'Salem's Lot

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1975

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Prologue, Chapters 1-3

Part 1, Chapters 4-7

Part 2, Chapters 8-10

Part 2, Chapters 11-13

Part 3, Chapter 14-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Part 1, Chapters 4-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary

It is after 10:30, and Danny and Ralphie’s parents are frightened. They are about to go out searching for the boys when Danny stumbles home, dazed and disheveled. He tells his parents he and Ralphie had seen something scary, then something bad happened, and Danny doesn’t remember more. Days of searching turn up no sign of the missing boy. Ben helps in the search for three days when he returns to the boardinghouse and finds Susan there. Standing on the porch with her, Ben looks up at the Marsten House. Susan wants to tell him that she loves him, but not while he is looking up at the house.

Straker telephones Larry Crockett and tells him that he has some deliveries he wants Crockett to handle for him—several boxes to be delivered to the antiques store at the former laundromat and one to be taken directly to the Marsten House.

Royal Snow and Hank Peters pick up the delivery from the dock in Portland. The warehouse is full of the sound of rats. The biggest box is the one slated for delivery to the Marsten House, and something shifts inside when they lift it. There is something about that box that they particularly dislike.

They hurry to deliver the box to the basement to the Marsten House. When they set it down, they hear a rustle in the room as of rats or something more horrible. When Hank goes to lock the cellar, he runs his flashlight around the room and sees a bundle of child’s clothes. He hears a snap behind him and sees that one of the aluminum bands securing the big box has snapped. He flees the cellar, leaps into the delivery truck, and speeds down the drive.

Hank tells Larry that he saw a pile of clothes matching the description of what Ralphie Glick had been wearing. Larry reminds Hank of a few minor indiscretions that Hank would not want exposed, then pays a little extra for his efforts. Hank realizes with relief that all he saw was a pile of rags, not a little boy’s clothes.

The search for Ralphie Glick has been abandoned. Constable Gillespie visits Ben to ask where he was the night of Ralphie’s disappearance. Gillespie’s next stop is the new antiques store. Straker is there; Barlow is not. Back at his office, Gillespie calls the FBI and asks for a background check on both Mears and Barlow.

Five days after Ralphie Glick disappeared, Danny Glick stumbles out of bed at four in the morning and collapses in the hallway. At the hospital, the doctors cannot figure out what is wrong with him. He is weak and disoriented with slow reflexes. They settle on a tentative diagnosis of pernicious anemia from an unknown cause.

Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary

Ben has dinner again with the Nortons and learns that Ralphie’s older brother Danny just died at the hospital from pernicious anemia. As Ben is leaving, he asks Susan if she wants a soda at Spencer’s. When they leave the house, Susan proposes they go for walk in the park instead. They make love in the park. Afterward, Susan asks Ben what his new book is about. He says it started out to be a book about ’salem’s Lot, but it has become a story about the Marsten House. He has done some background research on Hubie Marsten. Marsten was a contract killer for the mob. He was once arrested for the murder and evisceration of an 11-year-old boy but was released, probably due to his mob connections. During the 10 years Marsten lived in the Lot, four children disappeared and were never found. Ben’s new book is about the kind of evil that lingers in places like the Marsten House. Susan asked him dubiously if he thinks Marsten’s ghost comes back to life to kill children every few years.

Ben thinks the house is a kind of supernatural beacon, holding the essence of evil in its bones. Suddenly, it is occupied again and there’s been another disappearance. When Ben first conceived the idea of renting the house, he had imagined himself confronting and vanquishing the evil, or at least using the spooky atmosphere to write a brilliantly terrifying book. Either way, he would be in control of the situation. Now the house has summoned another evil man, and control has been snatched away from Ben.

After he drops off Susan at her parents’ house, Ben goes to Dell’s bar, where he makes the acquaintance of Matt Burke, the English teacher at the high school. They fall to talking about the Marsten House. Ben describes the Marsten House as looming over the town like an evil idol. Matt agrees, adding that a town like ’salem’s Lot has little good in it. Its citizens are indifferent at best.

Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary

Danny Glick is buried beside his brother on the first day of fall. Father Callahan officiates. In the midst of the service, Tony Glick breaks down and throws himself into the grave atop the coffin, screaming for his son to stop messing around and get out of there. When Danny’s father is subdued, the priest concludes the service by asking God to baptize Danny and give him “new life.”

When the service is over, the groundskeeper, Mike Ryerson, returns to fill in the grave. Mike feels someone watching him. Spooked, he begins filling in the grave as fast as he can. He goes through prayer for the dead in his head, but another prayer keeps intruding—the incantation uttered by Straker when he sacrificed Ralphie Glick. Mike is overcome by a compulsion to open the coffin. Danny rises from his open coffin, and the sun drops under the horizon.

Dud Rogers patrols the edge of the dump. He sees a shadowy figure who asks Dud whether he shoots many rats. The stranger loves rats, he says: all the nocturnal predators—rats, wolves, owls. The stranger approaches, and Dud thinks the pain is sweet as still dark water.

At the vicarage, Father Callahan broods over the banality of evil in this isolated little town. Sometimes he wants to reach through the window, grab hold of his parishioners by the soul, and shake them. It is a mindless, idiot evil. He longs to come face-to-face with the real thing, the true, primal Evil that came before mankind and all his religions. He dreams of leading a battalion into battle against the devil.

Part 1, Chapter 7 Summary

Matt Burke, the English teacher, invites Ben over for dinner. Ben tells Matt about his new book. It is a thriller about a series of murders set in a town like ’salem’s Lot. Matt deduces that the book is based on the series of murders that took place back in the 1930s. Several people in the town have already made the connection between those early murders and Ralphie Glick’s disappearance immediately after the Marsten House is occupied again.

Matt is uneasy about the house. It seems almost as though Straker and his unseen business partner sought it out. Then Ralphie disappears, and now his brother Danny is dead. Matt has a friend at the hospital, a doctor named Jimmy Cody. Cody told him the boy’s red-blood-cell count was half what it should have been. Matt and Ben talk about the Marsten House and the fact that Ralph’s disappearance and Danny’s death came so soon after the new owners moved in. Matt proposes that he, Ben, and Susan go up to the house on Friday to meet the new neighbors.

A few days later, Matt bumps into Mike Ryerson. The groundskeeper looks pale and drawn. Mike has felt sick ever since he fell asleep on the grass at the cemetery and woke up on the ground the next morning. Since then, he has been too weak and sick to eat anything. Now, every night, he locks all his doors and windows and sleeps with the light on like a kid afraid of the “Allamagoosalum.” Matt notices a scratch on Mike’s neck that looks like a bite mark. He offers to let Mike sleep at his house.

At Matt’s house, Matt checks to be sure Mike’s window is securely latched. That night, he lies awake, thinking he must be crazy to think about vampires, yet, being an English teacher, the first thing he thought of when Jimmy Cody told him about Danny Glick’s case was Dracula.

In the silent house, he hears Mike’s voice from upstairs, inviting someone—or something—to come in. Then he hears the click of the catch on the bedroom window in Mike’s room. He knows he should do something, but he is frozen with fear. Upstairs, he hears the evil laughter of a child and a sucking sound.

Part 1, Chapters 4-7 Analysis

The second half of Part 1 makes explicit the inherent tensions in the novel: Ben will wrestle with his fear of death or be possessed by it; the town will continue to muddle along in its indifferent way or be drowned in a tide of evil; Susan will emerge from her sheltered cocoon in the town with Ben or be swallowed by it. As the book progresses, the reader loses hope in a happy ending, as Ben doesn’t have control over anything that happens at the Marsten House. The town is too riven with little evils to resist the big one, and Susan is too young and naive to be properly cautious.

The first half of Part 1 introduces the You Can’t Go Home Again theme. Ben is aware that he is coming back in the hope of recapturing the childhood and the innocence he lost when he left ’salem’s Lot the first time. King frequently employs summer as a symbol of childhood, innocence, and life, especially in coming-of-age stories. Ben’s memories of his living in ’salem’s Lot are all associated with summer and innocence. In such stories, King uses autumn to represent endings and descent into the underworld in preparation for rebirth. Ben returns to the Lot at the tail end of summer, and the deaths in the Lot begin at the start of autumn, presaging death represented by winter.

At the time of his death, Danny is the same age Ben was when he left the Lot at the metaphorical end of his childhood. Danny is also the same age as Mark, who is undergoing a particularly dreadful coming-of-age himself. Mark will be baptized and symbolically “reborn” in the church in Los Zapatos. Danny’s burial represents the end of childhood’s summer, but his rebirth is very different. Danny has been “baptized” by the vampire and is reborn undead.

Danny’s burial service introduces the failure of faith, which will present a major obstacle to the protagonists. The graveside service attempts to assert the faith of the attendees, but Father Callahan’s prayer for new life foreshadows Danny’s dreadful rebirth. Tony Glick’s hysteria at the graveside builds on the prediction of Danny’s profane return as a vampire, and the conclusion of the service asserts that Danny has been given “new life” and begs that everyone in the town will someday join him. Failure of faith is also illustrated in Mike Ryerson’s attempt to recite the prayer for the dead to himself only to have the blasphemous vampiric incantation intrude, gradually subsuming his mind until he is fully under control and is forced to open Danny’s coffin. This foreshadows the uselessness of supernatural means to overcome what will overtake the town, indicating that one cannot escape fate.

Father Callahan experiences a different failure of faith. He wants to confront evil in a form he can lay hands on, as he cannot do with the weak and pitiable human sins of his parishioners. He lacks true compassion for the weakness of ordinary people, and his desire to confront the great enemy, sword in hand, is an expression of vanity. He is doomed to get exactly what he wishes for, only to find in the end that neither his faith nor his strength is great enough.

Matt Burke’s assessment of the villagers as “indifferent” speaks to the idea that the people of ’salem’s Lot have no great impulse to either good or evil. For example, Hank is easily persuaded that he did not see Ralphie’s clothes. Not only that, but he is also grateful to Larry Crockett for persuading him and for easing his conscience with cash. This signifies that it is not a great desire for evil that will allow the town to slide into decay but a willful ignorance, and this lack of willingness to work toward the good is what dooms it to the vampire plague.

All along, there has been an underlying question, not directly addressed in the story, as to whether the house—or the site on which it was built—was already imbued with evil before Hubie Marsten built there, or if he brought the evil with him. A hint appears in Mike Ryerson’s reference to the “Allamagoosalum.” Mike uses the word as an alternate term for the bogeyman. Characters in some of King’s other books have described the Allamagoosalum as a corrupted name of a devil or bogeyman belonging to the Micmac tribe in the Maine area. Another likely origin comes from England and Ireland, where Allamagoosa is used to mean something like “thingamabob.”

“Allamagoosa,” in the sense of “whatchamacallit,” is also the title of the science fiction story published in 1955 by British author Eric Frank Russell. As an avid reader, King would have been familiar with the story. In fact, King seems to have combined the two meanings, taking the British word for an indescribable thing and blending it with the Native American demi-devil.

The implication is that there may actually be something haunting ’salem’s Lot, something that underpins the evil that attracted Hubie Marsten and Kurt Barlow. When Straker sacrifices Ralphie Glick, he is propitiating that spirit.

Readers have struggled with the timeline in these chapters, trying to determine when Danny Glick was vampirized and by whom—Ralphie, Barlow, or Straker. In Part 3, Matt Burke will clarify that Danny is bitten but not drained by Straker on September 17th; Danny is then bitten and drained by Barlow on September 22. The timeline is as follows:

September 16: Ben meets Susan.
September 17: Ralphie Glick is taken and sacrificed to propitiate whatever dark entity undermines salem’s Lot. Straker bites Danny Glick, but Danny Glick but does not drain him. Ralphie is not vampirized.
September 22: The search for Ralphie ends.
September 22: Straker tells Crockett to deliver the box to Marsten.
September 22 (10 p.m. to midnight): The box arrives at the Marsten House. Henry Peters sees the band around the box snap as Barlow stirs and begins to emerge.
September 22 (4:00 a.m.): Danny collapses from pernicious anemia, bitten and drained by Barlow.
September 25 (Early morning): Danny dies.
September 28: Danny is buried.

Straker is a Type 3 vampire, unable to make another vampire. Danny is actually vampirized by Barlow. The readers’ confusion arises from the fact that the chapter is organized such that the reader sees Danny collapse before the box with Barlow inside is delivered. The story is being told out of order as the older Ben, reliving the story in memory, recounts the events in the order he thinks about them rather than the order in which they occurred.