Amara Tanith’s Reviews > ’Salem’s Lot > Status Update

OH MY GOD HE DID IT. KING JUST MADE THE METAPHOR TEXTUAL.

Just a few pages after a scene involving an implied pedo vamp hunting little boys, King apropos of nothing references the cover of Edgar Winter's "They Only Come Out at Night", which he describes as being a "picture of a transvestite" with a "strangely masculine face bleeding with rouge and paint".

How is NO ONE talking about how homophobic this book is???

Yeah, if you want to hide that you're doing pedo hunt bullshit (King clearly doesn't actually want to hide it), maybe stop making the villain repeatedly vow to castrate the little boy before turning him into a vampire (which was early referred to as "holding intercourse," which is an insidiously deliberate word choice).

This book's biggest flaw truly is the blood libel / Satanic panic / pedo hunt of it all. He takes Stoker's antisemitic/xenophobic and queer undertones to Dracula's vampirism and combines them with Lucy's pursuit of children (implied to be a feminine longing for innocence/motherhood/whatever) to play into the "queers are coming to rape your kids and sacrifice them to Satan" bullshit we've been fighting for like 50yrs.

Yeah, GR is throwing errors every time I try to post this lil paragraph:

Barlow/Straker are implied gay pedo predators. Ben is the straight man whose love for an unrelated child is paternal in comparison. He's their foil to accentuate the gay = pedo "moral". 🤮

Susan was probably only ever there to hammer home Ben's straightness; I don't doubt King would've cut Lucy/Mina entirely otherwise. [2/2]

Wait shit ew. I've been sitting here this whole time wondering what the fuck was the point of short-shrifting Susan in favor of Mark, and with this little post-climactic "I love you" from Ben to Mark, suddenly I understand King's point.

Goodreads isn't letting me post, so give me a minute while I finagle.

[1/?]

King's moralizing is so fascinating because it's just so fundamentally alien to the modern sociopolitical landscape. But the line about Barlow being in this town specifically because the town, like him, is already dead and just kind of pretending to be alive? That's delightful.

I'm 99% sure that Callahan doesn't come back for the climax, so... well, King, do we really need more Callahan scenes? Stick a fork in him at this point?

And right on the heels of me mentioning how much I appreciate King's writing sometimes... one page later, he decides to teach me an entire new racial slur. I just????

"They did not look out their windows. No matter what noises or dreadful possibilities, no matter how awful the unknown, there was an even worse thing: to look the Gorgon in the face."

When King is good, he's good.

Truly most of these people deserve to be eaten by vampires. Not turned, mind, but fucking eaten.

Maybe I am mad at Barlow after all. Just eat these jackasses!?