Where No One Rests In Peace

I recently finished reading 'Salem's Lot by Stephen King. Shoutout to my dad for gifting me this book!

POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT

  Rating: 3.75/5 stars

"'Salem's Lot is a small New England town with white clapboard houses, tree-lined streets, and solid church steeples. That summer in 'Salem's Lot was a summer of home-coming and return; spring burned out and the land lying dry, crackling underfoot. Late that summer, Ben Mears returned to 'Salem's Lot hoping to cast out his own devils... and found instead a new unspeakable horror.

A stranger had also come to the Lot, a stranger with a secret as old as evil, a secret that would wreak irreparable harm on those he touched and in turn on those they loved.

All would be changed forever—Susan, whose love for Ben could not protect her; Father Callahan, the bad priest who put his eroded faith to one last test; and Mark, a young boy who sees his fantasy world become reality and ironically proves the best equipped to handle the relentless nightmare of 'Salem's Lot."

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 everyday 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 are just as eerie be it an undead monster or the judgemental gaze from a neighbor's 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 the 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 behavior of the town, with the abusers, affairs, and general selfish fuckery has 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. 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. So here we are in Jerusalem's Lot, where pretty much everyone is lying, cheating, and inhospitable. Bam, vampire time.

This is a genuinely creepy novel that maintains a growing tension of terrors through its 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. ‘The basis of all human fears,’ King says here, ‘a closed door, slightly ajar.’

I love the atmosphere of this novel. It’s a small-town vibe. The town itself is creepy and oppressive though. Everyone knows everyone else’s business (a bit too much), everyone is kind of 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.

It’s King’s early work and it shows. The writing is great but some of the book exists without much clarification because, well, that’s just what makes the plot work. The crucifix is a key tool for fighting vampires because that's just how fighting vampires works. There is a lot of symbolism around the church. 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 utilizes 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 of the traumas of Ben’s past that he has come to revisit. Why? He did it for literature. 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. This resonates with the ideas of dying towns and want 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 it's also convenient to the plot because Ben can center all the evils into one idea: Marsten House.

Okay, we gotta talk about the ending. Or non-ending really. I mean, this book hits some HIGHS that are truly terrifying but, as is the complaint, King often struggles to stick the landing. While I’m into the 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

‘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. So enter, if you dare.

Check out 'Salem's Lot, and discover what happens when you venture to a place where no one rests in peace.

Happy Reading :)