Podcasts
Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot’ Helped Peter Straub Tell His ‘Ghost Story’ [The Losers’ Club Podcast]
“I really wanted to expand things much more than I ever had before. I wanted to work on a large canvas. ‘Salem’s Lot showed me how to do this without getting lost among a lot of minor characters.” –Peter Straub on writing Ghost Story
With Danse Macabre, The Losers’ Club journeys through all the books that influenced or made an impact on Stephen King. (Essentially, as he listed in his 1981 horror manifesto Danse Macabre. Hence the name of the series.) In the past, the Losers have left King’s Dominion to flip through the pages of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, and Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes.
Today, the gang finds themselves in Milburn, New York revisiting Peter Straub’s chilly 1979 horror novel Ghost Story. Join Losers Michael Roffman, Jenn Adams, Ana Marie Cox, and Justin Gerber as they chart the rise and fall of the literary horror wave of the ’70s, debate the MVP of the Chowder Society, point out all the literary influences, connect the dots to King, and share their own spine-tingling ghost stories.
Stream the episode below and return next week when the Losers kick off Blockbuster Month with a curious detour from King’s Dominion into Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park ahead of Jurassic World: Dominion. For further adventures, be sure to join the Club over long days and pleasant nights via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RadioPublic, Acast, Google Podcasts, and RSS. You can also unlock hundreds of hours of content in The Barrens (Patreon).
Maybe you haven’t thought about your good friend Sweeney Todd in a while, or maybe you have. The 2007 movie is a bit of a memory, though a fond one – it has a healthy 86% on Rotten Tomatoes, for what it’s worth. But 2023’s Broadway revival starring Josh Groban, who your mom thinks is “so talented” (she’s right!), was enough of a hit that its run was extended.
It appears we’re in a bit of a Sweeneyssaince.
For the uninitiated, Sweeney Todd is the story of a barber who kills his customers and disposes of the bodies by passing them off to pie shop owner Mrs. Lovett, who uses them as a special ingredient. But there’s more below the trap door.
Sweeney Todd isn’t just a late 70s musical that turned into a movie; it started as a penny dreadful called The String of Pearls: A Domestic Romance (author unknown), told week-to-week in the 1840s. Penny dreadfuls were essentially fiction zines featuring serialized stories that were usually horror-based and cost a penny, leading to the very literal nickname.
The String of Pearls differs from the more well-known Sweeney Todd plot in that it follows the investigation of a missing persons case that leads to the reveal of Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett’s arrangement, as opposed to the more modern iteration which treats audiences to the duo hatching their homicidal plan and then giving the worst haircuts ever. What a delightfully wild reveal that must have been if you were a reader in Victorian London after weeks of wondering what had become of the missing sailor carrying a string of pearls to deliver to a lovely girl.
Kristen and Will discuss the history and future of Sweeney Todd and works inspired by it this week on Guide to the Unknown. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to get a new episode every Friday.
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