‘Salem’s Lot (Stephen King) Chapters 5-9

Those of us who have read the Dark Tower series by Stephen King have gotten to know Father Donald Callahan rather well, having been introduced to him as a figure from a previous King book . . . ‘salem’s Lot.  Here, on page 203, we meet him in his first incarnation at the graveside of poor little Danny Glick.  This is a priest haunted by alcoholism, (‘. . . that always widening club, Associated Catholic Priests of the Bottle and Knights of the Cutty Sark.’) and frustrated by a desire to do something meaningful with his life.  ‘He wanted to slug it out toe to toe with EVIL . . . He wanted this struggle to be pure, unhindered by the politics that rode the back of every social issue like a deformed Siamese twin.’

Now this is definitely Stephen King!  (In the notes to the first quarter of the book, I mentioned a passage that I thought sounded more like Koontz than King.  I remember thinking that both authors might be a little put off by that.)  And there’s this; ‘At moments like this he suspected that Hitler had been nothing but a harried bureaucrat and Satan himself a mental defective with a rudimentary sense of humor . . .’ For me, it’s passages like these that set King apart from everyone else.  Even his earliest work, Rage, is full of them.

King may have set out to write “The Ultimate Vampire Story.”  If so, he wouldn’t want to stray too widely from the standards previously established.  Sure enough, there are the telltale puncture marks on the necks of the victims, the hypnotic powers that increase the victim’s vulnerability, the power of the crucifix in warding off the monster, the lying with open eyes in a casket until the time (and the victim) is ripe; but wait, there’s more.  It would have been easy to slip into triteness, but that is a trap King has always been able to sidestep with great agility.  (In Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse vampire novels, she turns the triteness on its head with equal nimbleness, using a liberal dose of humor and a beguiling first person narrator – what, you haven’t read any of those yet??  Get thee to a used book store NOW!)

I have pointed out before when an author oh-so-casually mentions a resemblance of one of his characters to a famous actor.  ‘Callahan . . . looking at himself in a mirror . . . thought that when he reached sixty he would throw over the priesthood, go to Hollywood, and get a job playing Spencer Tracy.’  Thanks for the hint, Steve; we’ll see if we can find him when we make the movie!  Besides Spencer Tracy (does anyone under 40 remember him?) there are other references to the arcana of King’s generation.  One of the young boys has almost the entire collection of “Aurora” horror monster models; the very same ones I put together as a kid.  He even describes one in enough detail that I’m pretty sure it was the same one I had.  I had forgotten that the brand name was “Aurora”!

Perhaps no other author (well, maybe Tolkien) gets re-read more than Stephen King.  I belonged once to a Stephen King Facebook fan club (until one of the moderators kicked me out for correcting the use of apostrophes in one of the cute little memes he liked to post) and there were dozens of fans bragging about how many times they had read their favorite King books.  Apparently King felt (before he had more than one measly best-seller!) the same way I do about this: ‘His mother would be holding a novel by Jane Austen on her lap, or perhaps Henry James.  She read them over and over again, and Mark was darned if he could see the sense in reading a book more than once.  You knew how it was going to end.’  Ha!  I love this author!







Next Week:  Chapters 10-13

Week 4:  Chapters 14-Epilogue