Long days, pleasant nights, and welcome to Kingslingers, a Duf Media podcast journeying through Stephen King's Dark Tower series and beyond.

I am your host, Constant Reader Scott Daly, an uncomplicatedly good and honest man.

And I'm your co-host, Relative King Newby Matt Freeman, an ambiguously good man with a worrisome violent streak.

But also, I like dogs.

This week on the show, we continue to explore King's second novel ever Salem's Lot and cover

Chapter 3, The Lot. One, that's a lot of numbers. We spend a day in the life of the

residents of Salem's Lot, which includes dead dogs, beaten babies, and a psycho bus driver. What a town. Matt, what did you think of this week's reading? I mean, I loved it. I think this is King absolutely playing to his strengths. He's sort of just showing off for this whole chapter. It's my favorite heard of the book so far, honestly. I, I was into the book

prior to now, but this was, this is sort of the equivalent to the, uh, the first Eddie Dean chapter

of the dark tower where, where, where I went from like, okay, yeah, this, this is well done to like,

okay, I'm into this now. And, uh, uh, yeah, like, like, I don't know.

I'm going to have so much to say about it.

But I think that there's a kind of specific space that King is going for with most, if not all of

these characters, which we sort of alluded to on our intro joke, where there's sort of a,

there's sort of an ambiguity to all of them.

None of them you can just pin down and say like this

person just sucks purely. Yeah. And I think that's intentional and I can't wait to get into like

all the different kind of ways in which he does that. Yeah. I mean I have a friend who's reading Salem's

lot right now along with us and And he's read it. And he

messaged me today going, I can't believe how much of it is in this book. And not to say that King

copied himself, but just that like this chapter by itself is like gets to the core of who Stephen

King is as a writer, which is why I'm like so glad we get to cover it like all at once.

We don't have to mix us with any other conversation.

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