Entering October Country

{Purported nineteenth-century kit for killing vampires, made by a Professor Ernst Blomberg.}

After seeing Stephen King slagging Fox Sports during Friday's Red Sox-Indians game, I decided to honor his forthrightness by reading 'Salem's Lot (1975). Back in high school, I plowed through thousands of pages of King's novels, but aside from The Colorado Kid (2005), the novella he published with Hard Case Crime, which I wrote about here, I hadn't read anything by him for fifteen years. As a teenager, I had found his books terrifying, impossible to put down--even brilliant. But what would I think as an adult?

The verdict? Still frightening. Still hard to put down. And, while 'Salem's Lot certainly isn't brilliant, I'm not disappointed.

King made his name by injecting horror into carefully drawn scenes of everyday life. The nightmares in his novels are frightening precisely because he's locating them in the most innocuous of small towns--but, as writers from Sherwood Anderson on have reminded us, small towns teem with dark secrets. (King even name-checks Anderson and Edward Arlington Robinson--an odd coincidence, since I'd just been reading about both in Edmund Wilson.) He shows how easily an uncanny, supernatural evil can prey on, exploit, or even arise from the ordinary meanness and evils of small-town life. In the case of 'Salem's Lot, that evil takes the form of a millennia-old vampire, the perfect creature, metaphorically, to feed on the late-night, basement, and close-shuttered underbelly of a town.

In the early part of the novel, King depicts a Maine town that despite its 1970s setting seems trapped in the late '50s: boys still build models of Universal movie monsters, teens still hang out at the soda shop, men still live in a boarding house. Yet, as King himself acknowledges in his Introduction, where he admits, "I have always been more a writer of the moment than I wanted to be," the creeping malaise and toxicity of the early '70s are never far from the surface.

King spends a lot of energy and pages establishing the town and its people, and though his dialogue frequently ends up sounding a bit too much like Sheriff Tupper telling Miss Fletcher about the strange doings in Cabot Cove, for the most part his work establishing characters pays off. His creations don't always come to life--the three primary male characters are essentially interchangeable--but when they do they nudge us just enough farther in our suspension of belief to tip the scales from shock to horror. This line from a boy whose father has just been killed is a good example, rendered simultaneously sad and chilling by the fact that we've come to trust the boy's precocious perceptiveness:

It's better this way. My father . . . he would have made a very successful vampire. . . . He . . . he was good at everything he tried. Maybe too good.

Once the action starts, King slathers on the gore, as he is wont to do. But what's much scarier are the quiet moments when fear first enters a room. Take this scene, where a young woman sits in the kitchen of her old English teacher's house, trying to convince him that he had not heard a vampire sucking dry his houseguest the previous night. As they talk, he breaks in:

"Be quiet."
He had cocked his head forward. She stopped talking and listened. Nothing . . . except perhaps a creaky board. She looked at him questioningly, and he shook his head. "You were saying."

Moments later, midsentence,

He ceased again, listening.

This time the silence spun out, and when he spoke again, the soft certainty in his voice frightened her. "There's someone upstairs."

The "soft certainty" of those moments when the trustworthy and rational convince us that it's time we start believing the unbelievable are King at his best.

I was surprised to find that King is also quite good at describing the landscape and the play of the seasons. Though his prose in these passages sometimes tiptoes to the edge of purple, it rarely crosses over, despite his efforts to invest the whole of nature with a human dread. Here he writes of a Maine autumn:

It stays on through October and, in rare years, on into November. Day after day the skies are a clear, hard blue, and the clouds that float across them, always west to east, are calm white strips with gray keels. The wind begins to blow by the day, and it is never still. It hurries you along as you walk the roads, crunching the leaves that have fallen in mad and variegated drifts. The wind makes you ache in some place that is deeper than your bones. It may be that it touches something old in the human soul, a chord of race memory that says Migrate or die--migrate or die. . . . And if there are no cars or planes, and if no one's Uncle John is out in the wood lot west of town banging away at a quail or pheasant; if the only sound is the slow beat of your own heart, you can hear another sound, and that is the sound of life winding down to its cyclic close, waiting for the first winter snow to perform last rites.

'Salem's Lot gets less interesting as the ratio of humans to vampires begins to fall; it becomes a race to an end that we can see coming--there are only so many ways to kill a vampire, after all. But that's nothing like the galactic disappointment I felt at sixteen at the end of 1,100 pages of It, nor is it a disingenuous abjuration of the very idea of an ending, like he employed in The Colorado Kid, so I won't complain.

But now it's a drizzly, windy October night, and it seems wrong to read something that's not scary. Time to curl up with my well-loved copy of The Oxford Book of the Supernatural and some M. R. James. No sneaking up on me, please.

Octavia Butler's vampires

Foundation, which I wrote about earlier in the week, was actually my second recent venture into sci-fi. The first, Octavia Butler’s Fledgling (2005) (which, strictly speaking, isn’t sci-fi, but as it gets shelved with Butler’s other books in sci-fi, that’s how I was thinking about it as I picked it up), opens with an adolescent woman coming to consciousness in a cave, slowly recovering from grievous injuries. She doesn’t know how she was hurt or how she got into the cave—in fact, she doesn’t remember anything at all.

Soon, however, as she heals and begins to move back into the world, she realizes that she is a vampire, and the people who hurt her had done so as part of an assassination attempt that also killed her whole family. Fledgling is the story of how Shori finds and is reintegrated into the secretive vampire community, relearns their ways and their history, and helps bring her attackers to justice.

Really, though, all that is just the scaffolding on which Butler hangs some pretty inventive reworkings of vampire myths. Butler’s vampires, who are called Ina, live in compounds separated by gender, unnoticed by ordinary humans because of a combination of general innocuousness and mind control—they have a surprising amount of power over humans whom they’ve bitten even once. Each vampire feeds regularly on between four and seven humans of either gender, called symbionts, with whom he or she lives in a kind of loosely regulated group marriage. The Ina live for centuries, so their culture is rich with longstanding traditions, laws, and history, much of which comes out in the course of Shori’s re-education (which serves nicely as a convenient method of delivering large chunks of exposition).

Butler is known for the moral complexity of her stories, though, and she introduces some interesting wrinkles into the lives of the Ina. Shori, it turns out, was targeted because she is the first successful product of a genetic engineering experiment that married Ina DNA human DNA from a black woman, making her the first dark-skinned member of a race that previously has been blonde and pale-skinned. She thereby has gained some resistance to the sun, and many Ina view her as a hope for a freer, safer life for their people. But the Ina, who themselves have occasionally been persecuted by humans over the centuries, harbor racists, like many a persecuted sub-group, and their hatred has fueled the attacks on Shori and her family.

More interesting is the role of feeding in the lives of the Ina and their symbionts. The Ina must, of course, feed to live—but in Butler’s world, the symbionts have just as pressing a need to be fed from. After merely a couple of feedings (which are as sensual and sexual as in any vampire literature), a human is, essentially, addicted to his Ina, and to go without being fed from will eventually kill him. The symbionts gain a portion of the longevity that vampires enjoy, and most of them seem to live happy, fulfilled lives as part of a real community, but many of the vampires remain open about the ethical dilemma the relationship can present. Is it moral for the Ina to involve humans, even ones they fully inform after the first bite, in a lifetime of dependency this way? Can any human, even in the earliest stages of the addiction, make a clear-headed judgment about whether to continue? Or, because it is truly a question of survival for the Ina, can ethics even be brought to bear on the question? The issue only gets more complex when we see that, while most Ina treat their symbionts with the tenderness of lovers, others treat theirs like servants, slaves, or pets.

These questions are fascinating, and I have a feeling they’ll stay with me in more abstract form long after I’ve filed the novel away in my bookcase. But somehow, despite them, Fledgling isn’t fully satisfying. The action of the book seems somewhat perfunctory, and the trial of Shori’s attackers is an anti-climax, interesting only for the insights it gives into the Ina legal system. I’ve read people online speculating that Butler had intended Fledgling to be the first volume of a new series, which would help explain both the information-heavy, action-light approach and the introduction of dozens of characters, most of whom get very little time to develop. If the idea is to establish a world and lay the groundwork for exploring it, Fledgling would have to be termed a success.

Sadly, we’ll never know what Butler would have done next, as, soon after the publication of Fledgling, she died from injuries sustained in a fall at her Seattle home, aged 58. She left behind a handful of extremely well-regarded novels and lots of fans.