#SalemSeptember
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hookland.bsky.social
With my other head on … #SalemSeptember
cultauthor.bsky.social cultauthor.bsky.social @cultauthor.bsky.social · Sep 3
Today's Salem's Lot thoughts.

'This chapter feels like King trusting his audience to be as smart as him, to move him the details offered to a bigger picture of people and place.'

Let me know what you think using the hashtag #SalemSeptember.
The dance of people with place – now that’s the thing. – C.L. Nolan Chapter Three The Lot (1-5) I’ve read less today to allow people to catch up. Anyone who knows me from Hookland will probably know that the Goodnights are inspired by The Borough, a collection of poems by George Crabbe published in 1810. To me, it feels an awful lot like King has also read The Borough as this chapter certainly matches its technique of providing portraits of the lives of a place through its people. It doesn’t matter whether we like or dislike Hal Griffen, Win Purinton, Eva Miller, Sandy McDougall, the important thing King is doing is making us know them, Making us feel something about them. When the line talking of Hal Griffen seeing school as a tomb comes back to haunt, when they all become something else later on, it is important to have known them before that happens. It is important to have seen them for a moment as human, as living people with thoughts and emotions we can believe in – even if we judge them as ignorant or uncaring. Previously, some of the charting of geography of Salem’s Lot has felt a little ham-fisted. The writing too strained to connect fully. However, in the telling of the milkman’s route, his moving from farm to homes, an organic sense of the towns layout starts to form. This chapter feels like King trusting his audience to be as smart as him, to move him the details offered to a bigger picture of people and place. And King is doing clever things which again he trusts us to pick up on. While the book starts with a sense of sunlight and summer and moves towards autumn’s growing shadows, this chapter starts with a sense of dawn and daylight. We know the hour moves on, we know night must come. That subtle picturing in our minds of the inevitable loss of light is a powerful connecting motif.
September 3, 2025 at 7:56 PM
cultauthor.bsky.social
Every September I re-read @stephenking.bsky.social’s ‘Salem Lot’. From tomorrow I will be posting my thoughts on this year’s re-read. If you want to read with me and join in, use the hashtag #SalemSeptember
August 31, 2025 at 5:05 PM
sjfarrer.bsky.social
Heading in...
#SalemSeptember
September 1, 2025 at 5:40 PM
fenrisgames.com
one for anyone following along with #SalemSeptember
alexsegura.com Alex Segura @alexsegura.com · Sep 12
SALEM'S LOT is probably my favorite @stephenking.bsky.social novel - great look at the book from @joe-hill.bsky.social's unique and important perspective: www.nytimes.com/2025/09/12/b...
So You Think Stephen King Has Scared You? Try Being His Son.
www.nytimes.com
September 12, 2025 at 8:07 PM
cultauthor.bsky.social
#SalemSeptember
September 2, 2025 at 8:15 PM
cultauthor.bsky.social
#SalemSeptember
mattstanhope7.bsky.social Matt Stanhope @mattstanhope7.bsky.social · Sep 2
I’m liking how Ben’s horrific childhood vision is left open to interpretation at this stage. It’s not presented as simply part of the “Salem’s Lot” universe, in fact Ben offers alternative explanations in quite a Fortean way. The reality of the trauma itself, however, is undeniable.
September 2, 2025 at 7:39 PM
cultauthor.bsky.social
Looking forward to finding out what others think. #SalemSeptember
September 1, 2025 at 5:12 PM
cultauthor.bsky.social
#SalemSeptember
fenrisgames.com ian.fenrisgames @fenrisgames.com · Sep 3
just about to read this chapter with my tea. I've relistened to the fantastic audiobook yearly around now for years but this is the first time I've read the actual book in maybe 20y. terrific worldbuilding and scene-scetting, you feel like you're on those streets.
cultauthor.bsky.social cultauthor.bsky.social @cultauthor.bsky.social · Sep 3
Today's Salem's Lot thoughts.

'This chapter feels like King trusting his audience to be as smart as him, to move him the details offered to a bigger picture of people and place.'

Let me know what you think using the hashtag #SalemSeptember.
September 3, 2025 at 7:12 PM
dumb-belles.bsky.social
Slightly late but am now starting #SalemSeptember. TV miniseries utterly terrified me as a kid, but I've not read the novel before. Gulp.
cultauthor.bsky.social cultauthor.bsky.social @cultauthor.bsky.social · Aug 31
Every September I re-read @stephenking.bsky.social’s ‘Salem Lot’. From tomorrow I will be posting my thoughts on this year’s re-read. If you want to read with me and join in, use the hashtag #SalemSeptember
September 7, 2025 at 8:54 AM
cultauthor.bsky.social
#SalemSeptember
September 2, 2025 at 7:46 PM
dumb-belles.bsky.social
From 101 ways to say IDGAF: 'Floyd can crap in his hat and wear it backward for all of me,' Parkins said.

(Salem's Lot, chapter 2.3)

#SalemSeptember
September 8, 2025 at 12:10 PM
dumb-belles.bsky.social
"...this fear was childlike, dreamy. There was no reference point to it. A house was a house...There was no reason, really no reason, to feel that each splintered crack was exhaling its own chalky aroma of evil... Ghosts? He didn't believe in ghosts." Salem's Lot 4.5

#PhantomsFriday
#SalemSeptember
September 12, 2025 at 8:10 AM
geogirl1.bsky.social
#SalemSeptember.
September 4, 2025 at 5:30 AM
mattstanhope7.bsky.social
I’m well behind with #salemseptember but as I move into the final part of the book I decided to treat myself to this gorgeous 1982 edition, which I love. It smells appropriately ancient
October 16, 2025 at 9:00 AM
susieoftraken.bsky.social
#SalemSeptember

Only just starting my reread of 'Salem's Lot. First thoughts: turnpikes & travel lanes, steelies & pickerels. I'm back in Stephen King country where much feels familiar and comfortable, and then the odd word will remind me it's alien territory.
September 3, 2025 at 10:53 AM
fenrisgames.com
Today's #SalemSeptember ratchets up the tension considerably with a missing child, late night delivery of a Hepplewhite sideboard, and suggestions of suspicions and mistrust. Standout segment though follows the Glick boys on a shortcut in the woods and the sentence "It became unspeakable."

brrrr
purple paperback version of Salem's Lot using a modified image from the tv miniseries with a shadowy vampire looming over a nighttime view of an old haunted house.
September 5, 2025 at 7:57 PM
dumb-belles.bsky.social
Mike Ryerson: "So what if he dug a few graves... Somebody had to do it. To his way of thinking, the only thing more natural than death was sex."

Salem's Lot, chapter 3.6

#SalemSeptember

(At this point, I'm basically using bluesky as a highlighter pen).
September 11, 2025 at 11:18 AM
dumb-belles.bsky.social
Salem's Lot 14.45

"His face looked sad and old, like the glasses of water they bring you in cheap diners."

#OnWriting #WritingStyle

#SalemSeptember
Two half-pint glasses of water on a wooden table.
October 19, 2025 at 10:25 AM
dumb-belles.bsky.social
Persephone in the underworld as an 18-year-old boy forced to remain in school:

"School. Fucking for chrissakes school.
The next nine months stretched ahead of him like an endless tomb."
- Salem's Lot, chapter 3.1

#SalemSeptember
#BookologyThursday
September 11, 2025 at 10:16 AM
mattstanhope7.bsky.social
2/2: Dread builds, horribly, inevitably. You can almost see the horrid dank basement. Nothing exactly happens, or does it? And the final horror, a threat and a bribe is enough to seal the fate of a missing child. If they’re even still alive. Was that even what was seen? So many ifs. #salemseptember
September 14, 2025 at 9:52 AM
dumb-belles.bsky.social
"But it was a mindless, moronic evil from which there was no mercy or reprieve ... the constant, vapid qualifiers which the human mind, in all its labyrinthine twists and turns, is able to spew forth."
- Salem's Lot, 6.9

#SalemSeptember
#BookSky
September 18, 2025 at 3:22 PM
cultauthor.bsky.social
Today's thoughts for #SalemSeptember. Auguries of darkness begin to flock.
Chapter Three The Lot (6-13) Horror is too often told through a middle class lens. Its points of view being professionals – doctors, scientists, academics and the sort of writer who doesn’t know heat or eat. King is a master of horror told from blue collar perspectives. In Salem’s Lot, much of the powerful sense of place comes from the glimpses into the lives of working people we get here. King is a generous writer. In half a sentence: ‘on account of an extinct colony of Shakers who buried their dead here’– there’s a whole other whole other horror novel waiting to be unearthed. The first gut punch of the book comes in part six of this chapter. The murder of the dog is a shock. An act so vile, so counter to all the norms, we cannot help be repulsed. The description is powerful, it makes us queasy. We need no power of prophecy to know how heartbroken Win will be. We are introduced to one half of our villainous team – Mr. Richard Throckett Staker and another of soon-to-be heroes – Mark Petrie. Each new character comes in the form of a short-story. Biographies told in the besting of bullies, the corruption of men already possessed by greed. As the hours move on, the sense of summer sun fading continues to be dominant motif. We feel the year turning. Today there is warm air, blue sky and cicada song. Today there is also a dead dog and deals with a devil. Auguries of darkness begin to flock. We know the autumn will bring more dead things than leaves.
September 7, 2025 at 6:04 PM
cultauthor.bsky.social
Hello to those reading along. Here are my thoughts on reading the first 20 or so pages today. #SalemSeptember
All horror is an unearthing. – CL. Nolan Prologue From the start, the prologue feels like an unearthing. Before they have names, we feel as if learning about the boy and the man is akin to disinterring the corpse of their past. There’s a wonderful grace and economy – despite the unnecessary in-joke about publishers and authors. So much is set up without clunky exposition. In just two pages we know they are running, we know they are scarred by trauma and whatever it is in Maine they left behind, it isn’t finished. Dracula had letters, diaries, wax phonograph cylinders. We start this 20th century vampire novel with dog urine stained newspapers as our epistolary fragments. It gives us the disconcerting shape of the mystery delineated by an empty town. Whatever the boy and the man are haunted by, we as readers are haunted right from the get-go by absences. We have questions and questions lead to turned pages. We may not know it, but the domed snow globe is an apposite symbol for what is to come not only in this novel, but many other works by King. The microcosm of a place which you will struggle to escape from as forces so much bigger than the human agitate it. We are the audience beyond the glass watching the whirring storm. Later we come to know that storm not as one of snow, but spots of blood. We are tainted by such voyeurism, but we still demand to know: ‘What happened?’
September 1, 2025 at 5:04 PM