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’Salem’s Lot

Stephen King

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Nov 01, 2019 Werner rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: supernatural-fiction

Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot was published in 1975; Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire appeared in the following year, 1976. Very close to each other chronologically, the two novels both focus on vampires; and both were best-sellers, achieving pop-culture immortality and near universal recognition, at least in the U.S. (And TV/cinematic adaptations have spread their fame beyond the ranks of readers alone.) But they also stand, as it were, as two contrasting monuments to sharply divergent appr Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot was published in 1975; Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire appeared in the following year, 1976. Very close to each other chronologically, the two novels both focus on vampires; and both were best-sellers, achieving pop-culture immortality and near universal recognition, at least in the U.S. (And TV/cinematic adaptations have spread their fame beyond the ranks of readers alone.) But they also stand, as it were, as two contrasting monuments to sharply divergent approaches to vampire fiction.

Despite his embrace of modernity's lax standards of taste where bad language and sexual references are concerned, King's approach is very much in line with the classic horror tradition beginning in the 19th-century. His vampires are no longer "human" in any sense; when they become vampires, all personality, morality, and capacity for feelings like love and compassion vanish, to be replaced by a single-minded, malevolent blood thirst. They are no longer actual characters acting on a basis of will and decision; for all practical purposes, they could be mechanical automata. Rice's novel, on the other hand, was the first work of written fiction to treat vampires as being in some sense still persons continuous with the self they were before being turned --now subject to new conditions, imperatives and temptations, but still possessed of the same free will and moral capacities (though that doesn't guarantee moral behavior --that depends on the individual!) they always had. Rice's approach became the more influential on subsequent writers; and, other things being equal, is the one I personally prefer. Nonetheless, I like King's novel the better of the two, mainly because his (human) characters are more appealing, and because he creates a more compelling storyline.

Our main setting here is Jerusalem's ("Salem's, for short) Lot, Maine; the Prologue tells us it's mysteriously become a ghost town, and since virtually all readers will be aware that this is a vampire novel, it's not a spoiler, but an obvious inference, that this is due to vampire activity. IMO, this detracts somewhat from the suspense factor (and though the man and boy in the Prologue aren't named, they aren't hard to identify when they show up in the main body of the text) --though the book is actually extremely, and perhaps surprisingly, suspenseful as it is, with a number of scenes that will have most readers on the edge of their seats. The crafting of the tale leaves something to be desired, with several significant contradictions that took me out of the story. In keeping with traditional vampire portrayals such as Stoker's, King establishes early on the "etiquette of the vampire" --the Undead can't cross a threshold or windowsill without being invited in. But at other times in the book, they don't have to be. In much of the book, once a human bitten by a vampire dies from the loss of blood, he/she immediately rises as a murderous fledgling vampire at the instant of the next sunset --or immediately, if they die at night. This happens again and again. But one character died in the middle of the night, was buried days later, and rose only at the sunset after his burial. (He didn't leave the morgue, unlike other victims, and didn't give his embalmers any trouble.) One vampire victim is killed before the vampire actually shows up, and this chronological contradiction, to my mind, isn't adequately explained. Several times, characters make inconsistent decisions or do things out of character (some of which could be described by the familiar abbreviation TSTL, "too stupid to live"), which serve the direction in which King wants to take the story, but don't come across as things these people, in real life, would be likely to do. The sheer scale of vampire blood-drinking here, and the level of creation of new vampires, is highly implausible, and betrays a total ignorance of any kind of realistic ecological relationship between a predator species and its prey. Also, the romantic strand of the plot depends on an "insta-love" situation that I didn't find really credible, and didn't feel as a genuine connection.

Christian symbolism is inherent in the classical vampire mythos (though I personally think Rice's approach is actually more consistent with Christian conceptions of free will and moral responsibility, neither of which are particularly supported by the idea that a vampire bite inflicted against your will can undermine your whole moral and spiritual nature). Though King himself lost his faith in "organized religion" in high school --he did subsequently come to a belief in God as a result of his battle with alcohol and drug addictions in the late 80s, but that was well after writing this book-- he not only doesn't shy away from this here, but even ramps it up compared to Stoker and Le Fanu's treatments. His vampires and their minions are conscious servants of Satan, who sacrifice to him; the power of God is an actual reality that opposes them and can defeat them, and that makes them vulnerable to Christian objects like the cross, Communion wafers and holy water (though, again inconsistently, sometimes the power of these things depends on the faith of the person wielding them, and sometimes it doesn't). The religious theme is actually prominent in the novel, and from a Christian perspective the glass is half full. But it's also half empty; while some of his characters go to confession at one point to arm themselves against vampires, King doesn't communicate the idea behind confession --that forgiveness comes from actual repentance of sin and faith in Christ's sacrifice-- and his God doesn't come through as particularly forgiving.

Despite its negatives, the novel succeeds as well as it does because it tells a very gripping story about people the reader comes to care for and root for. (Like many of the author's novels, it's a doorstop-sized tome, at 653 pages in this edition; but it did not seem at any point to be overly long.) King's vampires represent metaphysical evil in its essence; the conflict in the novel is between good and evil, and the author's allegiance is genuinely with good. (While he faces up squarely to the idea of the enormous cost that standing for good might exact, I did not find his ultimate message to be one of existential despair.) Readers should be warned that there's a fair amount of use of the f-word and other bad language in the book, and some references to unmarried or adulterous sex (though no explicit sex). But overall, I still found it a worthwhile read. ...more

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