The Return Of The Stephen King Double Bill: Salem's Lot and Bag Of Bones

Well, it happened again.

There I was, confined to bed with severe migraines and unable to do anything to pass the time. I needed something easy to read, something breezy and light. Then, just when all hope seemed lost, Stephen King floated spookily through my window and said “WoooOOOoooh read this book about vampires and also this book about ghosts or something WoooOOOoooh.”

Today I’m continuing my inexplicable love-hate relationship with America’s favourite creepy grandpa by looking at Salem’s Lot and Bag Of Bones.

Salem’s Lot

Published in 1975, this is King’s second novel. It avoids falling into the sophomore trap that a lot of authors stumble into, but it’s a very obviously inferior work from an author who was still honing his craft (to the extent that he ever did do that--I’ve gone on the record as stating that King is actually a very good writer of short fiction but never seemed to get the hang of full-length novels).

The book stars a blatant self-insert named Ben Mears: an up-and-coming author about the age Stephen King would have been at the time who has a string of popular hits under his belt but hasn’t actually hit the big leagues yet. After the untimely death of his wife, Ben returns to the sleepy town of Jerusalem’s Lot (called ‘Salem’s Lot by the locals), which he has fond memories of from a brief stay during his childhood--except for one terrifying incident where he ventured into the abandoned Marsten House and witnessed a ghostly apparition of its dead owner.

Ben actually rolls into town with vague plans of renting the old house and confronting this lingering childhood trauma, but it turns out the house has already been purchased. Unbeknownst to Ben and the townsfolk, the new owners are a centuries-old vampire named Barlow and his human servant, and they’ve arrived to turn Salem’s Lot into a vampire colony. As the people of the town are turned one by one, Ben and a handful of allies launch a desperate mission to eliminate Barlow before there’s no one left to save.

This is the first of Stephen King’s small-town epics, where the story revolves around a seemingly-wholesome all-American village under threat from some dire supernatural force, and the point of view swoops between lots of different people so you can see all the little petty evils and secrets in their lives and you’re supposed to understand that the true darkness isn’t the vampires or the evil clown but, like, humanity, man. Being an early stab at the concept, it’s noticeably undercooked compared to later efforts: Salem’s Lot never quite gains the texture of a real, living location like some of King’s other spooky burgs do, and many of the incidental side characters are little more than stereotypes sketched with a very heavy hand.

This leaves the plot and the characters to do all the heavy lifting, and only the former really comes close to succeeding. Despite being overstuffed and too long like pretty much all of King’s novels, this is a pretty rollicking yarn that manages to feel quick and propulsive even as it takes a long time to get going. The vampire infection taking over the town is like a runaway train that starts trundling along slowly and then gradually builds speed, with King conjuring a really terrific atmosphere of apocalyptic dread as more and more of the populace gets vamped with each passing night.

The vampires themselves have aged remarkably well; after decades of subversions, deconstructions, reconstructions and re-imaginings, completely bog-standard Dracula-style “I vant to suck your blood” vampires now feel refreshingly uncomplicated. There’s no playing around with nuance or moral ambiguity here: Barlow literally worships satan, and the religious forces invoked to fight him (specifically Catholic forces, because you can’t have an old-fashioned vampire yarn without a frocked priest waving a cross around and gurning about the power of Christ) suggest that the dark lord himself really is the ultimate source of the vampire plague.

Of course, this means that the book falls squarely into King’s oldest and most persistent flaw, which I’ve complained about before: his tendency to make his villains ridiculous cartoon characters who won’t shut the fuck up. Barlow actually isn’t anywhere near as bad as some other examples--like Pennywise, for example--but he still spends way too long blathering to be remotely scary. There’s a particularly funny scene where he leaves a taunting letter for Ben and company that feels like it goes on for sixteen pages, and the image of our heroes huddling in a dark basement and slowly pouring over this novella-length spiel really took the wind out of what is supposed to be a tragic and suspenseful scene.

On the other hand, I do like that the book never feels the need to engage in any detailed world-building in regards to Barlow and vampires in general. In fact, this is maybe the only time in King’s oeuvre (or at least the parts I’ve read) where he doesn’t over-explain the nature of the supernatural threat. Instead the reader is left to wonder about some of the details of how this particular brand of vampirism works; for example, Barlow’s familiar is clearly not a vampire but does have superhuman strength and a noticeably sinister appearance which suggests some sort of transformation, and the way he’s taken on his Austrian master’s antiquated, not-quite-fluent speech patterns despite being born only a few decades ago in Manchester is an interesting wrinkle that’s left unexplained.

Also, the book gets mad props from me for making the vampified townsfolk legitimately frightening in places. Maybe this is why I keep coming back to Stephen King even though I complain about him endlessly: despite all his weird habits and persistent flaws, he’s one of the few horror writers working today who is actually scary on a semi-consistent basis, which you’d think would be a baseline prerequisite for writing in the genre but apparently isn’t.

I think I would have enjoyed the book more if the vampires and their vampy antics were the focus, because our cast of unvamped characters aren’t too exciting. Ben Mears is completely unremarkable (apart from the fact that he’s handsome and intelligent and totally manly, as other characters frequently tell us) and his childhood connection to Salem’s Lot never goes anywhere despite the book spending a lot of time on it at the start. Father Callahan the alcoholic priest is kind of fun and his ambiguus fate as he shuffles out of the story is unexpected (King eventually picked this thread up in the Dark Tower series).

An early side plot introduces us to a precocious eleven year old boy named Mark who embarks on his own vampire investigation before joining the others. This character is like a splinter in the story’s thumb, because I kept waiting for a scene where the adults stop and ask themselves if it’s a good idea to take this eleven year old kid with them on their deadly vampire quest, but it never comes. When Mark starts getting cold feet towards the climax, Ben even pressures him into staying the course. 

(Incidentally “Deadly Vampire Quest” would make an excellent name for a Dragonforce-esque power metal band. Someone feel free to use that).

Rounding out the cast is a local doctor who joins the other protagonists way too late to get any meaningful development and Susan, Ben’s love interest and the only female character who isn’t some variety of stereotype. She fails to do anything constructive at all, then gets herself fridged halfway through the story.

Despite these problems I did enjoy Ben and co’s increasingly-desperate struggle against Barlow and the vampires, although the ending is kind of a let-down. I get the feeling King wrote himself into a corner that he didn’t know how to get out of, because the climax is one of those action movie fight scenes where the hero has been comprehensively losing to the villain and it doesn’t seem like there’s any way they could possibly win, and then they just suddenly kill the bad guy by trying really hard.

At least the victory is as pyrrhic as it is unearned: killing Barlow stops the vampire curse from spreading beyond Salem’s Lot, but the book’s epilogue makes it clear that anyone who passes through the derelict town or ventures too close to its outskirts is still at grave risk. That epilogue is an odd addition that’s basically a self-contained short story starring all-new characters, and it’s actually kind of better than the book that precedes it, a compact dose of vampy spookiness that gets across a lot of what the rest of the novel does in a more efficient manner. And the central idea, that people in the surrounding townships all know exactly what happened to Salem’s Lot and quietly take measures to protect themselves but otherwise just stay away and avoid thinking about it too hard, is a fun one.

If you’re an actual legit kinghead then you could probably mine all sorts of fascinating insights into the man’s career out of this book--Mark’s solo chapters and Ben’s flashback to his experience in the Marsten House feel like early prototypes for It, for example--but I’m content just to treat it as an immature work from an author who’s usually more polished than he was here, even if he’s not necessarily better.

But before we wrap up here, it’s time to play a little game called “What The Fuck, Steven King?”

One really weird thread running through the book is a teenage girl who is only directly present in the narration for a single sentence, but who is brought up and mentioned by other characters frequently. This is more or less universally to point out that she’s a huge slut for not wearing a bra and acting all sexy and seductive. Nothing in the book suggests that we are not meant to agree with this assessment. The most charitable interpretation I can give here is that this phantom girl and her sinful breasts are based on someone Stephen King hated in high school.

There’s also a whole lot of homophobia in this book. As far as I can recall this attitude is always coming from characters we’re clearly not meant to like, which I guess would have been progressive for 1975, but functionally it still amounts to heavy use of the non-fun F-word and its variations.

But hey, at least there’s no racism! Because everyone is white.

Bag Of Bones

Moving forward in King’s career to 1998, Bag Of Bones stars another blatant self-insert. This one is named Mike Noonan and in addition to being about the same age as circa-1998 Stephen King he’s a very successful (and wealthy) author of extremely popular fiction. But in a complete diversion from Salem’s Lot, this book opens shortly after Mike’s wife has died.

I picked these two books at random, by the way.

Losing his wife unexpectedly brings on a potentially career-ending bout of writer’s block, which isn’t helped by the fact that Mike starts having a recurring dream about Sara Laughs, the lake house that the couple used to visit every summer. After the dreams culminate in a terrifying nightmare--a nightmare that seems to include eerily prophetic elements--Mike decides to temporarily move out to Sara Laughs with the vague idea that it might somehow help his writer’s block, as well as allow him to confront whatever the dreams may or may not be trying to communicate to him. Once there he discovers more ghostly goings-on, as well as…

Actually I’m going to leave the rest of the synopsis for a bit later. See, I gave up on Bag Of Bones pretty early on, and to explain why I need to contrast the expectations these early parts of the book instilled with the actual experience of reading it.

This first part of the book is in pretty straightforward ghost story territory, and it does a phenomenal job: Mike’s dreams are legitimately creepy, the supernatural occurrences at Sara Laughs are understated and eerie in a way I like, and the strange old woman he sees in the nearby town is properly spooky and ominous. This pushes all of my buttons as far as horror is concerned.

The only big flaw in the book’s basic premise is Mike’s wife, who is somehow even less of a character than Ben’s wife was in Salem’s Lot despite getting substantially more on-page description. The problem is that aside from her death, most of that description is about how totally way hot and sexy she was and how she liked to have mega hot sex with Mike and how they had way hot and sexy sex just, like, all the time, bro. As well as being really juvenile, this reduces her to little more than a wank fantasy and undermines Mike’s grief over her death.

But okay, apart from that I was totally down with this spooky lakeside cabin tale. And the hints Mike keeps stumbling across that his wife had some sort of huge secret that he didn’t know about seemed very interesting. Where are you taking me, Stephen King?

Turns out, right into the very worst of his bad habits.

The thing is, Bag Of Bones is only half about all that stuff I talked about above. The other half is about the local intrigue Mike gets into when he arrives at Sara Laughs. It turns out that the nearby town is heavily in the pocket of a billionaire software mogul (this was the era of the dot com bubble, remember) named Max Devore, who’s locked in a custody battle with his widowed daughter-in-law Mattie over her three year old daughter Kyra. Mike blunders into this after he finds the girl wandering up the middle of the road and saves her from potentially getting run over; this apparent negligence on the part of Mattie could obviously serve as damaging ammo in the custody case, but Mike finds himself siding with Mattie against Max.

This isn’t just because he’s enamoured in a possibly romantic way with Mattie: Kyra’s name is spookily similar to the one Mike and his wife were going to give their unborn child if it was a girl and she’s about the age that child would have been if not for his wife’s death, and Mike finds himself having odd, potentially psychic experiences when he’s around her. Combined with one of the ghostly events at Sara Laughs being a young girl’s spectral crying, it seems Mattie and Kyra are connected somehow to the strange events he’s been experiencing and the malevolent presence that seems to lurk beneath the lake.

Alarm bells started going off when I read about this element of the plot in the synopsis, because I’ve written enough fiction myself to recognize when an author is padding out an idea that didn’t have enough meat on it to fill an entire novel and when they’re combining two separate ideas that didn’t quite work alone into one whole in the hope that this will solve their issues, and King is clearly doing both here. But okay, these techniques can sometimes work just fine.

The problem is mostly Kyra.

In the past I’ve accused King of not being very good at writing children, and in hindsight I actually think that’s not true. Mark and the other kids in Salem’s Lot are fine, the kids in It are mostly fine (with the glaring exception of that one scene, you know the one I’m talking about). The specific problem seems to be when King wheels out the stock character of the Special Child: a kid (usually but not exclusively a girl) who has some sort of psychic ability, or at least a non-standard way of thinking that gives them special insight into the world. When this character shows up the results are usually an utter disaster and can sink entire stories single-handedly (especially when the girl is actually a 45 year old woman), often because King gets all twinkly-eyed and precious and lays the saccharine whimsy on so thickly that it smothers the rest of the book.

I’m not going to say that Kyra is the worst example, but her dialogue is among the most unbearable things King has ever written. Here’s her very first lines:

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I go beach. Mummy ’on’t take me and I’m mad as hell.’ She stamped her foot to show she knew as well as anybody what mad as hell was all about. Three or four was my guess. Well-spoken in her fashion and cute as hell, but still no more than three or four.

I’ll admit that I haven’t spent a lot of time around kids this age whereas Stephen King as a father of three children has, but my impression is that they usually don’t talk in straight-up baby speak. Even if this is technically accurate, its rendition on the page is so cringe-inducing that I almost noped straight out of the book there and then. I know how cutesy Stephen King can get with these sorts of characters, having to put up with dialogue like this on top of the glurge would literally kill me stone dead.

I pressed on, then almost gave up again a few pages later when Mike gets vaguely horny over Mattie and accidentally touches her boob while helping her with Kyra. This comes after he states repeatedly that although she’s twenty years old she looks fourteen or fifteen. Like, she looks so much younger than her age that he assumes she’s Kyra’s older sister the first time he sees her.

But even that wasn’t enough to make me delete the book from my kindle. What finally did it, a few chapters later, was the realization that the whole Max Devore component of the plot just isn’t very interesting. It comes into the book too late, takes too much of the attention away from Mike’s investigations and the spooky goings-on at the house, and it ushers in a ruinous change in tone away from suspenseful horror and towards domestic drama and ham-fisted attempts at humour (Mike’s first meeting with Mattie and Kyra is like something out of a particularly stupid rom-com).

Even despite all this, I might go back and give Bag Of Bones another try at some point. It’s legitimately scary--a rarity in horror fiction, as I’ve often whined about--and I was genuinely invested in seeing where the non-twee parts of the story go. And the fact that my migraines have been acting up due to the hot weather probably left me feeling less charitable then I might have been otherwise.

But for now, I’m content to let this one languish at the bottom of my to-read pile. If it sounds intriguing at all then maybe just play Alan Wake instead, which is heavily inspired by Stephen King’s work in general but is clearly based off of this book in particular.