book and it’s this beautiful thing and they go like, “Don’t touch it, don’t … oh God it’s worth a thousand dollars, he signed it” and all this, and my idea of a book that I like is when someone comes up to me at an autographing, and you got this old beat-to-shit copy of The Stand and they say, “I’m sorry it looks this way” and I say, “I’m not.” It means a lot of people have read it and enjoyed it.
Frank Darabont, in an interview with Hans-Åke Lilja, from Lilja’s Library: The World of Stephen King (2009):
When I read your interview with Stephen King, I had to laugh when I read his comments about limited edition books. I laughed because he and I have had this debate many times. It is a loving debate, as only friends can have. After I read the interview, I sent him an email that said: “Steve, contrary to your notion that people who buy limiteds never read them, I’ve read every single one of mine, some of them more than once. I had the gigantic ’Salem’s Lot limited from Centipede Press, all twenty pounds of it, resting on my stomach for three nights in a row as I lay in bed. Not only did I enjoy every word of it, but it also strengthened my stomach muscles. And last year I reread that gorgeous The Stand limited edition published some fifteen years ago that looked like the Bible and came in a wooden box.” (That The Stand limited was actually a gift to me from Steve was incredibly generous of him!)
I went on to tell him: “I agree it’s absurd to put a book on a shelf and never touch it, as if it were some holy relic instead of a book. That’s like being afraid to open a bottle of wine because it’s too expensive and rare, or afraid to drive a classic car for the same reason. Wine is meant to be drunk, books are meant to be read, classic cars are meant to be driven—and I do all three!” (He responded by suggesting that I refrain from doing all three at the same time.)
As I’ve told Steve in the past, I really feel that presenting a beloved book as a limited edition is a way to honor that literary work and the author responsible for it. The people who create these limiteds do so because they love the book; it shows in the care and quality and effort they put into creating them. I feel it’s a huge compliment to the book and its author. I became email friends with Jared Walters (who runs Centipede Press) because I was so knocked out by that awesome huge ’Salem’s Lot he published. So I got in touch to compliment him on it; I sent him a fan letter. And it was very clear to me as we emailed back and forth that he published that limited for one very compelling reason: Jared read ’Salem’s Lot when he was younger, and it changed his life. He loves that book so much that he wanted to honor it, make something special of it, like putting a painting in a perfect frame and hanging it on a wall with just the right lighting.
As for people who buy these books, like me, they do so for the same reason: we love the book. I certainly wouldn’t buy a limited of a book I didn’t care for just as an investment, or some other silly reason—but for a book I love, how wonderful to have a special edition of it! I’ve told Steve that as long as the books are also available in low-cost trade editions (“books for the people,” as Steve admirably calls them), then what harm is there in doing a small number of special editions for loony, hardcore book lovers like me? It is the difference between buying a gorgeous custom-made chair lovingly handmade by an artisan who withholds no effort in crafting it, and buying a cheap mass-produced chair at Ikea. You can sit on both, they serve the same function, but the aesthetic of the hand-crafted chair makes it a piece of art in itself.
20
THE SHINING
1977; ORIGINAL TITLES: DARKSHINE, THE SHINE
The Overlook Hotel by Glenn Chadbourne.
The signed, limited edition of The Shining from Subterranean Press.
After twenty-seven years of seeing little of the United States except the confines of Maine, Stephen King decided it was time for a change of scenery. Randomly pointing a finger at a map, his finger landed on Colorado, and the family packed up to move to Boulder, a town northwest of Denver, located at the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains.
Living in a rented house at 330 South 42nd Street, King began work on a novel with the working title of “The House on Value Street,” which proved to have no value. After six weeks of attacking it and getting nowhere, King reluctantly abandoned it. Instead, he picked up another idea, inspired by a Ray Bradbury story, “The Veldt” (originally published as “The World the Children Made”), which had been published in The Saturday Evening Post (1950).
A cautionary tale about how immersion in a telepathically controlled virtual reality can replace the real world, two children become fixated on a scene of the African veldt that overrides everything else, to the point that the family psychologist suggests weaning the kids away by shutting it down, but the addicted kids lure their parents to the veldt, where they’re devoured by lions.
King liked the idea of a child’s mind acting as a psychic receptor. “I wanted to take a little kid with his family and put them someplace, cut off, where spooky things would happen,” he told attendees at a talk in Pasadena, California. Darkshine, set in an amusement park, proved to be unworkable. “The thing is,” King told the
audience, “you can’t really cut a family off in an amusement park; they’ll go next door and say, ‘We’ve got some problems here.’”
King, though, liked the idea, but knew it required more thinking, and decided a vacation might be the answer.
On the advisement of locals who suggested a resort hotel located in Estes Park, an hour’s drive away to the north, Stephen and Tabitha King found themselves checking in at the Stanley Hotel just as its other guests were checking out, because the hotel was shutting down for the winter season.
After checking in, and after Tabitha went to bed, King roamed the halls and went down to the hotel bar, where drinks were served by a bartender named Grady. As he returned to his room, numbered 217, his imagination was fired up by the hotel’s remote location, its grand size, and its eerie desolation. And when King went into the bathroom and pulled back the pink curtain for the tub, which had claw feet, he thought, “What if somebody died here? At that moment, I knew that I had a book.”
Salvaging the best parts of Darkshine, King began writing The Shine, a reference to the paranormal powers of Danny Torrance, whose father would become the winter caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, with disastrous results. Deliberately structured like a five-act play, the novel was a modern-day Shakespearean tragedy. It even had a lengthy prologue (“Before the Play”), which was cut from the novel, due to length considerations, though it saw print in a special Stephen King issue of Whispers, a semipro magazine published and edited by Stuart David Schiff. It was subsequently reprinted in TV Guide (1997), with illustrations commissioned by horror artist Bernie Wrightson. The original epilogue was also reworked and incorporated into the last chapter.
