Below is the continued lecture script for a lecture from my series 'The World of Pop Culture With Thomas Carruthers'...
 |
| Credit |
The next novel to discuss today is that of 1975’s ‘Salem’s Lot, again published by Doubleday, the book follows a town as it slowly one by one is take over by creatures of the night, that of vampires. From the flap; “’Salem’s Lot is a small New England town with white clapboard houses, tree-lined streets and solid church steeples. That summer in ‘Salem’s Lot was a summer of homecoming and return, spring burned out and the land lying dry crackling underneath. Late that summer, Ben Mears returned to ‘Salem’s Lot hoping to cast out his own devil’s and found instead a new, unspeakable horror. A stranger had also come to the Lot, a stranger with a secret that would wreak irreparable harm on those he touched and in turn those they loved”, before then on the flap, a promise; “You will not forget the town of ‘Salem’s Lot nor any of the people who used to live there”. Not many novels could live up to such a promise, but decades on, this vampiric small-town epic does just that. The novel is more than just the first of Stephen King’s small town epic novels, but also perhaps the genesis for the whole conceit, afterall it allows narratives of insane horror to unfold in ways that they simply couldn’t in other places. King cites this as being one of the biggest influences on the text, after he was studying Bram Stoker’s Dracula with his class and being pleasantly surprised to what extent it had, in his words, “remained vital after all these years”. He then went about positing ideas for his own vampiric text, asking Tabitha “one night over supper... what would happen if Dracula came back in the 20th century to America. ‘He’d probably be run over by a yellow cab on Park Avenue’, my wife said... It occurred to me that my wife was probably right – if the legendary count came to New York that is. But if he were to show up in a sleepy little country town, what then?” Deciding he wanted to make this his next novel, King started writing Second Coming, which Tabitha made him change the title of for fear it would be seen as a “bad sex story”, which became Jerusalem’s Lot, which his editors abbreviated to avoid religious connotations, giving in the end the small town epic masterpiece ‘Salem’s Lot. A town and world revisited multiple times in mention in King’s ongoing oeuvre, but twice even in full short stories, both published in the collection Night Shift in 1978 by Doubleday. It is this small town quality that led to King commenting in 1987 to Phil Konstantin that “in a way it is my favourite story, mostly because of what it says about small towns. They are kind of a dying organism right now. The story seems sort of down home to me. I have [a] special cold spot in my heart for it”. Jeffrey Deaver wrote of the novel that King “often remarked that ‘Salem’s Lot was Peyton Place meets Dracula. And so it was. The rich characterization, the careful and caring social eye, the interplay of story line and character development announced that writers could take worn themes such as vampires and make them fresh again”.
Of course most of the joy of the first half of the book is just the sheer minutia led build-up of this town and the people who inhabit it, it is the most ultimate of slow burns and would be the template for many small-town epic novels of King’s to come. By the time the vampires really start sinking their teeth in, we know by memory the smallest facets of the town and even the most exterior of characters that make up the populace. That’s not to say that the second half vampire mania of the novel is not excellent, it is, however it has to be said that it is made of such excellence by the slow-burn quality of the first half of the piece. Author and critic James Smythe wrote of how the novels’ small-town quality offers its own microcosm quality, “the novel itself can be read as a metaphor: the small-town American way of life, being bled dry by outside influences... But I actually prefer to see it as what it is: a story about the evil that’s always there lurking in the darkness”. The short One For the Road from Night Shift takes this even further with it existing in the same world as the novel and beyond being a thrilling vampire tale itself, has a terrifying sub-text that everybody knows what happened out there and nobody dares go there to check or do anything about it. Everybody understands the darkness underneath and daren’t not face it. The success of the novel was again bolstered perhaps by the immense success of Tobe Hooper’s T.V mini-series released within years of the book’s release. I first came to know of the show for instance through many members of my family discussing just how frightening and daring it was to see in England back in 1981 following its original U.S 1979 airing, the scenes of great horror amazingly still work terribly well, however beyond these sequences of great terror conducted masterfully by Tobe Hooper, one can’t help but feel a sense about the whole production of TV-ness, long before the world of film budgets and values invaded the small screen. There are of course major production values in the scare scenes and many of the actors brought in, aswell as this series new bookends to the tale, a very effective addition to the proceedings I might add. However this datedness for me works all in its favour. Salem’s Lot works ten times better as a small-town tale, as a 70’s tale for that matter. This is a story whose horror is entirely rooted in a world where a town of 2,000 could very well disappear and be consumed by darkness just off a highway on the outskirts of the burgeoning modern world.
Of course ‘Salem’s Lot too marks the first of many King novels with writers as our lead protagonists. Examples can be found in works such as 1986’s It, 1989’s The Dark Half, 1998’s Bag of Bones, and of course in 1987’s Misery and 1977’s The Shining. There are a few schools of thought on this one and it depends on which novel we’re talking about. Ben Mears in ‘Salem’s Lot is fun to talk about it, because at times it comes off as a little bit like dreamy role-play for King, Mears is this attractive, super-hero-esque super-writer, whereas characters such as Misery’s Paul Sheldon or of course with The Shining’s Jack Torrance, we end up dealing with an entirely different beast and a more reflective and truthful vision. James Smyth comments that for King it’s more of an “obsession with the bleeding between life and art that King would return to... 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)”. I’d have to agree, in more than a few novels the space between “this can’t be happening” and “there is an invasion of vampires in my town” or “this hotel is haunted” can be within the space of a few chapters. The writer as lead protagonist angle of this by Smythe services many of the leaps of logic in King’s novels. Of all the King tropes perhaps there is no larger theme in the settings of King’s novels than that of the small-town, as a matter of fact with Castle Rock, it’s a fictional town that King will return to over and over and again, beginning with The Dead Zone. Whether it be the small town that’s invaded by alien forces in 1987’s The Tommy-Knockers or the small town that is trapped under an alien-like dome in 2009’s epic Under the Dome. Or of course with his brilliant ode to Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes with his 1991 epic Needful Things, a novel that was not only his first written completely sober, but also one of several of his books that King has too performed the audio-book for.
Undoubtedly the most complicated of King’s 70’s works is that of the novel Rage, published in 1977 under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. Bachman was used as a pseudonym on several King publications early in his career mainly for the books that he had written prior to the publication of Carrie. I cite here Rage as a microcosm of the legacy of King having despicable figures in lead roles in his texts. Examples can be found all over in minor roles, but in 1983’s Christine, 1984’s Thinner (another Bachman book) and particularly in the short story Survivor Type from his 1985 collection Skeleton Crew, we can find despicable leads all over. However with Rage there is a chief difference, that of empathy and that of punishment. Thinner features a scummy business-man being cursed to grow thinner and thinner until he dies, with Survivor Type featuring a similarly scummy surgeon ending up deserted on an island forced to eat himself to stay alive. Rage is a novel where we meet Charlie Decker, who takes his class hostage and ends up shooting and killing one of his teachers. From the flap; “the sly voices in his mind whispered their terrible warnings, telling Charlie exactly what he had to do. And one by one the students filed into the room, laughing, talking, never suspecting that today’s class would be like no other”. Rage is a book that is no longer in print by the request of King himself, for one unfortunate chief reason. Well, actually, unfortunately several. King now comments on the novel sighting that “[Rage is] now out of print, and a good thing”. Over the course of five incidents starting in 1988 and ending in 1997, five separate school shooting incidents have been linked with the novel, in each of these cases with a copy of the book being found in the possessions of the attacker in the aftermath. With one, Scott Pennington, in 1993 having written an essay on the book and killing the teacher that gave him a C grade on it. In the end it was the 1997 Michael Carneal shooting that led King to ask his publisher “to take the damned thing out of print. They concurred”. King would later pen in 2013 a non-fiction essay on the subject entitled Guns, with all benefits going to the Brady Campaign to prevent gun violence. Now to discuss Rage is to open a tremendously large discussion about politics and morals in fiction that I think in many ways that I could never do justice in this somewhat slight lecture, however one thing to me has always been clear. King did not write a text to inspire, nor did he write a text to instruct. He simply wrote a fictional novel with a figure he found interesting and a horrific circumstance that he found compelling and thought readers would do. To correlate this action in any way to the real-life violence itself would be a thing of immense wrongness, for ultimately it is the sad truth that violence in a person can be spurred on by many things, however as dark a thought as it may be, if it were not Rage then in these individuals I have no doubt something else would have spurred them days after, weeks after, or even years. But something, always something. The novel is out of print, and whether in the conversation of ethics and morals literature that is a good thing, it’s a good thing for King, and in a way that’s all that matters in this case. It’s certainly all that matters for me.
The other Bachman books include that of 1981’s Roadwork, 1982’s The Running Man and 1979’s The Long Walk. From the flap of The Long Walk, “the place; an ultra conservative America of the not too distant future. The event; The country’s #1 sports contest, a gruelling 450 mile marathon walk, where a single mis-step could be the last. The competitors; The cream of the nation’s youth, 100 red blooded American boys out to make it to the top no matter who they trample on to get there. The prize; a fortune in money, fame and everything the heart desires for the one and only winner”. The Long Walk is a prototype for the plethora of children trapped in future battle to the death games we find with The Hunger Games and Battle Royale, however for me the ultimate joy of the novel is that unlike these above future examples, there is no get-out, no final page saviour, no deus-ex-machina change of the rules at the last minute. The Long Walk ends with one boy still standing and everybody else killed along the way, it’s that sort of ending that in a way an early King would only have the guts to pull off. For as incredible as the book is, it’s greatest marvel is that this was the first novel King ever wrote, over the course of 1966 and 1967 during his freshman year at the university of Maine. The assured quality of the writing even in this earliest of pieces is genuinely astounding. James Smythe discusses how the late 60’s impacted the work in his own King essays, saying the book “is a metaphor for war; specifically the ongoing conflict in Vietnam... the televised draft, the horror of seeing new friends die, the seeming lack of reason for it occurring in the first place. To all involved, it’s endless”. The idea of Bachman was in a way a test that all authors of great critical and commercial success face, is whether or not it’s still the words themselves that are making them famous or just the brand name. Call it a test, call it an experiment, some people also see it as a symptom of King’s incredible prolificness and the publishing standards at the time only really seeing one book a year as acceptable commercial fodder. By the time Bachman was eventually exposed as King, King killed him off in a press release having Bachman die of ‘cancer of pseudonym’. But whether they be King or Bachman, King’s works are timeless, in a piece for the Economist entitled Why Stephen King’s Novel’s Still Resonate, the writer opened with the truth that “Stephen King is practically an industry unto himself”, a brand from the start and until the end it seems, hence the reason for Bachman in the first place, the Economist continues to say “Mr King’s novels have a deep affinity with the cultural and political anxieties of America today”.
Now arguably the most famous of King’s 70’s works and perhaps his most famous work of all is that of his 1977 novel The Shining, set in the Overlook hotel, one of his first haunted locations. From the flap; “The overlook hotel claimed the most beautiful physical setting of any resort in the world, but Jack Torrance, the new winter caretaker, with his wife, Wendy and their five year old son, Danny, saw much more than splendour. Jack saw the Overlook as an opportunity, a desperate way back from failure and despair. Wendy saw this lonely sanctuary as a frail chance to preserve their family. And Danny? Danny, who was blessed or cursed with a shining precognitive gift, saw visions hideously beyond the comprehension of a small boy. He sensed the evil coiled within the Overlook’s 110 empty rooms, an evil that was waiting just for them”. The Shining is a tale of a deeply personal nature to King, for as much as it easy to mock King for his repeated use of writers as leads, there is something about the darkness of Torrance with his violence and alcoholism that can’t help but feel like King evacuating his darkest thoughts onto the page, as he faces the throws of his own personal addictions to drugs and alcohol that plagued him for many, many years. The book also remains the origin of one of King’s only full novel sequels, that of 2013’s Doctor Sleep.
The idea of haunted hotel and what became the novel The Shining came from a couple of sources, King cites in particular an occasion in 1976, when he and Tabitha spent a night at The Stanley hotel, which still holds Shining tours to this day and was the location of the TV Mini-series adaptation of the novel. “We were the only guests as it turned out, the following day they were going to close the place down for winter. Wandering through corridors I thought that it seemed the perfect- maybe the archetypal – setting for a ghost story. That night I dreamed of my three-year old son running through the corridors looking back over his shoulder, eyes wide, screaming. He was being chased by a fire hose”. King goes on to relay that after this he woke up, smoked a cigarette and by the time the cigarette was done, he had already conceived of much of the basics of this landmark horror masterpiece. Other stories from this stay at The Stanley included a night where King found himself up in the bar being served drinks by a bartender named Grady. Inspiration comes from all over it seems for King. With even the title coming from the John Lennon song Instant Karma with it’s repeated chorus, “We all shine on!” Then of course there is Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film adaptation of the novel. The ultimate enigma of a film, lending to multiple decades of research into signs and the like, and one can view it as such, or one can simply watch it was a pure horror film. Kubrick’s work here is just incredible, naturally living up to his often given title as an absolute genius of the world of cinema. However this is of course a King lecture perhaps first and foremost and so one would be remiss to mention the very well known King critique, well, King hatred of the film. Fundamentally King returns to the same three issues. That the film is a beautiful “car without an engine”, a direct quote that comments clearly on Kubrick’s astounding perfectionism and beautiful visual craft, whilst commenting that the film entirely lacks the majority of the human family drama that makes the book the tremendous success that it too is. The second and third issue are of a similar vein, in a critique and hatred of both Jack Nicholson and Shelly Duvall. Stating, of course somewhat wholly correctly, that Nicholson’s Jack Torrance fails to have the arc into madness that the novel’s Jack does, nor does Duvall’s Wendy have much of the power or grit that the novel’s Wendy does. However in this trade off we get one of the most manic and hilarious Nicholson turns we ever got and a daringly terrified turn from Duvall that still unnerves the viewer to this day. However the King commentary that I have the biggest issue with is the lack of “engine” comment – for me the film is a terrific adaptation because it captures in its roundabout way the very atmosphere and mood of the novel like no other film has done before or since in the world of King adaptations. No film has bettered translated that very specific sense of King horror and terrifying dread than Kubrick’s film.
For me the reason for King’s hatred has always been incredibly evident to me. The Shining may be his most personal book, second to 1987’s Misery, and so to have that novel be altered in so many ways as it was, it can be a difficult prospect to come to terms with. King’s own addictions are perhaps the chief impulse for much of the human drama in the novel, he has written of his addictions before and the beautiful clarity he can discuss the darkest throws of it with is a very touching thing indeed. The darkest stories are devastating for him to confess, tales of being drunk delivering his own mother’s eulogy, or the plain admittance that the writing of whole books, particularly 1981’s Cujo are something he can barley recall. After a family intervention where friends and loved ones dumped out onto the rug in front of him the plethora of cigarette buts, beer cans and other drugs paraphernalia, the hidden remnants from his office, the evidence of his devastating disease - King sought help and has remained sober since the late 1980’s. King said once “sometimes you confess. You always hide what you’re confessing to. That’s one of the reasons why you make up the story. When I wrote The Shining, for instance the protagonist is a man who has broken his son’s arm, who has a history of child beating, who is beaten himself. And as a young father with two children, I was horrified by my occasional feelings of real antagonism toward my children... So when I wrote this book I wrote a lot of that down and tried to get it out of my system, but it was also a confession”. To then view an adaptation that for the most part removes a lot of the arcs and human emotion of the story, no matter what filmic excellence it implants in for the transplant, you can understand the author’s particularly robust dismissal in a nature that has never really shown it’s face again with other adaptations. James Smythe wrote of how King lover’s compare the two works; “it’s hard to think of one without the other. The Shining is two stories, both the same, but somehow very different... neither is the correct version; one is the original, and one is a cover, a different take on the same powerful, terrifying material. Neither stands in the way of the other’s brilliance, and, if allowed to, each can help the other to... well, shine”.
This article containing the script of my lecture will continue next week.
-Thomas Carruthers
0 Comments