Deborah
ENGL 3850-02N
Supernatural Lit
Dr. Coats
23 April, 1998
"One For The Road"
Stephen King can't seem to keep away from the vampires of Jerusalem's Lot, Maine. His novel, 'Salem's Lot, introduced his readers to the creepy little town. In Night Shift, King has two short stories that tell new tales of the damned in 'Salem's Lot. The first, "Jerusalem's Lot," tells of the reawakening of the horror in 1850. The next, "One For The Road," is an interesting memory of a resident of a long-suffering nearby town. These people have dealt with the reality of 'Salem's Lot all their lives. The intrusion of a bumbling motorist into the Lot reawakens it again in 1977.
There are, indeed, several of the elements of Supernatural and Horror fiction in "One For The Road." The challenge is to discover the less obvious examples in this short story. Death and the fear of the unknown are in the story, of course, but there are also moments of family fears, fears of women and of failures, and an element that Stephen King wrote about in Danse Macabre.
Death and the undead are the first elements that people think about when they hear of the vampires in 'Salem's Lot. Humans fear the unknown experience of death, but they fear those who return even more. A recurring theme of tales of those who return from the dead is the non-human qualities with which they return. They may look like the human they once were, but they try to scare their loved ones by haunting them or try to kill them in order to satiate a new blood-hunger. The disposition of those who return seems to negate any thoughts of a happier realm beyond death. If the afterlife is so pleasant, why do these return--and in such a bad mood? This increases the fear of death.
Even from the rise we could see the sullen red glare in those eyes. They were less human than a wolf's eyes. And when she grinned you could see how long they had become. She wasn't human anymore. She was a dead thing somehow come back to life in this black howling storm. (King 310)
Even though the narrator, Booth, knows that to give in to these creatures means a fate worse than death he is almost taken in by their power: "...and I was thinking: Well, maybe it won't be so bad, not so bad, maybe it won't be so awful after a while..." (King 311).
As in any family unit, fears dealing with the family and a fear of failure are inexorably linked. A man who appears to have it all- wife, daughter, and posh car- loses it all in one wrong turn off of the highway. "'Where did you go off the road?'... 'S-six miles s-s-south of here'...( King 299)" He abandons them, chosing to search for help alone as the "man of the family." He thinks that he is the master of his environment and is totally unprepared for the harshness of the elements.
He was wearing kid gloves, expensive but thin. There were probably some more of those grayish-white patches on his hands, and he would be lucky not to lose a finger or two. His coat was fancy, all right; a three-hundred dollar job if ever I'd seen one. He was wearing tiny little boots that came over his ankles... (King 298)
The minute he reveals where his car went off the road, the two natives, Booth and Tookey, realize just how badly this man has failed his family. They attempt to keep him calm by making only the vaguest of references to what may have happened. "But he wasn't thinking of anything but his wife and daughter. I don't see how anybody could blame him, either" (King 306). They reach the car, only to find it empty except for the daughter's coat. The father has a keen sense of failure but cannot express it clearly.
His [Lumley's] face was pale and wild. His mouth was working as if he had chewed down on some bitter stuff he couldn't yet unpucker enough to spit out. He reached in and grabbed the parka. 'Francie's coat?' he kind of whispered...He looked at me, blank and unbelieving. 'She can't be out without her coat on, Mr. Booth. Why...why... she'll freeze to death.'
Booth and Tookey feel a sense of failure as they see the wife-thing turn on her own husband. They didn't reach the family fast enough to rescue them, and they couldn't rescue Lumley, either. But Tookey saves Booth's life, twice. This leads into another fear found in Supernatural/Horror fiction: a fear of women.
Both the woman-thing and the child-thing attempt to seduce their victims in a very feminine manner. The wife-thing uses pure animal lust/attraction to lure her victim, while the child-thing uses her supposed naivete and innocence to get close enough to kill.
...I yearned after her, so dark and beautiful with that green poncho floating around her neck and shoulders, so exotic and strange as to make you think of some beautiful woman from a Walter de la Mare poem...She looked up at us and grinned. And when she did, I felt my longing, my yearning turn to horror as cold as the grave, as white and silent as bones in a shroud...he reached for her...and then he began to scream...He tried to back away from her, but her arms, long and bare and as white as the snow, snaked out and pulled him to her. I could see her cock her head...(King 310)
...and I damned near ran into the little girl. She was just standing there beside the driver's side door, her hair in pigtails, wearing nothing but a little bit of a yellow dress. 'Mister,' she said in a high, clear voice, as sweet as morning mist, 'won't you help me find my mother? She's gone and I'm so cold--'...She looked up at me then, Lumley's daughter Francie. She was no more than seven years old, and she was going to be seven for an eternity of nights...'Pick me up, mister,'...'I want to give you a kiss...' (King 311)
Tookey is able to hold back the Child-thing by throwing his mother's sacred Bible at it. It hits the thing dead-on (pardon the pun) and makes it flee in pain. But it will return. Things in 'Salem's Lot always return.
Stephen King said in Danse Macabre that terror "often arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment; that things are in the unmaking" (handout). The cycles that 'Salem's Lot continuously goes through are most certainly defined as things in the unmaking. Booth, the narrator, remembers a few incidents.
Because two years ago, in the span of one dark October month, the Lot went bad...You see, people in the Lot started to disappear. First a few, then a few more, then a whole slew. The schools closed. The town stood empty for most of a year. Oh, a few people moved in- mostly damn fools from out of state like this fine specimen here- drawn by the low property values, I suppose. But they didn't last...Then the town burned flat...but no one knows how it started, not to this day...(King 302)
The inhabitants of the area around 'Salem's Lot know and understand how to deal with the danger of the Lot. They do not challenge its power lightly. The outsider awakens the old evil by his bumbling actions. Lumley's, Booth's and Tookey's deepest fears are stiired up by the incident. The basic fears of Man-- fear of Death, fear of failure and the family dynamic, fear of women, and a sense of impending disaster by the incorrectness of the situation all combine to weave an incredibly terrifying tale.