`Salem’s Lot (1975)

Written By:  Stephen King
Published By:  Doubleday

`Salem’s Lot is a novel that asks a simple question: What happens when vampires descend upon a modern American village filled with a bunch of simple-minded idiots?  As such, it is a sort of Americanized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s classic Dracula as well as some considerably more pulpy rags.  It follows the novelist Ben Mears during his pit-stop in the town bearing the novel’s namesake.  He seeks to rent out the nefarious Marsten mansion on the outskirts of town so that his latest novel may be inspired by its evil atmosphere and is surprised to learn that he was already outbid not too long ago by a suspiciously reclusive chap only named Mr. Barlow.  This is a surprising turn of events because the house has stood derelict and abandoned for many decades.  Resigned, he holes up in a local boarding house, meets a girl, and is thrust into some kind of Eldritch horror as the town begins to decay from the inside in conjunction with increased activity at the maleficent mansion that broods over the town.  Did I mention the mansion was evil?

It’s been said that Stephen King regards this, his second novel, as one of his favorites.  I’m inclined to agree.  Unlike his comparatively trashy debut effort Carrie, this novel has been crafted with much more care and restraint.  Characters are given plenty of opportunities and time to carefully develop into a rich and varied cast of unbelievers who are slowly persuaded to take action against phantasmal forces far beyond the borders of modern reasoning, but in a more modern setting.  Even the town gets in on this development, beginning as a little bustling burg that hesitantly degenerates into a dilapidated and sad shadow of its former glory: no doubt a commentary on the ongoing and steady dissolution of the pastoral part of the American Dream.  A bittersweet ending, at best.

However, I still struggle a little with King’s writing.  Throughout the novel, it’s very clear that the talking heads one encounters are just various bodies with Stephen King’s face attached to them.  There are often little throw-away lines that characters say or think, perhaps intended as a natural response to the situation and whatever emotions they may imply to give them some depth; but they don’t feel natural or organic at all.  More like cheesy.  For instance, very early on in the novel when Ben and Susan meet for the first time in the park, he throws out this strange suave remark: “Of such inconsequential beginnings dynasties are begun,” which is a very obvious wink at the reader that shit is going to be thrown down eventually, but at that very moment it feels rushed or shoved in.

Numerous other references to song lyrics and poems and sayings are sprinkled everywhere into the manuscript with only minimally useful context; I presume it’s meant to make things feel deep, to give these characters a sense of gravity and purpose, or even just indignantly shove the reader into the scene.  But most of the time they fall flat and refuse to make any sense.  They also serve to age the novel in as unflattering a way as you could get.  I haven’t heard of any of these pop tunes that were big on the radio in 1975, and auxiliary character’s Vietnam flashbacks are frequent and bothersome, offering very little to what is for all intents and purposes a story about magic and monsters.  The audience of today has moved a little past that, I think.

But these are small qualms I have with ‘Salem’s Lot.  Generally speaking, this is a powerful novel about a bunch of random people who come together to displace an enormous evil that has beset their beloved township and threatens their very souls.  It is a labor of love that takes its time setting up what is an intense and gripping thrill ride, one with a colorful cast of what eventually become compelling [enough] characters who you learn to admire and frustrate over as they work toward liberating the town from a rapidly growing evil not seen since, well since ever.  Two of the best things this novel has going for it: the segues between action sequences where lesser throwaway characters (and to an extent the town as a whole) meet their doom, and one of the most baddass boss boasts I’ve had the pleasure of seeing that is totally befitting to a boss of Barlow’s station.

B+

Choice Passages

“…perhaps in America even a pig can aspire to immortality.”

“That next one now, that was that slutty little Ruthie Crockett, the one who didn’t wear no bra to school and was always elbowing her chums and sniggering when Dud passed on the street. Bang. Good-by, Ruthie.”

“Clyde Corliss broke wind.”

“‘I don’t care who’s tried to stop him before. I don’t care if Attila the Hun played him and lost. I’m going to have my shot. I want you with me. I need you.'”

“‘Here we go, friends, into isolation,’ Matt said. ‘Say the secret word and win a hundred dollars.'”

Safe Area Goražde (2000)

Written By: Joe Sacco
Published By: Fantagraphics Books

When reading a traditional novel, it can be challenging sometimes to glean the “correct” message from words alone, especially if the common style of writing has changed significantly over the previous 300 years. A weaker author might use imagery that is rather ambiguous for one reason or another and, depending on the reader, the author’s intention behind a set of carefully selected words might fail to connect even in the most pivotal of moments. For as language changes, the images intended for the reader’s head might blur as generation after generation evolves the human condition.

Using a graphical approach can evoke more specific feelings about the situation since the ambiguity is not as much of an issue. After all, if one picture is worth a thousand words, then what is a book of a thousand pictures worth? Within the pages of Safe Area Goražde there might be an answer.

The imagery provided by Safe Area Goražde is at once surprising and magnificent. Every single frame is layered with incredible detail as author Joe Sacco describes the things going on with each of the characters he encounters within the titular safe area.

Within this imagery, there seem to be a few things going on. First, there is the issue of relieving the reader’s imagination of all that hard work involved in imagining things. This is evident throughout the entire novel; as the narrative drifts from character to character there are usually short intermissions that show the reader the strife that has occurred to bring things full circle in the way they have, or even to pull the “camera” out so we can more easily glimpse the story in a larger context. A good example of this occurs on pages 14 and 15 when the journalists are being interviewed in the classroom. People are milling about as usual, and even though life is certainly hard for them, the scene is a poignant demonstration of the desire to live.

The graphical approach can also be all up in the reader’s face, immediately establishing a tone in a few pages whereas a regular novel may struggle to accomplish for many and more. In the case of Safe Area Goražde, author Joe Sacco goes a little bit further and applies his cartoonist skills in creating unique caricatures for many of the players, especially when humor or merriment is involved. This technique is established pretty early on in the party scene on page 8, where faces are exaggerated and contorted in comical ways. In later pages, such as the section on Brotherhood and Unity (20-23), the images are far more normalized in an obvious attempt to cancel out the overall comic effect and get serious for a little while.

The story that seems to emerge is that even though the plight of the Bosnians is not an especially good one, there is a sense that the survival instinct is emergent in the whole of the remaining population. It becomes clear that these folks are doing everything they can to survive in spite of the odds of endless persecution by the Serbs and still have the propensity to be humorous about it. It leaves one to wonder, “just how could they possibly do it?”

A

All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)

Written By: Erich Maria Remarque
Published By: Random House

Reading literature sucks. Not because literature is bad, or boring, or something only teachers do to torture students or anything. But because when I am NOT reading or writing about a literary piece under academic pretenses, my review is just a chip in the pile of millions of other chips that have come and gone before and after because other people are reading and wring about literature under academic pretenses. I’m late to the party, and any thought that I make today about anything has already been thought by someone thinkier than myself and that’s just disappointing.

This is because when I approach and digest a novel like All Quiet on the Western Front with wholly virgin eyes and talk about my experiences with it, I am compelled to divulge some clever insight about something new. Something no one else can see. Yet, no one else is surprised because they themselves have already thought things thoroughly through, and penned it down for the book report they must turn in to Mrs. Sedminik the 4th Grade teacher by 8 AM Monday morning. And then that review is tossed into the chip pile with millions of others, a signal lost in the ether of endless noise that is, in a word, “progress”.

All Quiet on the Western Front is billed as “The Greatest War Novel of All Time.” It is about a German guy, fresh out of high school, who enlists to fight in the trenches of World War I with his classbuddies. He begins as an eager young adventure seeker, kind of in it for the thrill, whose enthusiasm and spirit becomes quickly deflated as he is exposed to the incredible horror that is The Front. As he sits in various stinky, dirty holes, watching his friends and comrades get blown to pieces by enemy mortar shells, he copes with starvation, despair, and being blown to pieces himself by frequently suppressing or rationalizing his role in the war as that of ‘becoming a man.’

The story is driven primarily by the war that rages on within the guy’s mind. It is a clear struggle to stay sane in whatever way he can as the world is literally destroyed all around him. We get insight into the thoughts and feelings directly from this poor naive sod stuck in one of the most harrowing situations ever to beset humanity. This suffering and pain is interspersed with a lot of commentary and reflection about the war that is so powerfully poetic that this review could never do it justice. Remarque’s lamentations are just as apt today as they were during WWI–War isn’t glorious, or fun, or even very heroic; it should never be thought of as such. Countless lives are thrown away for the betterment of a select few who would never set foot on the battlefield on any day of the week even if you paid them double. Why do we, as a race, let this happen?

This novel is fantastically written, fantastically paced, and extravagantly detailed. Even if all you are doing is reading this for Lit 101 (actually that’s kind of what I’m doing), it shouldn’t be too hard to get sucked right in to the fascinating horror of early modern warfare. And if you’re an ignorant mongoloid warmonger that preaches to the glory of human domination through excessive violence, perhaps it will adjust your worldview a smidgen and give the rest of us hope that we won’t die under your terms or anyone else’s.

Remarque himself describes it best:

“This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it.”

Choice Passages:

“We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial–I believe we are lost.”

“Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades–words, words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.”

“Now just why would a French blacksmith or a French shoemaker want to attack us? No, it is merely the rulers. I had never seen a Frenchman before I came here, and it will be just the same with the majority of Frenchmen as regards us. They weren’t asked about it any more than we were.”

A

Hiroshima (1946, 1985)

Written By: John Hersey
Published By: Random House (New York)

Hiroshima endeavors to teach us about a pivotal moment in human history–that of the dropping of the first ever atomic bomb deployed in war on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, that which signaled the dawn of the Atomic Age. Rather than take a dry, dull, by-the-numbers statistical approach, as text books often do, author John Hersey instead tells the story of six civilians–a personnel clerk, a physician, a tailor’s widow, a German priest, a young surgeon, and a pastor–whose lives were changed forever on that fateful day August 6, 1945 when a city some 300,000 strong was reduced to a pile of ash and rubble in a terrible flash of light. Originally a magazine article written for The New Yorker in 1946 to humanize victims of the Hiroshima bombing tragedy, it was later expanded with an aftermath that provided some much-needed closure on the fates of the interviewees.

The book is split into 5 distinct chapters:

1. A Noiseless Flash
   Where each person describes where they were and what they were doing when the bomb went off. Interestingly enough, no one can recollect the bomb making a noise.
2. The Fire
   Where the immediate aftermath is explored through the eyes of our six witnesses. It describes search and rescue efforts in addition to the massive environmental damage to the city’s infrastructure.
3. Details Are Being Investigated
   Where the survivors do whatever they can to stay alive during their predicament. Some just drop dead for no apparent reason.
4. Panic Grass and Feverfew
   Where life slowly emerges to reclaim the city.
5. The Aftermath
   Where the six civilians are revisited on the 40th Anniversary of the bombing.

You know, history is an odd thing. As years yield to decades yield to centuries yield to millenia, turning points in our little story on this planet become more abstract and sparse. You might recall your lessons from high school or college, where a guy stood at a lectern and delivered a message along the lines of, “Yeah so this happened.” Maybe there was a little bit of analysis, you know, if you’re lucky. And luckier still if you got the whole story rather than just one tiny little part.

I’m happy to say that, some 70 years later, Hiroshima is definitely not dry, drab, dull, or boring. It still contains those raw human emotions that make you frustrated as to why man can be so cruel to his brothers. Why so much unchecked suffering must happen in the world for fairly retarded reasons. And even though it was published at a time when The West was surely fascinated with the macabre effects of nuclear annihilation and romanticizing its winning of the War, Hiroshima was written perhaps to juxtapose that very sentiment. Look, I’m going to cut the crap and implore you to read this; it’s something every human being should do. It’s that important.

Choice passages:

“There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.”

“The younger one had huge, raw flash burns on her body; the salt water must have been excruciatingly painful to her. She began to shiver heavily, and again said it was cold. Father Kleinsorge borrowed a blanket from someone nearby and wrapped her up, but she shook more and more, and said again, “I am so cold,” and then suddenly stopped shivering and was dead.”

“He saw a uniform. Thinking there was just one soldier, he approached with the water. When he had penetrated the bushes, he saw there were about twenty men, and they were all in exactly the same nightmarish state: their faces were wholly burned, their eyesockets were hollow, th e fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks. (They must have had their faces upturned when the bomb went off; perhaps they were anti-aircraft personnel.)”

A