Salem to Salem: The End by The Doors

The early chapters of Salem to Salem in which Abigail and her friends take a coach out of Woodstock, into the woods, and up to the mountains, owe a debt not to any great work of literature but to The Doors' "The End", which could be considered a great literary lyrical work in a sense. Jim Morrison had many literary references, namely Aldous Huxley, and a great deal of Aldous Huxley can be read into "The End, but the sense of dread and the feeling of leaving a place of security and heading out into the wilderness, this subconcious unknown strongly echoes "The End".

I listened to the song extstensively while writing the book so it's fair to say its DNA is entwined in the book, and especially these chapters -- also, the later chapters in which Abigail attempts to apocalyptically blow up Billy; even the final chapter in which she returns to L.A. to kill Billy Manson-style. The song's lyrics definitely bleed into the book's themes. "Lost in a wilderness of pain/ All the children are insane,"; reflects the main crux of the book; only its Billy and his kin who are the adults, exploiting and killing children. It's true, however, they do give LSD to the other town and destroy their minds. "All the children are insane", indeed.

It's the song's Freudian passages, however, its midsection with the spoken-word lyrics of "The killer awoke before dawn/ He put his boots on", that reflect the early chapters in which Abigail and her friends go out to kill witches.