Salem’s Lot

The classic horror novel Salem’s Lot, by Stephen King, was written in the 1970s,  but is still popular and still a good suspense story today. Readers can still be drawn into this small town, with both charming local characters and ominous signs, and anything that’s a bit dated in the book works well for the sense of isolation in the tiny town.

Stephen King creates that classic sense of dread and tension throughout the novel, partly from that small-town isolation in the small Maine town of Salem’s Lot.  The novel, like some of King’s other works, considers this idea that quaint and quiet towns can hold terrible dark secrets just beneath the surface.  From the first time we see the town of Salem’s Lot, it’s both New England charming and very creepy. The creepiness focuses on the Marsden House, but the book shows us dark thoughts below the surface around town, too. Like in The Institute, King shows realistically evil people in the story, too, like a school bus driver who torments the students on his route. I thought this showed the evil under the Marsden House adding to the dark side of human nature and then kind of feeding off these evil actions, and it also worked to ground the supernatural evil in everyday misdeeds.

The protagonist, Ben Mears, is a novelist who returns to Salem’s Lot where he once stayed with his Aunt Cindy when he was growing up. As boy, he was dared to enter the creepy Marsden House and pick up a souvenir to prove he entered , and the memory has stayed with him. Now, he wants to write a (creepy, Maine, Stephen King-ish horror) novel.

The Marsden House has a deeply creepy history, with a murderous recluse who killed his wife and himself in the house, and set a trap intending to kill anyone else who entered. (Oh, and the recluse has been supporting himself and his evil deals with regular checks from Fall River, of course!) Then the house stood empty for year, naturally, because no one wanted to live in a place like that, but when the story begins, a strange new resident has taken possession of the house. There’s such a good mix of realistic and supernatural here.

Salem’s Lot has an unusual take on the supernatural suspense story, because there’s not much time devoted to whether or not the haunting is real. English teacher Matt Burke picks up on it pretty quickly, Ben doesn’t doubt what he sees, even the doctor and priest are convinced pretty quickly. Poor Susan spends a lot longer looking for proof and doubting, but the overall question is less about whether the haunting is really happening, and more about how to handle the haunting. I liked this a lot, because we don’t waste time waiting for characters to catch on, which makes for more likable characters and a fast-moving plot.

I read Salem’s Lot before, ages ago, and my main memory was about the haunted house as the site of so much evil. This time, I particularly liked the character of high-school teacher Matt Burke. I often find that teachers in fiction are either inspiring and beloved leaders or cruel classroom tyrants. Matt Burke is a guy doing a job with dedication and some quiet satisfaction, but no grandiose ideas about his career.

He had ranged across the length and breadth of the English language like a solitary and oddly complacent Ancient Mariner: Steinbeck period one, Chaucer period two, the topic sentence period three, and the function of the gerund just before lunch.

and also

Children did not revere or love him; he was not a Mr. Chips languishing away in a rustic corner of America and waiting for Ross Hunter to discover him, but many of his students did come to respect him, and a few learned from him that dedication, however eccentric or humble, can be a noteworthy thing. He liked his work.

Recently, I’ve been realizing that I’m not a deeply inspiring teacher, not a genius academic or ground-breaking researcher, just a solid classroom instructor,  so I particularly liked a character who was also just a solid classroom instructor, and contented to be so. His careful, methodical research from his hospital bed isn’t as flashy as the vampire-staking parts, but he saves the world too. Not really a horror vibe, just something I personally enjoyed.

For a novel with an incredibly high body count, it’s not gory. The focus is on the deaths happening in an isolated town, and the implication that this been happening just out of sight for all of Bartlow’s long history. The book’s a little gross (STAKING VAMPIRES EEEEEW) but it’s about suspense and shadows, not guts. A lot of the tension comes from the idea that evil gains power at night, and the safe, reliable world fades in  the dark. Sometimes this is explicit, with characters racing to accomplish their tasks before sunset, and sometimes it’s just implied.  Overall, even with a solid conclusion, the book suggests that real evil never truly dies, but lies dormant waiting for its next opportunity, and that real darkness isn’t just the supernatural part — although that’s scary and well-written too — but the large and small cruelties in daily life. Salem’s Lot is a horror classic because of that unique King blend of ordinary and deeply creepy.