After countless frightening and suspenseful masterpieces the master of horror Stephen King tackles the vampire genre in this scary novel.
The town of Jerusalem's lot, somehow changed to 'Salem's Lot by the locals is a very small town set in rural Maine. A town so small and insignificant almost, a very remote location with very small-minded people. King portrays the citizens as kind and welcoming but not all the time and not everyone is nice. The people are quite rotten and flawed; from an adulterous couple to a mum who beats her baby, the locals are not good humans. The locals also know a lot about their neighbors, but they overlook it, ignore it and sweep the sins under the rug.
The town has dark secrets that come from a big house on top of a hill called the Marsten House. Inside lived an ex mobster who was rumored to dabble in devil worship.This house haunted the novel's hero Ben Mears since he was a boy. After 25 years he has returned to the town where he grew up and in order to exorcise his demons after a traumatic experience as a boy in the house, plans to write a novel about Salem's Lot.
This is a horror novel about a town that is destroyed from the inside out. The vampire arrives in the town and decides to live in the scary house on top of the hill. This vampire is called Barlow and like many vampires in horror fiction is from Eastern Europe. A major fan of 'Dracula' by Bram Stoker, King wrote this novel as an 'unofficial homage to that classic vampire novel'. Compared to Dracula, Barlow is really evil, despicable and a great formidable being. I guess we could say he's ten times more evil than Stoker's vampire Count. The vampire only needs to bite a very small number of people and the infection spreads quickly after that.
Stephen King works well with the familiar conventions of vampire lore, from stakes, coffins, crosses, garlic and even the Holy Host. Mr. King also adapts and puts some interesting spins on the vampire myth. He has updated the pop culture monster from the E.C. comics and camp B movies.
When the threat is uncovered the main hero and the other characters go through interesting and philosophical dialogue to fully comprehend what is happening and to ensure that they are not going mad. Those passages are brilliant.
The vampire Barlow is almost unseen but when he appears it is to demonstrate his evil power and nature. Just like Dracula, he remains hidden, his 'plague' and servants spread the rest of his evil.
Like all his other great novels, this one terrifies and excites.
This is what Stephen King said in the Introduction of his novel:
'One of the ideas I had in those good old days was that it would be perfectly possible to combine the overlord-vampire myth from Bram Stoker's Dracula with the naturalistic fiction of Frank Norris and the EC horror comics I'd loved as a child... and come out with a great American novel. '
'I liked the idea of my vampire novel serving as a balance for Stoker's which has to go down in history as the most optimistic scary novel of all time. Count Dracula simultaneously feared and worshiped in his dark little European fiefdom of Transylvania, makes the fatal mistake of taking his act and putting it on the road. In London, he meets men and women of science and reason by God- Abraham Van Helsing who knows about blood transfusions, John Seward, who keeps his diary on wax phonograph cylinders. Mina Harker, who keeps her in shorthand and later serves as secretary to the fearless vampire hunters.
Stoker was clearly fascinated by modern inventions and innovations and the underlying thesis of his novel is clear: in a confrontation between a foreign child of the dark powers and a group of fine upstanding Britishers equipped with all mod cons, the powers of darkness don't stand a chance. Dracula is hounded from Carfax, his British establishment, back to Transylvania, and finally staked at sunset. The vampire hunters pay a price for their victory- that is Stoker's genius- but that they will come out on top is never in much doubt.'
'When I sat down to write my version of the story in 1972- a version whose life-force was drawn more from the nervously jokey Jewish American mythos of William Gaines and Al Fedstein than from Romanian folk tales. I saw a different world, one where all of the gadgets Stoker must have regarded with such hopeful wonder had begun to seem sinister and downright dangerous. Mine was the world that had begun to choke on its own effluent, that had hooked itself through the bag on diminishing energy resources and had to deal not only with nuclear weapons but nuclear proliferation. I saw myself and my society at the other end of the technological rainbow, and set out to write a book that would reflect that glum idea. One where, in short where the vampire would end up eating the fearless vampire hunters for lunch.'
'Given my dim view of small New England towns (I had grown up in one and knew what they were like), I had no doubt my version of Count Dracula would emerge completely triumphant over the puny representatives of the national world arranged against him. What I didn't count on was that my characters weren't content to remain puny representatives. Instead they came alive and began to do things sometimes smart things, sometimes foolishly brave things- on their own. More of Stoker's characters are around at the finish of Dracula than at the end of 'Salem's Lot', and yet this is - against its young author's will- a surprisingly optimistic book.'
'I'm glad, I still see all the nicks and dings on its fenders, all the scars on its hide that were inflicted by the inexperience of a craftsman new at his trade, but I still find many passages of power here. And a few of grace.'
'Second Coming was the first title but was changed because my wife Tabby said that Second Coming sounded like a sex manual and then to 'Salem's Lot.'
'I think Salem's Lot, for all its flaws, is one of the good ones. One of the scary ones.'
In the afterword of the novel Stephen King says this:
'Dracula was my first encounter with the epistolary novel as well as one of my earlier forays into adult fiction, and turned out to be comprised not just of letters but of diary entries, newspaper cuttings and Dr. Seward's exotic 'phonograph diary' kept on wax cylinders. And after the original strangeness of reading such a patchwork wore off I loved the form. There was a kind of justified snoopiness to it which exerted tremendous appeal. I loved the form, I loved the story too.'
'There were plenty of frightening sections- Jonathan Harker's growing realization that he has been imprisoned in the Count's castle, the bloody staking of Lucy Westenra in her tomb, the burning of Mina Murray Harker's forehead with the holy wafer- but what I responded to most strongly was the intrepid band of adventurers which takes off in blind, brave pursuit of Count Dracula, hounding him first out of England, then back to Europe, and finally to his native Transylvania, where the issue is resolved at sunset.'
'I reencounted Dracula in 1971, when I was teaching a high school English class called Fantasy and Science Fiction. I came back to it with some trepidation, knowing that a book read- not just read but studied even at a high school level- at twenty-four looks a lot different than one read at the age of nine or ten. Usually smaller. But the great ones only get bigger and cast longer shadows. Dracula although created by a man who never wrote much else of lasting worth in his life, is one of the great ones. My students enjoyed it and I'd say I enjoyed it even more than they did.
One night, the second time through the adventures of the sanguinary Count, I wondered out loud to my wife what might have happened if Drac had appeared not in turn-of- the century London but in the America of the 1970s. 'Probably he'd land in New York and be killed by a taxicab', I added, laughing'.
'My wife who had been responsible for all of my greatest success did not join my laughter. 'What if he came here, to Maine?' she asked. 'What if he came to the country? After all isn't that where his castle was? In the Transylvanian countryside?'
'That was really all it took. My mind lit up with possibilities some hilarious, some horrible. I saw how such a thing could operate with lethal ease in a small town; the locals would be very similar to the peasants he had known and ruled back home, and with the help of a couple of greedy kiwanis types like real estate agents, he would soon become what he had always been; the master.
I saw more, as well: how Stoker's aristocratic vampire might be combined with the fleshy leeches of the E.C. Comics, creating a pop-cult hybrid that was part nobility and part bloodthirsty dope, like the zombies of Romero 'Night of the Living Dead.' And in the post-Vietnam America, inhabited and still loved, I saw a metaphor for everything that was wrong with the society around me, where the rich got richer and the poor got welfare... if they were lucky.'
'I also wanted to tell a tale that inverted 'Dracula' in Stoker's novel, the optimism of Victorian England shines through everything like the newly invented electric light.
Ancient evil comes to the city and is sent scatting (not without a struggle, it is true) by thoroughly modern vampire hunters who use blood transfusions and stenography and typewriting machines. My novel could look through the other end of the telescope, at a world where electric lights and modern inventions would actually aid the incubus, by rendering belief in him, all but impossible.'
'My characters turned out to be stronger than I had expected. It took a certain amount of courage to allow them to grow toward each other as they wanted to do, but I found that courage. If I ever won a single battle as a novelist, that was probably it. Writers have found it so much easier to imagine doom in the years since World War 2 (and especially in the years since Vietnam), easier to imagine characters who grow smaller as a result of their trials rather than bigger. Ben Mears, I discovered wanted to be big. Wanted, in fact to be a hero. I let him be what he wanted to be. I have never been sorry.'
'Salem's Lot, I still like it well enough to number it among my favorites. I like the picture it draws of a small New England Town; I like its sense of deepening menace; I like its strong, intended echoes of Dracula and of the E.C. Comics.'
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