'Salem's Lot

“[The house] was huge and rambling and sagging, its windows haphazardly boarded shut, giving it that sinister look of all old houses that have been empty for a long time. The paint had been weathered away, giving the house a uniform gray look. Windstorms had ripped many of the shingles off, and a heavy snowfall had punched in the west corner of the main roof, giving it a slumped, hunched look. […] He swallowed and stared up at the house, almost hypnotized. It stared back at him with idiot indifference.”

The author uses significant details and evocative language to convey not only the look of the house but its character as well. In addition to describing weathered paint and fallen shingles, he personifies it by describing it as “hunched,” “staring” in “idiot indifference.” Those last two words in particular evoke a sense of madness described in the Shirley Jackson quote in the Part 1 epigram.

“‘The town hasn’t changed that much. Looking out on Jointner Avenue is like looking through a thin pane of ice—like the one you can pick off the top of the town cistern in November if you knock it around the edges first—looking through that at your childhood. It’s wavy and misty and in some places it trails off into nothing, but most of it is still all there.’”

’Salem’s Lot is one of King’s more lyrical works. Its appeal lies largely in the mood he invokes through the use of language and imagery. Looking through a sheet of ice is a metaphor for the way that memory becomes distorted over time, the rough edges and ugliness smoothed out. Ben’s description hints that his own memory is distorted, not just unclear and imperfect but changed, no longer an accurate representation of reality.

“The northwest quadrant of the sight was north Jerusalem, the most heavily wooded section of town. It was the high ground, although it would not have appeared very high to anyone except perhaps a Midwesterner. The tired old hills, which were honeycombed with old togging roads, sloped down gently toward the town itself, and the Marsten House stood on the last of these.”

The slow, lyrical description evokes the opening scenes of his passage bears a resemblance in style and tone to certain of Lovecraft’s best-loved works, particularly “The Color Out of Space” and “The Dunwich Horror,” both of which are notable for their use of the rural New England landscape to create a sense of quiet beauty and brooding isolation.

“’I saw myself renting it and oh, I don’t know. Confronting my own terrors and evils, maybe. Playing ghostbreaker, maybe be gone in the name of all the saints, Hubie. Or maybe just tapping into the atmosphere of the place to write a book scary enough to make me a million dollars. But no matter what, I felt that I was in control of the situation, and that would make all the difference.

I wasn’t any nine-year-old kid anymore, ready to run screaming from a magic-lantern show that maybe came out of my own mind and no place else. But now...’

‘Now what, Ben?’

‘Now it’s occupied!’ he burst out, and beat a fist into his palm. ‘I’m not in control of the situation. A little boy has disappeared and I don’t know what to make of it. It could have nothing to do with that house, but...I don’t believe it.’ The last four words came out in measured lengths.

‘Ghosts? Spirits?’

‘Not necessarily. Maybe just some harmless guy who admired the house when he was a kid and bought it and became...possessed.’

‘Do you know something about—’ she began, alarmed.

‘The new tenant? No. I’m just guessing. But if it is the house, I’d almost rather it was possession than something else.’

‘What?’

He said simply, ‘Perhaps it’s called another evil man.’”

Ben came back to ’salem’s Lot to grapple with the idea of death. Twenty-five years ago, he encountered in the Marsten House a material manifestation of evil, something he could come to grips with. Instead, he is discovering that, symbolically speaking, death is beyond human control. In the material reality of the story, Ben is coming to realize that Evil exists on its own terms. If the house has its own kind of life, then it is drawing evil to itself.

“‘It stands on that hill overlooking the village like—oh, like some kind of dark idol.’ He chuckled to make the remark seem trivial.

‘You have said it precisely. The Marsten House has looked down on us all for almost fifty years, at all our little peccadilloes and sins and lies. Like an idol.’

‘Maybe it’s seen the good, too,’ Ben said.

‘There’s little good in sedentary small towns. Mostly indifference spiced with an occasional vapid evil—or worse, a conscious one.’”

If the Marsten House is an idol, then all the town’s sins and peccadilloes are its offerings. Matt takes a misanthropic view of the potential for good in a small town. A reader might ask whether this is the author’s assessment of small towns in general, or if it is meant to tell the reader more about Matt’s perspective than about the real world. King often bares the seamy underbelly of small-town America.

“‘I came to watch the fire. It is beautiful.’

‘Yeah,’ Dud said. ‘You from around here?’

‘I am a recent resident of your lovely town, yes. Do you shoot many rats?’

‘Quite a few, yeah. Just lately there’s millions of the little sonsawhores.

Say, you ain’t the fella who bought the Marsten place, are you?’

‘Predators,’ the man said, crossing his hands behind his back. Dud noticed with surprise that the guy was all tricked out in a suit, vest and all.

‘I love the predators of the night. The rats...the owls...the wolves. Are there wolves in this area?’”

One who has read Bram Stoker’s Dracula can almost hear the voice of the vampire count: “Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!” Stoker’s vampire was also associated with rats and other vermin. We’ve already seen that his presence attracts particularly large and bold rodents. If Mark Petrie had encountered this creature, he would have known instantly what he was confronting. Even adults like Ben and Matt Burke wouldn’t have wrestled long with disbelief.

“[Father Callahan] found himself cast in the role of a traditionalist who can no longer even trust his basic postulates.

He wanted to lead a division in the army of—who? God, right, goodness, they were names for the same thing—into battle against EVIL. […] He wanted to see EVIL with its cerements of deception cast aside, with every feature of its visage clear. […] He wanted this struggle to be pure […] Heaven was a dim attraction compared to that of fighting—and perhaps perishing—in the service of the Lord.

But there were no battles. There were only skirmishes of vague resolution. And EVIL did not wear one face but many, and all of them were vacuous and more often than not the chin was slicked with drool.”

Callahan has lost faith in the basic postulates that would enable him to stand against the vampire without the cross, and once he realizes he no longer has faith in his religion, he loses faith in the power of the cross in his hand. Callahan is worn down by the polluted stream of blind, idiot evil. His fantasy of confronting evil face-to-face is a search for meaning, but it is also vanity. That vanity will be his downfall.

“‘I got scared before I went to bed. Just like a little kid afraid of the Allamagoosalum. I went around and made sure all the windows were locked. And I went to sleep with all the lights on.’

‘And yesterday morning?’

‘Hmmm? No...never got up until nine o’clock last night.’ He offered the papery little chuckle again. ‘I remember thinking if it kept up I’d be sleeping the clock right around. And that’s what you do when you’re dead.’”

Another small example of irony. Mike is, in fact, well on his way to being undead. The Allamagoosalum has raised speculation among readers as to its origin. The reference also appears in King’s short story “Uncle Otto’s Truck.” The most likely origin is that the author combined an English word, “Allamagoosa,” meaning something like “whatchamacallit,” with a similar-sounding word used by the Micmac tribe of New England for a kind of bogeyman.

“What you’re thinking is madness. But step by step he had been forced backward toward belief. Of course, being a literary man, it had been the first thing that had come to mind when Jimmy Cody had thumbnailed Danny Glick’s case. He and Cody had laughed over it. Maybe this was his punishment for laughing. Scratches? Those marks weren’t scratches. They were punctures.

One was taught that such things could not be; that things like Coleridge’s ‘Cristabel’ or Bram Stoker’s evil fairy tale were only the warp and woof of fantasy.”

The subject of this passage is faith and belief. Different characters come to the point of belief by their own routes. Matt has faith that the fantasies of Stoker and Coleridge are separate from the real world, where a scratch on a boy’s neck can’t be a vampire bite because vampires don’t exist. Yet when all signs point to vampires, he has just enough poetry in his soul to believe.

“‘Or did you just fall in love with the idea of blond-haired grandchildren? I suppose I bother you—you can’t feel your job is complete until you see me married and settled down to a good man you can put your thumb on. Settled down with a fellow who’ll get me pregnant and turn me into a matron in a hurry. That’s the scoop, isn’t it? Well, what about what I want?’

‘Susan, you don’t know what you want.’

And she said it with such absolute, convinced certainty that for a moment Susan was tempted to believe her.”

King doesn’t always do his best characterization with women, but when he does, it is by placing the focus not on the character but on the character’s circumstances. Susan’s mother wants to lock Susan down in the safe, prescribed role of mother and wife. King says that all fear is about disruption. This is Ann Norton’s disruption, that Susan will go out and do something different. She is grasping at anything that will keep Susan close and stave off chaos.

“[Susan] lay down on her bed—which had been decorated with stuffed toys and a poodle dog with a transistor radio in its belly not so long ago—and lay looking at the wall, trying not to think. There were a number of Sierra Club posters on the wall, but not so long ago she had been surrounded by posters clipped from Rolling Stone and Creem and Crawdaddy, pictures of her idols—Jim Morrison and John Lennon and Dave van Ronk and Chuck Berry.”

Susan is described consistently in childlike terms. Ben sees her as a girl and describes her as young for her age. She still lives with her parents at the age of 25. She has dreams and ambitions but has done nothing to pursue them. Now she returns to her room in her parents’ house, where she is surrounded by memories of the childhood toys and posters only recently abandoned. She has put them aside, trying to replace them with more “grown-up” accoutrements.

“[Matt] gave a dry chuckle. ‘We’ve read the same books. And what do you think, Susan? Is there more than heaven and earth in your philosophy?’

‘No,’ she said with quiet firmness. ‘Houses are only houses. Evil dies with the perpetration of evil acts.’”

Susan is struggling with a theme that appears in several of King’s books and in the Gothic genre as a whole—the tension between science and superstition. The line “more things in heaven and earth […] than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” comes from Hamlet, a rather Gothic detective story in which the young prince wrestles with faith and science and comes to a tragic end because he can’t make up his mind on which side to fall. Susan’s tragic end derives from a similar unresolved conflict. King often resolves the conflict by the application of Lovecraftian cosmicism; monsters have a material origin, but the science that describes them is so far beyond human knowledge that it might as well be supernatural.

“And you couldn’t explain that to your mother and father, who were creatures of the light. No child ever conquers those fears, he thought. If a fear cannot be articulated, it can’t be conquered. And the fears locked in small brains are much too large to pass through the orifice of the mouth.”

Matt is thinking of all a child’s fears: of the dark, of the unknown, of the imagination. He could be articulating the author’s own feeling. King has spoken of his chronic and pervasive fears as both a child and adult. Matt is finding those earliest fears never entirely go away. They remain dormant in the reptilian part of the brain to emerge with the encroachment of the unknown and unseen.

“Many of the older houses are saltboxes and most of the stores are false-fronted, although no one could have said why. The people know there is nothing behind those false façades just as most of them know that Loretta Starcher wears falsies. The land is granite-bodied and covered with a thin, easily ruptured skin of topsoil.”

The storefronts, Loretta Starcher’s undergarments, and the granite thinly covered by soil are all metaphors for the reality under the false front of the town. Under the drowsy little town in the pastoral New England hills broods a core of rottenness.

“He became aware that he was frightened—his body had known before his mind. He had never been so frightened […] His mind, still that of a child in a thousand ways, made an accurate judgment of his position in seconds. He was in peril of more than his life.”

Where Matt, Ben, and especially Susan struggle to overcome disbelief in the face of all the evidence, Mark, the child, has a pure, uncomplicated belief. Mark believes instinctively in secrets and terrors that adults like Susan can’t. Those childhood fears that are too big to be articulated have a primal survival value. King has explored the same idea in other stories, particularly It.

“There is no group therapy or psychiatry or community social services for the child who must cope with the thing under the bed or in the cellar every night, the thing which leers and capers and threatens just beyond the point where vision will reach. The same lonely battle must be fought night after night and the only cure is the eventual ossification of the imaginary faculties, and this is called adulthood. In some shorter, simpler mental shorthand, these thoughts passed through his brain. The night before, Matt Burke had faced such a dark thing and had been stricken by a heart seizure brought on by fright; tonight Mark Petrie had faced one, and ten minutes later lay in the lap of sleep, the plastic cross still grasped loosely in his right hand like a child’s rattle. Such is the difference between men and boys.”

This passage is an example of the omniscient point of view. The narrator is able to speak directly to the reader, conveying information and observations that aren’t available to the characters themselves. The first part of the passage echoes the previously expressed idea that a child’s fears are too vast to be expressed to adults. Fear is belief. Matt believes instantly and without question that Danny is a vampire because his fear tells him so, and because he believes in vampires, he believes in the power of a cheap plastic cross to repel them.

“The rebellion had been growing in her all afternoon, and around two o’clock it burst its bonds. They were going at it stupidly, taking the long way around the barn to prove something that was (sorry, Mr. Burke) probably a lot of horseshit anyway. Susan decided to go up to the Marsten House now, this afternoon.”

Rebellion is the key word in this passage. The men have not been listening to her. They override her, going their own way and dragging her with them. Susan is finally becoming an active protagonist, taking control of her own life like the classic Gothic heroine. Unfortunately, at the last moment, she surrenders leadership to Mark, losing her advantage.

“She found herself thinking of those same drive-in horror movie epics where the heroine goes venturing up the narrow attic stairs to see what’s frightened poor old Mrs. Cobham so, or down into some dark, cobwebby cellar where the walls are rough, sweating stone— symbolic womb—and she, with her date’s arm comfortably around her, thinking: What a silly bitch...I’d never do that! And here she was, doing it.”

Again, like the classic Gothic heroine, Susan is confronting the central conflict between emotion and reason. She is aware on one level that she is going about it the wrong way, but her rational mind won’t allow her to surrender to unreason. The image of the womb with the sweating stone also resembles a tomb, symbolizing both death and rebirth, a metaphor King has used in other stories (It, Joyland) to represent coming-of-age.

“Their eyes locked.

‘Are you making this up, Mark?’

‘No,’ he said, and told his story in a few simple sentences.

‘And you came here alone?’ she asked when he had finished. ‘You believed it and came up here alone?’

‘Believed it?’ He looked at her, honestly puzzled. ‘Sure I believed it. I saw it, didn’t I?’”

Of all the vampire hunters, Mark has the simplest, purest belief because he is closest to the childhood fears that have gradually ossified in even the most imaginative of adults. His belief contrasts with Susan’s stubborn skepticism. True, she hasn’t seen any vampires yet, but other people have presented a preponderance of evidence, and a person with more imagination might have been more open-minded.

“[Susan] had always consciously or unconsciously formed fear into a simple equation: fears = unknown. And to solve the equation, one simply reduced the problem to simple algebraic terms, thus: unknown = creaky board (or whatever), creaky board = nothing to be afraid of. In the modern world all terrors could be gutted by simple use of the transitive axiom of equality.”

This is the central tension of the Gothic genre—the conflict between science and superstition. Susan comes across as lacking in imagination in this passage. In Susan’s mind, every irrational fear can be linked to a material cause and resolved. Susan possesses an excellent tool for managing fear, but if fear is belief, then Susan’s logic is the wrong tool for the circumstance.

“The confessional might have been a direct pipeline to the days when werewolves and incubi and witches were an accepted part of the outer darkness and the church the only beacon of light. For the first time in his life he felt the slow, terrible beat and swell of the ages and saw his life as a dim and glimmering spark in an edifice which, if seen clearly, might drive all men mad.”

Ben has a complicated vision of the church as intermingled with the outer darkness. The darkness seems infinite with the church no more than a beacon holding it at bay. In its way, it is as destructive to humankind as the darkness itself—incomprehensible to the point of madness.

“You have forgotten the doctrine of your own church, is it not so? The cross...the bread and wine...the confessional...only symbols. Without faith, the cross is only wood, the bread baked wheat, the wine sour grapes. If you had cast the cross away, you should have beaten me another night.”

The science-versus-supernatural question comes down in the end to faith. In the confession scene, Ben sees the church in a way that no one raised under its umbrella can. He sees it as a force beyond human comprehension. Even Callahan, in the end, fails to see that overwhelming power and puts his faith in the symbols of the church rather than the church itself.

“‘That so?’ [Gillespie] said with no particular surprise, ‘Vampire, ain’t he? Just like in all the comic books they used to put out twenty years ago.’ […]

Ben heard himself say remotely, ‘You gutless creep. You cowardly piece

of shit. This town is still alive and you’re running out on it.’

‘It ain’t alive,’ Parkins said, lighting his smoke with a wooden kitchen match. ‘That’s why he came here. It’s dead, like him. Has been for twenty years or more.’”

Matt once told Ben that there’s precious little good in a small town—mostly indifference. Gillespie illustrates that indifference is its own form of evil. Gillespie has always been a leave-well-enough-alone lawman, but this indifference to the lives of the (relatively) innocent survivors of the vampire plague illustrates that indifference is its own form of evil. Gillespie can’t even be properly called a coward. He would be courageous enough if he cared enough to act.

There’s also a level of insight that Ben and Mark—both relative newcomers to the town—don’t share. He sees that the town isn’t worth saving, that it has been eroded from within by petty evils before Barlow arrived.