Book #218: 'Salem's Lot

Book #218: 'Salem's Lot by Stephen King

April 18, 2016

I've been meaning to get to this book since reading The Dark Tower series, since Father Callahan is a prominent character in this text as well. The scene that he recalls to the ka-tet, where he faced down Barlow and had his faith shaken, is part of this book, of course, and is pretty much how I remembered it. I can't remember if Callahan talks about it in Wolves of the Calla or Song of Susannah, but I think the scene may have been excerpted directly from 'Salem's Lot.

The idea of vampires taking over a sleepy little town seems to be, a little bit, a metaphor about the decline of rural areas. Some scenes definitely made me think of my time living in Southwest Iowa. The area I lived in was comprised of nothing but sleepy little towns. While I don't think a vampire could come in and wipe out a town like the one where I taught for my first two years out of college (it had a population of less than 900 people) without anyone noticing, it wasn't too hard to imagine.

I'm also familiar with 'salem's Lot from a short story in King's Night Shift collection. This story seems to show that vampires haven't been completely wiped out of the Lot, though I don't know if the dates and stuff hold up to the novel; I'd have to check, but I was under the impression that Night Shift came along before this one. Still, the novel is at least based on the setting in the short story.

Of course, one of the central characters is a writer. Ben has been through some shit recently, losing his wife in a motorcycle accident. He returns to 'salem's Lot, a town where he spent some time with relatives as a kid. He has fond memories of it, except for one thing: the Marsten House, a creepy old mansion that overlooks the town and has been unoccupied for decades. Until around the time that Ben comes to town, of course.

I found the plot to be fairly predicable; of course, that could be because I already knew Father Callahan's perspective on the thing, so I already knew about Barlow, already knew about the vampires. And of course, vampire shit is even more engrained in our popular culture now than when this book came out a few decades ago, so the signs are pretty obvious. Of course, I always say that what makes King's stories worth reading are the details about the characters. I didn't really like any of them all that much...I didn't dislike Ben, or Matt, or Dr. Cody, though I didn't really connect with them. I didn't like Susan, Ben's girlfriend who, of course, meets an awful end, but that could just be the time difference. The fact that she's 25 and still living at home and taking orders from her mother irked me to no end, but I had to remind myself that it's a different time and place. I'll leave it at this: Susan Norton is no Susannah Dean.

Of course, Mark Petrie is the exception to this. He's portrayed as a rare sort of kid: methodical and intelligent, yet still a kid, so still willing to believe in things that go bump in the night. He gets involved with the small band of amateur vampire hunters, and is one of only two survivors in the end. In fact, his and Ben's fate is left kind of ambiguous. They're burning down the Lot, and plan to do a sweep and kill the remaining vampires...or die trying, I guess. Maybe the short story about the Lot has some details about this...I'm not sure. Now I really do feel like I need to reread that, like as soon as I'm done with this post.

This isn't my favorite King novel, but it's still a solid work. The best parts, I think, are the descriptions of the people and places of this small community. The book jumps third person perspectives a lot; some of the minor characters were hard to keep track of, but mostly they were interesting people, some sad and pathetic in a very normal way, everybody with their own shit. Some of the older people would consider how times seemed to have changed, how kids today were worse, or things like that. But the narrative would counter back, were they really? Were things really all that different in the past? Nostalgia is blinding, as we all know. Look at the recent resurgence of interest in 1990s shit. I grew up in that time, and I have to admit that it's fun to read about and reminisce about the stupid shit I loved as a kid. I don't remember loving it as much at the time as I do looking back on it, so I'm fully away of the effect that nostalgia is having on me. Some of King's characters were a bit clueless about it.

I know I need to get on top of reading more, if I'm ever going to accomplish this somewhat lofty goal I've set for myself. But I figure that, as long as I'm reading a little bit, even when I'm busy with all kinds of other life shit, I'm still doing okay.

Book #217: October Sky

Book #217: October Sky by Homer Hickam

April 12, 2016

I started this book way back at the beginning of the school year. That's how little reading time I've been able to fit in the classroom, though it is a fairly long memoir. I saw the movie when I was in high school, and I remember liking it. Hickam's mother stood out to me most in the film, and she's the dominant force in her family in the book as well. I would consider this text yet another example of an autobiographical work worth reading.

I was impressed with how dedicated teenage Hickam and his friends were to figuring out how to make their rockets fly. They took fucking calculus in order to get down their calculations; Hickam wasn't even allowed to be in the course, and he studied it independently! When I first got to that part of the book, I started thinking about how much I used to slack off in math. When I was in the fifth grade, I was picked out amongst my peers to take pre-algebra the following year...which was a pretty big deal for me at the time. But I couldn't quite get my head around it from the get-go, and I lagged behind my peers, the dumbest kid in the smart class, I guess.

So while I had an aptitude for math, I grew to hate it pretty early on. I even flunked trigonometry in high school; I never really learned much after geometry, cheating and faking my way through the previous year before it finally caught up to me as a sophomore. I retook the year, got a decent grade, and said adios to math before my senior year. Looking back on it, I have a lot of regrets about that. I'm still more of a literary person than a mathematical one, but I could have been both, maybe. Oh, well.

Anyway, Hickam and his friends start to dream big when they see how high they can make their rockets fly. And that's not a normal thing where they're from. They grew up in a mining town in West Virginia. Hickam's father was a dedicated manager at the mine, so he had some advantages over his poorer peers, but nobody ever expected much from him, least of all his old man.

The most compelling thing about this story is the setting. The late 1950s and early 1960s were a time of great change in the U.S., and this was even true in little tucked away towns like the aptly-named Coalwood. Young Hickam learns that the town is bound for ruin; before too long, the coal's either gonna run out, or the demand for it will, and the coal mine is the only point of their town. So during a time when everyone there had a lot to be fearful about, Hickam and his friends brought them a glimmer of hope and excitement with their frequent rocket launches.

This particular book is part of the curriculum for the district I work for, and I'm glad. Unfortunately, I can't really use it in my own classroom, as it describes unhooking a girl's bra, and Hickam loses his virginity to a girl in the backseat of her boyfriend's car (naughty!). Obviously these are normal details of adolescent sexuality, nothing distasteful about it; it's not unusual for a teenage boy to ogle a girl's chest in the auditorium. But, as I've described in previous posts, I work in a rather delicate, sheltered environment. I'd recommend it to some of my students, when they're in a more normal environment. I think it'd be a great book for any American to read, to give them an interesting perspective on a turbulent time in our history.