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�The town kept its secrets, and the Marsten House brooded over it like a ruined king.�

Stephen King is a master of weaving together the narrative of a community with the aesthetics of horror. It’s part of what makes him so truly frightening: his horrors lurk in every day realities and often the community at large is just as threatening as the monsters that infiltrate in secret. �We’d all be scared if we knew what was swept under the carpet of each other’s minds,� King writes in ’Salem’s Lot, and in this tale of good vs evil the ways the everyday folks of the town silently allow their neighbor’s traumas to brood and boil over onto each other becomes just as unsettling as the vampires drawn to the bad vibes. The watching eyes of a predator is just as eerie be it an undead monster or the judgemental gaze from a neighbors window.

It’s a perfect set-up of small town scaries that tap into the real fears of small towns quite literally dying out, a topic that fueled a lot of political discourse in rural areas in the last few decades of 20th century in the US. A factory would close or an industry would dry up and suddenly the infrastructure of a town would cave in on itself with no jobs and no future prospects. Kids would flee the moment they could to avoid being pulled under with it. So begins ’Salem’s Lot, with the flight from a small town in Maine seeming like another victim of a collapsed local economy on the surface, but with a darker secret bruising within. �The town knew about darkness,� King writes, �it knew about the darkness that comes on the land when rotation hides the land from the sun, and about the darkness of the human soul.� The bad behavoirs of the town, with the abusers, affairs, and general selfish fuckery have opened an opportunity for far worse predators to nestle in and take control.

Which brings us to the title and name of the town. Jerusalem's Lot. This may be a stretch but King does frequently play with biblical elements, and the shortened version, ‘Salem’s Lot sure feels adjacent to Sodom and Gomorrah as well as Lot from Genesis (one could also argue Salem where the witch trials occurred, seeing as a religiously tinged “purifying by fire� plays into the ending but more on that later). In reality, the town is based on Durham, Maine where King explored the real Marsten House (an abandoned home of the same name there) as a kid. But the story of Sodom and Gomorrah involves a town being destroyed because of—according to Isaiah and Jeremiah—greed, adultery, inhospitality, and lies. In Ezekial 16:49 it is written: �Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.� The larger context here is that Jerusalem is as bad, if not worse, than Sodom. I’ve had people also tell me the “real� reason is lack of remnant, basically failure of the church, which is sort of happening here as well though Father Callahan does some ass kicking later on. So here we are in Jerusalem's Lot, where pretty much everyone is lying, cheating, and inhospitable. Bam, vampire time. I do love a good vampire time (and as vampires are often written as some lusty folks, SO DO THEY).

This is a genuinely creepy novel that maintains a growing tension of terrors through it’s hefty length. King is an author that can thrill and chill in the moment of reading but, like the monsters lurking out of sight, the lingering terror always strikes from your mind later on when you realize how you too could have walked right into the frights that occur in his books. Like I wrote about for Pet Sematary, the scariest bits are dropped into normal, mundane reality. Each October I love to over indulge in horror novels. I love the genre, it really works for me, and I always think “why don’t I read more like this all year?� But then something will happen, my imagination will run wild and I’ll swear off horror novels until the wheel of seasons rolls around again. This year I didn’t really have that moment and was just blissfully downing scary stories, thrilled to keep going into November while reading this book along with Nataliya (read here excellent review here). I had to feed my neighbor’s cat last weekend, and their electronic door lock isn’t working so getting it to unlock and lock was a bit of a hassle. It was late in the evening as I was walking down into the darkness of their basement where the cat dish is when suddenly my mind decided to pelt the intrusive thought “don’t think about the Marsten House� at me like a brick. Well, fuck, now I’m hoping I don’t turn around for Marsten’s dead ass chasing after me down the stairs. I did my chore SO fast and as I’m trying to lock the door, which isn’t cooperating, the windy night is creating a draft that makes it feel like the door is trying to be pulled back open from the inside. �The basis of all human fears,� King says here, �a closed door, slightly ajar.� YUP. So you got me King, that was my memorable imagination-run-wild fright of 2022.

�Small towns have long memories and pass their horrors down ceremonially from generation to generation.�

I love the atmosphere of this novel. It’s a small town vibe that reminds me of the small towns in Michigan’s upper peninsula where I would spend my summers as a kid. The town itself is creepy and oppressive though. Everyone knows everyone else’s business (a bit too much), everyone is kind of a shit, and generational trauma is running rampant. It becomes sort of a question of were the people being shits the reason the town became evil or was the town being evil the reason the people are shits. Once the vampires get someone they sort of become the worst version of themselves, which is rather in keeping with the first vampire novel: The Vampyre by John William Polidori. In it, anyone who is drawn to the enigmatic vampire is met with ruin and becomes terrible versions of themselves on their descent. The vampire was based on Lord Byron and this whole road to ruin was pretty expected for anyone who decided to buddy themselves with him. There is a lot of standard vampire lore in this book that sort of lets the reader’s predisposition towards vampire knowledge fill in a lot of gaps, though the use of it is all a bit muddy.

It’s King’s early work and it shows. The writing is great but some of the book exists without much clarifications because, well, that’s just what makes the plot work. The crucifix is a key tool for fighting vampires because thats just how fighting vampires works. There is a lot of symbolism around the church, though Barlow does inform us �the Catholic Church is not the oldest of my opponents.� It just happens to be a tradition that is also an effective weapon against him. It is less that it is a tool from God, but, as Ben observes, �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.� It also opens the opportunity for some great moments with Mark getting vampire murdering down with a toy cross. King always does utilize childhood innocence in a great way, something that is very characteristic of a lot of his works. A very 'suffer the little children' vibe juxtaposed with the power of their innocence.

In the vibes of a small town dying out, there is a large theme about the part and reclaiming memory. Marsten House is largely a symbol for the trauma’s of Ben’s past that he has come to revisit. Why? He did it for literature (see also: profit—�tapping into the atmosphere…to write a book scary enough to make me a million dollars�) Ben wants to dig into his past and write a good book, but also because he wants to reclaim the magic of time now gone.

�What was he doing, coming back to a town where he had lives for four years as a boy, trying to recapture something that was irrevocably lost? What magic could he expect to recapture by walking roads that he had once walked as a boy and were probably asphalted and straightened and logged off and littered with tourist beer cans?�

This resonates with the ideas of dying towns and wanting to reclaim the past, or where people hold to a golden age nostalgia to resist change or progress. You can’t reclaim the past though, and memory is often much rosier than the reality. The house becomes the general base for the vampiric plot, but its also convenient to the plot because Ben can center all the evils into one idea: Marsten House. �If a fear cannot be articulated, it can’t be conquered,� King writes (I love this line, and have written frequently elsewhere about how naming a thing takes away its power or gives you power over it as seen in fairy tales) and there’s almost a metafictional aspect of articulating all the evil into Marsten House in a book about writing a book about evil. It’s King winking at us seeing if we catch the references to fairy tale theory more or less.

�Purification should count for something.�

Okay, we gotta talk about the ending. Or non-ending really. I mean, this book hits some HIGHS that are truly terrifying (those teeth, ahhhhh!) but, as is the complaint about King so common they spoofed on it in the new film remake of It, King often struggles to stick the landing. While I’m into the (view spoiler)[whole purify the land with fire motif going on to smoke out the vampires for one last great battle we don’t get to see (it can be assumed it isn’t wholly successful as in One From the Road in Night Shift the vampires are still preying. (hide spoiler)] On that note, Night Shift also contains the story Jerusalem’s Lot, written as an homage to H.P. Lovecraft and connects the town to the Cthulhu mythology (it was written before the novel but appeared in print after). But I would have been into the book abruptly ending when Ben says �I’ll be back� like he’s Vampire Terminator. Imagine him riding out of town on a motorcycle if you want. I’ve always been into King’s tongue-in-cheek warning going into the end of Dark Tower, and with many of his books you can probably quit and write your own final few pages and he’d be into that.

‘Salem’s Lot is a wild ride of frights and fun that is worth the hefty size of the narrative. It’s early King and a few parts read as clunky (Ben’s interactions with women are a bit awkward too) but it’s a well told story that is worth the price of admission. There's a lot to talk about here and I do really appreciate the efforts made here to make horror into a work of literature by having a lot of symbolism and references that give some good depth to it. So enter, if you dare.

3.75/5