A Brief Guide to Stephen King by Paul Simpson Read Free Book Online Page A

now back in the Lot to write a book, perhaps about ‘the recurrent power of evil’, although he keeps his cards pretty close to his chest. He spends time with his old teacher, Matt Burke, and gets close to college graduate Susan Norton. And all the while, a plague of vampirism is spreading through the town, affecting the young and the old, caused by Barlow, a master vampire, and his partner, Richard Straker.
    After some persuasion, local doctor Jimmy Cody and alcoholic priest Father Callahan join Ben and young horror fan Mark Petrie in their fight against the vampires. Matt Burke suffers a heart attack; Susan is captured and turned into a vampire, and Mark manages to kill Straker. Father Callahan is caught by Barlow and forced to drink his blood, after his lack of sufficient faith means his crucifix is ineffective against the vampire; as a result he finds himself unable to enter his church and leaves the Lot. Cody is murdered, but Ben and Mark are able to kill Barlow afterhe moves from the Marsten house to the basement of the lodging-house where Ben has been staying. Ben and Mark go on the run, staying in Los Zapatas, Mexico for a time, but eventually return to Jerusalem’s Lot to burn the town to rid it of the now leaderless vampires.
    One of King’s personal favourites among his early novels,
’Salem’s Lot
rewrote the rules for the horror story, pitching the classic tropes into small-town America. It derived from a conversation with his wife in which they wondered what would happen if Dracula appeared in contemporary America. Although they considered that there was a good chance the lord of the vampires would be hit by a yellow cab in New York, King kept pondering the idea of Dracula arriving in a ‘sleepy little country town’. The story of ‘Second Coming’, as
’Salem’s Lot
was originally known, sprang from there.
    As well as Bram Stoker’s classic novel, which was one of the books that King taught at Hampden Academy,
’Salem’s Lot
incorporated a nightmare that King recalled suffering aged eight. The corpse of a hanged man was blowing in the wind, and King realized that it had his face, albeit pecked at by birds – and it then opened its eyes and looked at him, causing him to wake up screaming. Changing the name from Robert Burns (which was written on a placard around the corpse’s neck in his dream) to Hubie Marsten, King used the image for Ben Mears’ strong memory of events in the Marsten House.
    One element of the novel often overlooked is its reflection of the paranoia of the time. King was writing
’Salem’s Lot
in 1973, shortly after the revelations regarding President Nixon’s involvement in covering up the burglary at the Watergate hotel in Washington DC, and the web of corruption exposed by the courts, not just within the government, but in the security services. Talking about it in 1980, King commented that he believed ‘the unspeakableobscenity in
’Salem’s Lot
has to do with my own disillusionment and consequent fear for the future. In a way, it is more closely related to
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
than it is to
Dracula
. The fear behind
’Salem’s Lot
seems to be that the Government has invaded everybody.’
    There are strong links to other areas of King’s writing. One of his earliest short stories, ‘Jerusalem’s Lot’, told the tale of events in the town over a century previously; it was published in
Night Shift
in 1978. Father Callahan became a central figure in the later novels in the ‘Dark Tower’ saga, beginning with
Wolves of the Calla
, which also provides an indication of the fate of Ben Mears. According to
Doctor Sleep
, the True Knot pass by the town of Jerusalem’s Lot during their passage across America in the years following the events of the book.
    And, of course, this was the first of many stories by King centred upon a writer. Ben’s writing itself is perhaps not so relevant, but the combination of analysis and imagination that he applies to events