Salem’s Lot is the second published novel by American author Stephen King. It is the story of novelist Ben Mears who revisits his home town of Salem’s Lot, to overcome a childhood tragedy involving a haunted house, known as the Marsten house, while his recluse town is becoming over run by vampires. When Dracula was published in 1897, it soon became the mile stone for the modern day vampire. Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, in my view, is just a modern day retelling of the same story, but in a small town in New England, Maine known as Jerusalem’s Lot. While I am still in the process of reading Dracula, the parallels are uncanny. Even the physiognomy of the two characters are similar. They are both described as having an aquiline, or beaklike nose, pallor skin, high cheek bones, and a mouth with protruding teeth under a heavy mustache. They both involve many themes which include love, sexual desire, invasion, and fear of the unknown. The beginning is a bit slow, but not without cause, introducing us to the many characters through out the novel. Considering the many characters, even the tertiary ones are of importance. King paints a vivid picturesque view of small town living, and the many evils behind it.
There are many small towns in America that are so overseen, if the population was wiped out, they wouldn’t be missed or noticed. The wiping out of this small town is from the invasion of a vampire, named Kurt Barlow. He and his colleague/assistant Richard Straker come to the small town as antique dealers, set up a small antiques shop and purchase the benevolent, enigmatic house known as the Marsten House. The Marsten House is sort of a materialized evil, who’s previous owner murdered his wife and hung himself in a room on the second floor. Ben Mears as a child is persuaded by his friends to go into the house to prove his bravery. He goes into the room where Hubert Marsten hung himself, opens the door, and sees a man hanging from a scaffold. This is the reason Ben Mears comes back to his home town; to purchase the Marsten House, work on his novel involving the house, and to overcome his childhood fear of it. It’s an interesting fact that Stephen King stated he had a terrible dream as a child involving opening a door, seeing a man hanging from a scaffold, and opening his dead eyes, staring straight at him.
Childhood fear is a major theme among many of his novels. As we grow up into adulthood, we tend to shut out those childhood fears with reasoning. ‘That tapping at the window is just a tree branch.’ or ‘That ominous shadow is only an illusion from light.’ As a child our imaginations tend to get the best of us and reasoning isn’t in our vocabulary. Childhood fear is the most powerful of all fears simply that it’s the most primal and intuitive of them all. Evil is another major theme through out the novel. The Marsten house, and Kurt Barlow are the materialized versions of ‘Evil’ but ‘evil’ has always been present amongst us all. King reveals the many secretive evils of the characters, such as a mother who beats her infant child; or a wife, having an affair with a young man, is later caught, beaten, and constantly raped by her husband. The moral of ‘evil’ being, weather it’s a vampire that invades our town, or the evil inside man’s heart, the two are of the same. Small town living is an evil in itself as well. Being too enclosed in perfunctory ways, or becoming suspicious or unwelcoming to any outsider’s such as Ben Mears, can have an evil effect on us. Becoming a vampire is a sort an allegorical transformation to embracing all the evils we are ever so secretive about, fortifying it, and spreading it like a virus. Many people have said the only setback of the novel is the lack of showing us more of how the vampires lived. I think King’s novel is more of a morality tale of evil, faith, childhood fears, and small town living, then seeing the vampires in action. To me I enjoyed his genre infusion of vampires, haunted houses, and the evil living inside us all. Over all, I think Salem’s Lot is an important read to any vampire or horror enthusiast, and has shown me the reason as to why I used to enjoy the genre, before any Stephenie Meyers got a hold of the mythos, and destroyed it dearly.
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