'Salem's Lot

King has suggested that what people fear most can be boiled down to disruption. He often uses the theme of the outsider who disrupts the status quo and exposes the slimy pallid things hidden under an idyllic surface. Historically, the vampire has represented disruption in three ways—the outsider bringing disruptive customs and beliefs, or the outsider bringing disease from another village; internally, the vampire represents social or moral deviance, especially sexual deviance (the vampire bite being a glaringly obvious metaphor) arising from within the group.

Barlow certainly disrupts the status quo, and he brings a plague from outside, but he primarily represents the internal threat of social and moral decay already eating the town from within. Before the arrival of Straker and Barlow, ’salem’s Lot and the Marsten House have been in a state of suspension ready to be tipped over into chaos by the intrusion of the outsider(s). Chapters 3 and 14 contain taxonomies of the moral degeneracy in the citizens of ’salem’s Lot. The residents of the town are already vampires of a kind. They suck out one another’s lives with greed, child abuse, adultery, sadism, petty malice, bullying, murder, arson, and a multitude of private addictions and obsessions. Their metaphorical vampirism is the reason they are unable to resist—and sometimes even embrace—the plague introduced by Barlow.

The representation of vampires has changed in the last half decade. Kurt Barlow is modeled after Count Dracula, who was in turn modeled on the strigoi who originated in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. Those monsters were alien to humankind. If they had intelligence, which not all did, it was the cold intelligence of a predator, and their emotions were limited to lust, hunger, and malice. Later writers have used the idea of the vampire as outsider to explore the experience of being the outsider. In those stories, where ordinary people see a threat, the reader is invited to identify with the lonely alien. The vampire is isolated from humanity due to his (or her) long life; any human that they happen to care for will die in what is the blink of an eye for an immortal creature. The vampire is further isolated by the fact that it is likely to eat anyone it becomes close to.

The representation of the vampire as a complex individual reflects a cultural change from people living in small, close-knit communities whose residents are heavily interdependent to a highly mobile population so intermixed that there is effectively no such thing as an outsider. In the latter culture, however, everyone is paradoxically an outsider. We are attracted to characters through whom we can examine our own sense of isolation.

The vampire has also become a romantic figure, especially in women’s fiction. If early vampires represented a threat to women (metaphorical rape, violation of patriarchal social norms), they have come to represent taking control of one’s own sexuality and female nature more generally. The heroines of vampire-romance stories are doing the same thing as the Gothic heroines who overcame the social constraints of their time. The lover in women’s romance fiction represents a woman’s incorporation of her animus, her agency in the world. By mastering the brooding, romantic vampire lover and tying him to the human world, the heroine (and the reader) assumes and wields his power.

Incidentally, Ben is another outsider, bringing disruption. For some people in the town, he is a welcome disruption. Susan sees in him the potential for escape. Matt, Mark, and Cody find a kindred spirit. Susan’s mother, on the other hand, sees him as a threat much more menacing than Barlow or Straker (whom she finds charming). Straker and Barlow are a manifestation of the familiar corruption that infests the town, whereas Ben represents a life free of that poison, and the freedom is frightening and distasteful to Mrs. Norton.