My Search for Scares: Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot

On finding the master of horror charmingly quaint.

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Awwww, Vampires!

Longtime readers know that I’m on an endless search to find ghost stories or horror novels that give me the heebie-jeebies.

I’m not talking about the horror I felt after reading the first paragraph of Lawrence Wright’s excellent 2013 nonfiction work Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief and realizing, “Jesus Christ, Scientology is everywhere and all-powerful.”

Real life delivers gut punches of horror. I’m talking about the kind of fear that makes goosebumps break out on your arms, and your imagination run wild in the dark.

I’ve pontificated on this before in previous posts, but to summarize for my new readers: I can think of a handful of written works that have made me feel this way:

• Edgar Allan Poe’s 1844 story “The Premature Burial”

• Henry James’s 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw

• Jeffrey Eugenides’s 1993 debut novel The Virgin Suicides

• a scene — but just a scene! — in Tananarive Due’s 2023 historical horror The Reformatory

There may be a few more I’ve forgotten, but those are the ones that stick with me.

Nowhere in this list, you’ll notice, is the master of modern horror, Stephen King.

Because, dear reader, with the exception of his 1994 short story “The Man in the Black Suit,” I’d never read the guy’s work.

Why not? Well, horror has never been my genre. When I want to be scared, I usually turn to old episodes of The Greatest Show Ever Made (OG Unsolved Mysteries hosted by Robert Stack) or YouTube channels where people read scary stories gleaned from Reddit or 4Chan (in Japan) aloud. Essentially, campfire stories.

Those tales have a leg up on fiction because they claim to be true. I’ve also found them more creepy in the telling than classic ghost stories from Victorian or Edwardian writers like M.R. James that I’ve also listened to as I fall asleep. Sometimes those can create enough of a creepy atmosphere…but never enough to make me feel even a heebie.

So, maybe it was worth giving King a try.

The challenge with reading a Stephen King book for the scares is finding a book that you don’t already know everything about. The Shining is one of my top five movies, so even though King’s books is very different, it’s out.

(I do recall picking up a copy once at the library and reading bits of the end. I recall being grossed out — but not scared! — by a sentence in which Jack Torrance strangles his wife so hard that her eyeballs go red with blood. They never show that in the movies. Of course, it might be a false memory. Can anyone who’s read The Shining confirm?)

The Stand? It? Christine? Misery? Carrie? Cujo? Pet Sematary? With the exception of the last two, I know exactly what happens. (I was wary of pet deaths distracting me from the horror in the final two.)

I also didn’t want to start The Dark Tower, because King’s individual books are long enough. I didn’t want to get bogged down by a series.

So, I went with his 1975 novel ‘Salem’s Lot, about a small town in Maine that gets overrun by vampires.

And reader, oh my gosh.

It. Was. ADORABLE.

Too Cute, Stephen!

I mostly mean that as a compliment, though it is probably not the adjective you want your readers to use if you write horror.

But there’s a beautiful innocence in this book that is far more interesting that vampires, and it comes from two main sources: King’s complex but deep love for small town America and his belief in fundamental forces of good and evil that make human villainy puny and sad in comparison.

The Force

I want to start with this first one. King released ‘Salem’s Lot while George Lucas was filming the first Star Wars movie, and I was struck quite a few times how similar the language was to Lucas’s concept of the Force.

King actually uses the word:

“The church is a Force…and one does not set a Force in motion lightly.”

It was Force; it was Power; it was whatever moved the greatest wheels of the universe.¹

One of the main characters is a Catholic priest, Father Callahan. He longs for an earlier time with less human, more supernatural Evil to fight:

He wanted to lead a division in the army of—who? God, right, goodness, they were names for the same thing—into battle against EVIL….He wanted this struggle to be pure, unhindered by the politics that rode the back of every social issue like a deformed Siamese twin…..

But there were no battles. There were only skirmishes of vague resolution. And EVIL did not wear one face but many, and all of them were vacuous and more often than not the chin was slicked with drool. In fact, he was being forced to the conclusion that there was not EVIL in the world at all but only evil—or perhaps (evil). At moments like this he suspected Hitler had been nothing but a harried bureaucrat and Satan himself a mental defective with a rudimentary sense of humor—the kind that finds feeding firecrackers wrapped in bread to seagulls unutterably funny.

The great social, moral, and spiritual battles of the ages boiled down to Sandy McDougall slamming her snot-nosed kid in the corner and the kid would grow up and slam his own kid in the corner, world without end, hallelujah, chunky peanut butter. Hail Mary, full of grace, help me win this stock-car race.²

Dear Father, where’s my Darth Vader? [cue lightsaber sounds]

Setting aside the uncomfortable use of disabled people — the “Siamese” twin, the “mental defective” — to signify bad things, this section is a rather adorable plea for a world clearly divided into GOOD and EVIL. Callahan, of course, gets what he wants when ‘Salem’s Lot is overrun by old-school vampires: people who bring no joy in the world and only take, people who achieve immortality by literally draining the blood from other people.

The irony is that Hitler was his own kind of vampire, as is any CEO of a company that overworks its employees into disability or even — as in Japan, where there’s a name for this (karoshi, 過労死) — to death.

But what Callahan wants is essentially a more simplistic EVIL, one where it’s clear the guy is the bad guy because of the fangs and the blood drinking and you actually have to kill him with a one-on-one confrontation like two middle schoolers getting into a skirmish on the playground.

In other words, what Callahan longs for here is the easy way out. It’s a hell of a lot harder to stop Sandy McDougall punching her baby, because that work doesn’t end with one confrontation. In ‘Salem’s Lot, you put the stake in the vampire’s heart, you kill the EVIL. With Sandy, you convince her not to hit the kid this one time — but what about all the other times where you’re not there, and she can’t get him to go to sleep and she hates being a mother, and she JUST WANTS HIM TO SHUT THE FUCK UP FOR A SECOND?! Victory, if it comes at all, pyrrhic: the only thing you’ve managed is to hope you’ve prevented further damage to a kid who has already learned that violence is the way of life and will need lots of convincing not to pay that forward.

Vampires aren’t just easy, they’re also not scary anymore. Hell, in the Twilight series, they’re the good guys. I believe some of this stems from our healthier (not healthy, but healthier) attitudes towards sex. When Bram Stoker wrote Dracula in 1897, sexual promiscuity wasn’t just frowned upon (in women). It literally spread syphilis everywhere in Victorian London, as middle- and upperclass men slept with impoverished, infected sex workers and brought the disease home, making their wives infertile and turning their brains to mush. Now, we lean into the erotic part with far fewer hang-ups than even 1970s America.

The Farm

It’s King’s ambivalent yet deep love for Norman Rockwellian small town America that is the heart of this book.

He’s not immune to its flaws — after all, it’s the place Big EVIL flourishes. Nearly every character in the town carries complex flaws: Sandy McDougall’s anger towards her child, the local real estate agent’s willingness to screw others over to make a buck, Father Callahan’s drinking problem, the town dump manager’s unhealthy obsession with a girl who turned him down….the list goes on.

I want to single out one huge, gorgeous paragraph that I’m suspect many readers breeze by to get to the vampires:

The land is granite-bodied and covered with a thin, easily ruptured skin of topsoil. Farming it is a thankless, sweaty, miserable, crazy business. The harrow turns up great chunks of the granite underlayer and breaks on them. In May you take out your truck as soon as the ground is dry enough to support it, and you and your boys fill it up with rocks perhaps a dozen times before harrowing and dump them in the great weed-choked pile where you have dumped them since 1955, when you first took this tiger by the balls. And when you have picked them until the dirt won’t come out from under your nails when you wash and your fingers feel huge and numb and oddly large-pored, you hitch your tractor and before you’ve broken two rows you bust one of the blades on a rock you missed. And putting on a new blade, getting your oldest boy to hold up the hitch so you can get at it, the first mosquito of the new season buzzes blood-thirstily past your ear with that eye-watering hum that always makes you think it’s the sound loonies must hear just before they kill all their kids or close their eyes on the Interstate and put the gas pedal to the floor or tighten their toe on the trigger of the .30-.30 they just jammed into their quackers; and then your boy’s sweat-slicked fingers slip and one of the other round harrow blades scrapes skin from your arm and looking around in that kind of despairing, heartless flicker of time, when it seems you could just give it all over and take up drinking or go down to the bank that holds your mortgage and declare bankruptcy, at that moment of hating the land and the soft suck of gravity that holds you to it, you also love it and understand how it knows darkness and has always known it. The land has got you, locked up solid got you, and the house, and the woman you fell in love with when you started high school (only she was a girl then, and you didn’t know for shit about girls except you got one and hung on to her and she wrote your name all over her book covers and first you broke her in and then she broke you in and then neither one of you had to worry about that mess anymore), and the kids have got you, the kids that were started in the creaky double bed with the splintered headboard. You and she made the kids after the darkness fell—six kids, or seven, or ten. The bank has you, and the car dealership, and the Sears store in Lewiston, and John Deere in Brunswick. But most of all the town has you because you know it the way you know the shape of your wife’s breast. You know who will be hanging around Crossen’s store in the daytime because Knapp Shoe laid him off and you know who is having woman trouble even before he knows it, the way Reggie Sawyer is having it, with that phone-company kid dipping his wick in Bonnie Sawyer’s barrel; you know where the roads go and where, on Friday afternoon, you and Hank and Nolly Gardener can go and part and drink a couple of six-packs or a couple of cases. You know how the ground lies and you know how to get through the Marshes in April without getting the tops of your boots wet. You know it all. And it knows you, how your crotch aches from the tractor saddle when the day’s harrowing is done and how the lump on your back was just a cyst and nothing to worry about like the doctor said at first it might be, and how your mind works over the bills that come in during the last week of the month. It sees through your lies, even the ones you tell yourself, like how you are going to take the wife and the kids to Disneyland next year or the year after that, like how you can afford the payments on a new color TV if you cut cordwood next fall, like how everything is going to come out all right. Being in the town is a daily act of utter intercourse, so complete that it makes what you and your wife do in the squeaky bed look like a handshake. Being in the town is prosaic, sensuous, alcoholic. And in the dark, the town is yours and you are the town’s and together you sleep like the dead, like the very stones in your north field. There is no life here but the slow death of days, and so when the evil falls on the town, its coming is almost preordained, sweet and morphic. It is almost as though the town knows the evil was coming and the shape it would take.³

It’s hard to tell if King finds the death of a town like this and the death of its people the triumph of EVIL over GOOD or vice versa.

‘Salem’s Lot strikes me as a love letter to the death of small town America that can’t quite tell if it should put “And good riddance” in a postscript. There’s a helpless guilt in loving this way of life — “I know I should quit you, but I just can’t.”

This, to me, is the heart of the book. It’s in this ambivalence that the interesting parts lie.

The vampires, if anything, make it boring.

Sara, 1. Scares, 0.

Any thoughts for what I should try next?

Hurricane Helene & Wildfires: Ways to Support Recovery

Help Catye Gowan Feed People with Dietary Needs! This chef has been out there on her own since the storm began cooking food designed for people with severe dietary issues like Celiac and dietary preferences like veganism. She’s a force for good, and every dollar helps!

Help the House of Black Cat Magic Save Black Cats! Our second cat, Mini Keeper-Moo, came from Binx’s Home for Black Cats, one of only a handful of black cat-specific rescues in the country. They opened up a gorgeous black cat lounge and magic shop last May, but since Hurricane Helene they’re struggling like every other business. They’ve only received $15,000 micro-grants since the storm to save their business — not a cent more. Please help them help black cats!

BeLoved Asheville. These folks are the best in the world — the ultimate model of mutual aid and greeting the world with love. Check out what they’ve been doing, and donate, here.

The Deep End of Hope in the Wake of Hurricane Helene: 40 Days and Nights of Survival and Transformation. A Ground Zero view of the storm’s devastation — and a community’s resilience — from a trauma chaplain who lived it.

L.A. Wildfires: Opportunities to Help

World Central Kitchen. They were unbelievable for us here after Helene. I don’t know the grassroots organizations running in LA right now — LA readers, feel free to share so I can include them! — but I can vouch for the amazing-ness of World Central Kitchen. A hot meal means everything in such difficult moments. I’ll add more links as I hear about places doing great work.

This Week’s Dose of K-Pop: ENHYPEN (엔하이픈), “Bad Desire (With or Without You)”

I’m bummed I’ve already shared Red Velvet’s “Peekaboo,” since it’s the best example in K-pop that I know of embracing horror tropes in a video. I’ve even used the most representative examples of ENHYPEN’s use of vampire lore!

But ENHYPEN did just release a new album, and the comeback single is all about loving someone you shouldn’t. In that sense, it’s perfect for King’s relationship to small town Maine. Which, as I’ve already said, is far more interesting that the dumb vampires.

Love y’all,

Sara

1. ‘Salem’s Lot, 622.

2. Idem, 239-40.

3. Idem, 321-24.