God told his son, “It’s time to come home
I promise you won’t have to die all alone
I need you to pay for the sins I create”
His son said, “I will, but Dad, I’m afraid”

-“Here’s Your Future,” The Thermals

The Holy Ghost

I complained in my initial post on the Lot that pure good versus pure evil doesn’t, in theory, make for morally complex or interesting narratives, but this would also seem to be something that, in large part, is integral to one of the pillars of the Lot‘s source material–Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Dracula is, technically, a purely evil monster.

Yet King’s analysis of Dracula in his intro to the Lot actually points out that Stoker’s narrative is more complex than good v. evil when he describes it as a “novel of old horrors colliding with modern technology and investigative techniques.” Stoker’s characters aren’t just good in a moral sense; they’re more technologically sophisticated, and the story of their triumph is the story of the triumph of modern civilization (and perhaps an argument that technological progress is inherently moral?). Perhaps these themes are ultimately why King considers Dracula to be “the first fully satisfying adult novel I ever read,” but I’d argue that his version of the vampire narrative has strayed from some of the complications that make the source material so satisfying. Technological sophistication does not especially characterize our band of good ole boys in the Lot, who are instead defined mainly by blind, stupid, and ultimately rewarded bravery.

‘Salem’s Lot‘s treatment of religion is also derived to an extent from Dracula–but King seems to surpass Stoker’s presentation of it as an unmitigated force for good in the face of unadulterated evil. The trail of literal bread crumbs to the saving power of Catholicism that Stoker leaves are definitely present, but at least somewhat more subtle. Stoker’s first crumb appears thus:

As to Van Helsing, he was employed in a definite way. First he took from his bag a mass of what looked like thin, wafer-like biscuit, which was carefully rolled up in a white napkin; next he took out a double-handful of some whitish stuff, like dough or putty. He crumbled the wafer up fine and worked it into the mass between his hands. This he then took, and rolling it into thin strips, began to lay them into the crevices between the door and its setting in the tomb. I was somewhat puzzled at this, and being close, asked him what it was that he was doing. Arthur and Quincey drew near also, as they too were curious. He answered:—

“I am closing the tomb, so that the Un-Dead may not enter.”

“And is that stuff you have put there going to do it?” asked Quincey. “Great Scott! Is this a game?”

“It is.”

“What is that which you are using?” This time the question was by Arthur. Van Helsing reverently lifted his hat as he answered:—

“The Host. I brought it from Amsterdam. I have an Indulgence.” It was an answer that appalled the most sceptical of us, and we felt individually that in the presence of such earnest purpose as the Professor’s, a purpose which could thus use the to him most sacred of things, it was impossible to distrust.

We will go on to see that the Host of the Catholic Eucharist does indeed seem to be an impediment to the Undead’s mobility; they will plant pieces of the Host in the different boxes of dirt they know Count Dracula bought so that he’ll no longer be able to use them. The Host will also reveal when one of their own have been turned:

As he had placed the Wafer on Mina’s forehead, it had seared it—had burned into the flesh as though it had been a piece of white-hot metal.

And, in the novel’s exciting penultimate battle:

The expression of the Count’s face was so hellish, that for a moment I feared for Harker, though I saw him throw the terrible knife aloft again for another stroke. Instinctively I moved forward with a protective impulse, holding the Crucifix and Wafer in my left hand. I felt a mighty power fly along my arm; and it was without surprise that I saw the monster cower back before a similar movement made spontaneously by each one of us.

So yes, Catholics and their Hosts and Crucifixes are very powerful and venerated in Dracula, though, interestingly, the word “Catholic” never actually appears in the text of Dracula, while it appears in the text of the Lot twenty-five times. In updating this narrative for 1970s small-town America, I might have expected the idea of the legitimate, literal power of religion (rather than, say, its psychological power) to be downplayed rather than played up, but King went for the latter. There’s the blue light released by Callahan’s crucifix like he’s got some kind of superpower, a marked amplification of the colorless power flying along Dr. Seward’s arm in the passage above. There’s the sacramental confession Callahan makes them undergo as a means to purify themselves for their confrontation with Barlow. There’s also the rather extended sequence of Danny Glick’s funeral:

“With faith in Jesus Christ, we reverently bring the body of this child to be buried in its human imperfection. Let us pray with confidence to God, who gives life to all things, that he will raise up this mortal body to the perfection and company of saints.”

He turned the pages of his missal. A woman in the third row of the loose horseshoe grouped around the grave had begun to sob hoarsely. A bird chirruped somewhere back in the woods.

“Let us pray for our brother Daniel Glick to our Lord Jesus Christ,” Father Callahan said, “who told us: ‘I am the resurrection and the life. The man who believes in me will live even though he dies, and every living person who puts his faith in me will never suffer eternal death.’ Lord, you wept at the death of Lazarus, your friend: comfort us in our sorrow. We ask this in faith.”

“Lord, hear our prayer,” the Catholics answered.

“You raised the dead to life; give our brother Daniel eternal life. We ask this in faith.”

“Lord, hear our prayer,” they answered. Something seemed to be dawning in Tony Glick’s eyes; a revelation, perhaps.

“Our brother Daniel was washed clean in baptism; give him fellowship with all your saints. We ask this in faith.”

“Lord, hear our prayer.”

“He was nourished with your body and blood; grant him a place at the table in your heavenly kingdom. We ask this in faith.”

“Lord, hear our prayer.”

Marjorie Glick had begun to rock back and forth, moaning.

“Comfort us in our sorrow at the death of our brother; let our faith be our consolation and eternal life our hope. We ask this in faith.”

“Lord, hear our prayer.”

He closed his missal. “Let us pray as our Lord taught us,” he said quietly. “Our Father who art in heaven—”

“No!” Tony Glick screamed, and propelled himself forward. “You ain’t gonna throw no dirt on my boy!”

When Tony then disrupts the service by tumbling down onto his son’s coffin, one might interpret it as a representation of how spouting these ritualistic Catholic prayers is an utterly inadequate salve for these parents’ grief. And yet the prayers themselves are depicted in such detail that it still almost seems like Catholic propaganda, especially in the context of Father Callahan’s character (whose arc seems to show that it’s not the religion itself that’s inadequate, but rather humanity’s frail capacity for faith in it), as well as the rest of the depictions of the literally saving power of Catholic iconography.

Which brings us to an interesting aspect of Catholicism in general: its more literal interpretation of what other religions treat as symbolism via the sacrament of Communion: bread (the Wafer/Host) and wine are “transubstantiated” into Jesus Christ’s body and blood. Official Catholic doctrine holds that after transubstantiation, the bread and wine have actually become Jesus’s body and blood, while my understanding is that other Christian denominations (Episcopalian, Lutheran, Presbyterian and the like) maintain that the bread and wine are merely symbols of Jesus’s body and blood. This distinction is where there seems to be the most potential for commentary via the vampiric narrative: the vampire literally drinks blood, as Catholics believe themselves to be doing during what constitutes one of their most sacred sacraments (a sacrament that demands suspension of belief in the physical senses). So it’s almost like the Catholics are using the vampire narrative as a means to figure themselves in the exact opposite role of what they really are to distract from their true nature, in a spin move reminiscent to me at the moment of (Trumpian) politics–accuse someone else of doing what you yourself have done to get the heat off you. But Stoker, who was Irish, was raised Protestant, according to his Wikipedia page; I’ll leave analyzing how this influenced his depiction of Catholicism to a Stoker scholar.

At any rate, Stoker’s Dracula seems to touch on this idea of the Catholics being the real vampires via the character of the insane-asylum resident Renfield, who’s made a habit of eating flies and spiders:

“Why, I myself am an instance of a man who had a strange belief. … I used to fancy that life was a positive and perpetual entity, and that by consuming a multitude of live things, no matter how low in the scale of creation, one might indefinitely prolong life. At times I held the belief so strongly that I actually tried to take human life. The doctor here will bear me out that on one occasion I tried to kill him for the purpose of strengthening my vital powers by the assimilation with my own body of his life through the medium of his blood—relying, of course, upon the Scriptural phrase, ‘For the blood is the life.’”

Here Renfield essentially reminds us that this biblical phrase Jesus uttered is the precedent for the Catholic sacrament and literal interpretation of the Eucharist–the way Renfield phrases it calls attention to the fact that this is actually what Catholics believe they are doing every week at Mass: drinking blood. This then potentially figures Catholics as monstrous, because they are doing what Count Dracula is doing. But then the Wafer that is representative of literal flesh-eating being successfully deployed against the overtly monstrous blood-drinking figure seems to figure Catholics as heroic… This apparent contradiction is part of what makes Stoker’s treatment of religion ultimately less problematically valorizing than King’s.

Of course, the treatment of religion in Dracula is a complicated subject that academic literary scholars have had time to write quite a bit about. A relatively recent (2018) article by Stephen Purcell in the literary journal Christianity & Literature, cleverly titled “Not Wholly Communion,” has an interesting take that reverses what would seem to be a traditional interpretation of the novel’s treatment of Catholicism:

A recurring theme in Dracula criticism is the assumption that, because Stoker’s protagonists rely on Catholic sacraments and symbols, they represent Catholicism, High Church Protestantism, or a perverse variation thereof. The protagonists’ adoption of Catholic sacramentality, however, lacks any accompanying moral or epistemological shift—Stoker’s protagonists never adopt Christian morality, nor do they transition from skepticism to faith. Rather, the protagonists instrumentalize Catholic sacramental objects, making them tools with which to exterminate vampires and to justify the hatred that underpins that task. The protagonists’ relationship to the Communion wafer encapsulates their disregard for theology and their willingness to manipulate sacrament.

“Not Wholly Communion: Skepticism and the Instrumentalization of Religion in Stoker’s Dracula” by Stephen Purcell, Christianity & Literature 2018, Vol. 67(2) 294–311.

This interpretation that the characters in Dracula are using religious iconography as weapons in the service of vengeance/hatred would seem to show that it’s human frailty that’s the problem rather than the religion or theology itself. ‘Salem’s Lot plays this idea out to a more extreme degree via the amplified Catholic aspects I’ve already mentioned, particularly Father Callahan’s arc seeming to reinforce that the problem is ultimately with the believer, not the belief. All of which seems to enact a version of the biblical original sin narrative–it’s the weakness of humans, not the framework they exist in, that’s figured as the problem.

But shouldn’t that weakness still be a reflection of their Creator?

Father and Son

If the Creator fucked up and created a faulty creation capable of sinning at the beginning of the Bible’s Old Testament, then this is essentially plot point one, the initiating incident of the Bible’s rising action, which then, for Christians, leads to a narrative climax in the New Testament of the Creator’s Son dying on a cross to save humans from their sins (saving them both proactively and retroactively, apparently). What’s potentially most relevant about this narrative framing for this discussion is that a father-son relationship is more or less central to Christianity. (The whole virginal mother thing affecting conceptions (so to speak) and treatment of women is a whole other issue…)

Which brings us to ‘Salem’s Lot‘s opening line:

Almost everyone thought the man and the boy were father and son.

This pseudo nature of the father-and-son relationship invoked in the novel’s opening could be read through a religious lens: the father-son relationship that’s central to Christianity (and the trinity) is not a traditionally biological one. The biblical narrative is: the son pays for the father’s sins. If Mark’s and Ben’s relationship is figured as parental in this manner, Mark would somehow be paying for Ben’s sins, which seems to potentially be referenced when Ben keeps begging Mark to go first into the boarding house where they know Barlow is with him, then to go back to ‘Salem’s Lot with him in the prologue. (The idea of the child paying for the parent’s sins doesn’t really seem to play out in the level of depth that it will in The Shining, though that explores biological parental relationships.)

The first chapter in the first academic text on King’s work that I checked out from the University of Houston library–Stephen King: The First Decade, Carrie to Pet Sematary by Joseph Reino (1988)–is about representations of father-son relationships in King’s earliest published novels, and I was surprised at how directly the author was reading these relationships through the lens of King’s personal biography. I guess I’ve forgotten a fair amount since the academic literature classes I had to take for my master’s degree. I do recall the general literary cage match between critics who want to probe the author’s life to gain further insight into the text, and the New Critics who think the text should stand on its own, independently of the author’s personal life–Roland Barthes’ “Death of the Author” and all that. Personally, I think it’s kind of dumb to try to study the text independently of the author, because the text does not exist in a vacuum. ‘Salem’s Lot itself represents that in the figure of novelist Ben Mears, returned to the Lot to try to exorcise his demons by writing them away. Whether his destroying his manuscript by novel’s end signifies a failure to do so is arguable, especially in light of his succeeding in killing the head vampire, further complicated by the ambiguity of whether he successfully kills off the rest of the vampires. (Perhaps significantly, King actually returns to the Lot in a later short story, showing the vampires have in fact not been killed off.)

Anyway, this father-son analysis chapter, “Cinderella Hero/Cinderella Heroine,” notes a critical King biographical detail: his father walked out on the family when Steve was only two, left to go get cigarettes and never came back–that old cliché. Not only that, young Steve later made a startling and formative discovery in the attic:

…young Steve found a “treasure trove” of his father’s old Avon paperbacks of horror stories and weird fiction, as well as–most surprising of all–discarded manuscripts of horror stories that Donald King had unsuccessfully attempted to publish.

Stephen King: The First Decade, Carrie to Pet Sematary by Joseph Reino (1988) p. 2

In this context, Reino invokes the opening line of ‘Salem’s Lot:

Almost everyone thought the man and the boy were father and son.

Reino notes this as one of the pieces of evidence of a “‘lost-father motif'” in King’s work:

the theme of a father lost and strangely regained was to be one of the identifying hallmarks of King’s fiction.

Stephen King: The First Decade, Carrie to Pet Sematary by Joseph Reino (1988) p. 3

Reino notes King noting in Danse Macabre that the image of the hanging corpse opening his eyes came from a dream he had when he was eight years old, then offers an interesting reading of some lines that had not occurred to me in Ben’s being required to have: “‘at least three references’ (a phrase with not-too-subtle genital implications)” (p. 6) to attain membership in the boys’ club that was the reason he went into the Marsten House as a child in the first place. (Arguably there’s more of a father-son relationship between Ben and his inner child than there is between Ben and Mark….)

I was not aware that the term “reference” had “genital implications,” but even without this implication, it makes sense that because one of Ben’s “references” becomes the snow globe that he takes from the Marsten House as proof of having gone in (or penetrated it), the snow globe then becomes a symbol of his masculinity. Thus the snow globe’s fate becomes significant:

Ben tosses the glass paperweight onto the floor where his proof of masculinity shatters into a thousand pieces. Then, … King points out that novelist Ben Mears, perhaps out of an unconscious fear of having to face some unbearable realities, runs away without waiting to see what might have “leak[ed] out” of the broken snow globe.

Stephen King: The First Decade, Carrie to Pet Sematary by Joseph Reino (1988) p. 6

Reino seems to be implying that King’s work is unconsciously reflecting that he as a writer is unwilling to face the reality that his written work reflects him personally facing (or not facing) his own “unbearable realities,” and as such it almost seems like Reino is calling King’s masculinity into question, with masculinity now implicitly being defined by an ability to face “unbearable realities.”

The bravery King attributes to Ben in his intro–which, interestingly according to Reino’s reading, Ben is patently not exhibiting in the moment he breaks the snow globe–could certainly be read as a coded form of masculinity: brave = masculine. The bravery King invokes applies to an external enemy: Ben v. Barlow, whom Ben defeats. The lack of bravery exhibited by Ben’s inability to stick around and see what leaked out of the snow globe applies to an internal enemy: Ben v. himself. But this latter battle doesn’t play out in all that satisfying of a way, certainly not via any apparent conscious crafting on King’s part (not like it will in The Shining).

The way Ben’s character reflects unconscious ideas about masculinity on the part of the author is more interesting than the conscious ideas Ben conveys in being man enough to take on the vampire who’s been around since Catholics “hid in the catacombs of Rome and painted fishes on their chests so they could tell one from another.” Mark conveys similarly boring ideas about masculinity in the first scene he appears in, in which he bests a notorious bully not just physically, but psychologically. These are the characteristics of the masculine hero, perhaps an evolutionary rung above John Wayne in dominating not just with brute force (though Mark does use force with the bully and in killing Straker with a bed leg), but with cleverness. Even though these characteristics are also shared by the vampires–the cleverness in particular demonstrated by the knife trap they set for Jimmy Cody–there doesn’t seem to be any significant intimation or acknowledgment that this sinking to the enemies’ level would in any way mar the protagonists’ masculine integrity–on the contrary.

It also seems worth noting that Mark’s cleverness is linked to his love of pop culture in a couple of instances: his fascination with pop culture monsters leads him to have a plastic cross from a mock graveyard he uses to ward off a vampire, and his having read a Houdini biography leads him to be able to escape being tied up and kill Straker. This almost seems like King figuring pop culture as offering a saving power potentially equivalent to religion, and the toy cross in particular seems an embodiment of this overlap.

A chapter that explores the figure of the vampire in the book Teaching Stephen King: Horror, the Supernatural, and New Approaches to Literature, reiterates Jerome Cohen’s idea about monster theory:

Our monsters are not just fictional bogeys that go bump in the night, but rather the symbolic manifestation of the cultural moment’s deepest fears and anxieties.

Teaching Stephen King: Horror, the Supernatural, and New Approaches to Literature by Alissa Burger (2016), p. 11

The vampire and the way it steadily takes over the Lot is actually a fitting monster for the fears of the current cultural moment of the coronavirus (more on this coming, to be sure). This slow takeover constitutes a version of an epidemic, where people might still look like some version of themselves but have become “unclean” and highly contagious, and by the end, everyone who’s left is hiding behind closed doors, afraid to interact with anyone.

But that’s relatively far in the future for this 2016 chapter, which goes on to note that in the Lot, “many of the tried and true vampire defenses falter and fail” (p. 16), meaning King is playing with rather than remaining fully loyal to the tropes. It’s interesting to note what aspects influenced the changes he made. One divergence from Stoker’s version is that there’s no intimation that the vampire figure can control rats, as there is in a memorable scene in Dracula in which rats overrun a chapel (imagery that would seem to support Stephen Purcell’s thesis about the novel’s depiction of religion). The King biography Haunted Heart (2009) by Lisa Rogak specifically notes why a nod to this aspect was removed:

[Bill Thompson] also asked Steve to rewrite one of the scenes where Jimmy Cody, the local doctor, is eaten alive by a horde of rats. “I had them swarming all over him like a writhing, furry carpet, biting and chewing, and when he tries to scream a warning to his companion upstairs, one of them scurries into his open mouth and squirms as it gnaws out his tongue,” Steve said. “I loved the scene, but Bill made it clear that no way would Doubleday publish something like that, and I came around eventually and impaled poor Jimmy on knives. But, shit, that just wasn’t the same.”

Rogak, Lisa. Haunted Heart (p. 76). St. Martin’s Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

This is interesting both in light of how it shifted King’s use of the vampire trope, and how it reflects shifting standards in the publishing industry. The rat death reminds me of probably what still remains the most disgusting thing I’ve ever read, a passage from Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) involving a rat and a woman, which I will not go into any more detail about here other than to say what publishers were willing to publish changed dramatically in the almost two decades intervening.

Returning to our current coronavirus moment, the potentially fundamental shift in physical human interactions this moment might constitute reminds me of a hypothesis from historian Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens:

Thanks to advances in computing, cyborg engineering, and biological engineering, “we may be fast approaching a new singularity, when all the concepts that give meaning to our world—me, you, men, women, love and hate—will become irrelevant.”

From here.

That’s a lot to process, and probably before the coronavirus a lot of people (myself included) couldn’t even begin to wrap their minds around such fundamental shifts in civilization. I still can’t (or maybe just don’t want to), but I’ll try to start by just biting off just one of these concepts–love.

Alissa Burger notes that one distinction between Dracula and ‘Salem’s Lot is that the group fighting the vampire figure successfully coheres in the former while it fails to in the latter–the group is always physically split in the Lot, never all in the same location at once. (Burger also notes that a critical element of the group’s coherence is Mina stringing together the members’ different epistolary accounts into a coherent narrative that helps them figure out how to defeat Dracula, making the epistolary nature of the Stoker’s novel more directly relevant to the plot than King makes it in either Carrie or the Lot.) The core of this group ends up coming down to our figurative father and son, Ben and Mark.

Before the group is whittled down to two, Ben is already interested in the concept of love as it applies to the vampire:

“Folklore says they can’t be seen in mirrors, that they can transform themselves into bats or wolves or birds—the so-called psychopompos—that they can narrow their bodies and slip through the tiniest cracks. Yet we know they see, and hear, and speak…and they most certainly taste. Perhaps they also know discomfort, pain—”

“And love?” Ben asked, looking straight ahead.

“No,” Jimmy answered. “I suspect that love is beyond them.”

The directness with which the topic of love is addressed almost seems a response to Stoker’s depiction of Count Dracula when one of his vampire subjects seems to accuse him of the same thing:

“You yourself never loved; you never love!” On this the other women joined, and such a mirthless, hard, soulless laughter rang through the room that it almost made me faint to hear; it seemed like the pleasure of fiends. Then the Count turned, after looking at my face attentively, and said in a soft whisper:—

“Yes, I too can love; you yourselves can tell it from the past. Is it not so? Well, now I promise you that when I am done with him you shall kiss him at your will. Now go!”

I guess King is not taking Dracula at his word here, probably based on Stoker not really seeming to do any more development of this aspect of the Count’s character. And being a Romantic, as King is basically in the (writing) process of figuring out here as his unconscious leads him to let the good guys (almost) win, King seems to want to reinforce the power of real love as an antidote to such evil. In the prologue, we’re supposed to understand there’s some powerful element at work influencing the man and boy’s relationship, that they’ve gone through something extreme together, as the man asks the boy to go back to the site of trauma:

“Can you come with me?” the man asked.

“Do you love me?”

“Yes. God, yes.”

The boy began to weep, and the tall man held him.

The invocation of God by the man here seems an attempt to link this love to religion and thus reinforce it as platonic, which introduces an interesting (or perhaps a more appropriate word would be disturbing) undercurrent in the novel’s treatment of Catholicism–the subtext of priests and pedophelia, since this scene comes immediately on the heels of the scene where Ben talks to a priest about the confession Mark made in anticipation of joining the priesthood himself.

That Mark, one of our pair of masculine heroes, is joining the priesthood would seem to patently mark it as a force for good rather than evil. That the priest who hears his confession is named “Gracon,” very reminiscent of “garçon,” French for “boy,” strikes me as a little weird. According to Wikipedia, the scandal of sexual abuse in the Catholic church doesn’t really seem to have permeated mainstream cultural awareness until the late 80s, so it seems unlikely King would have had anything about it in mind, especially since most of the priest relations on the surface seem more or less positive–Father Callahan’s faith may fail him, but I never caught any intimation he was a pedophile. The only single nod to the possibility is when Callahan contacts Mark’s parents:

Mr and Mrs Petrie eat sandwiches in their kitchen, trying to puzzle out the call they have just received, a call from the local Catholic priest, Father Callahan: Your son is with me. He’s fine. I will have him home shortly. Good-by. They have debated calling the local lawman, Parkins Gillespie, and have decided to wait a bit longer.

The possibility of a priestly threat is intimated here, but never comes up again. Obviously you could write a very different vampire novel involving boys and priests in the Catholic church… This novel seems to be consciously/directly figuring belief in religion as an antidote to evil, but in showing its masculine heroes sinking to the evil/enemy’s level in sharing similar traits and strategies in attempting to overcome each other, it unconsciously/indirectly anticipates the evil the Catholic church harbors beneath its surface.

King bookends the narrative with the love theme when he follows up the exchange between the man and boy in the prologue with this exchange right after Ben chops up the coffin containing Barlow in the moments before their climactic confrontation:

He dealt it a final blow and slung the ax away. He held his hands up before his eyes. They blazed.

He held them out to Mark, and the boy flinched.

“I love you,” Ben said.

They clasped hands.

The awkward and undeveloped way Ben and Mark’s relationship is supposed to figure love almost seems like an unconscious expression of the awkward and undeveloped expression of love between the father and son central to Christianity, with the son having to sacrifice his own body and blood for the father’s shortcomings (officially humanity’s, unacknowledged as a form of the father’s shortcomings) and then having to have that sacrifice re-enacted in what’s effectively an unacknowledged form/manifestation of cannibalism and vampirism that would in other contexts be construed as monstrous….

Lately I’ve been wondering about the power of religion as a salve in these trying times. I’m starting to see vampires everywhere. Alissa Burger quotes critic John Sears in Stephen King’s Gothic (2011) saying ‘Salem’s Lot is all about failure:

“King’s version of the vampire in this novel expresses the negative, pessimistic fulfillment of this myth. ‘Salem’s Lot is a novel of failure and despair, the failure of belief and faith…the failure of Fathers to rule and of heterosexual love to redeem and, in its representation of the undead and their uncanny, persistent afterlives, a novel of the failure of endings” (Sears 18).

Teaching Stephen King: Horror, the Supernatural, and New Approaches to Literature by Alissa Burger (2016), p. 17

In this passage Sears seems to unintentionally call attention to an implicit contradiction in a vampire narrative valorizing the Catholic religion: the afterlife is an originally religious construction that the vampire narrative co-opted to fundamentally shift–reverse–the connotation of the afterlife and immortality. Perhaps living forever as a vampire is a version of the Christian conception of Hell, but there’s no positive counterpart to that fate to match Heaven. Jesus had to die to pay for mankind’s sins (or his father’s mistakes…), but then he rose from the dead in what strikes me now as a very vampiric arc. In this reading, the vampire figure is a co-opted Christ, a metaphor for how the Christ figure, and via him religion, became an oppressive/repressive vampiric force…

So is all this Catholic iconography really valorizing Catholicism, or implicitly pointing out its vampiric aspects? I could buy the latter is the case in Dracula, but I don’t think as strong a case could be made that the commentary is that sophisticated in the Lot, at least on any intentional level. I do think the figure of Callahan becomes increasingly fascinating in the light of what would later be revealed about the Catholic church’s sexual abuse scandals and the thematic question the Lot raises about the fallibility of faith/humans versus the fallibility of religion/the Catholic church as an institution. Callahan’s faith, or lack thereof, is specifically the problem, as reinforced when he tries to get back into the church after Barlow makes him drink blood and he’s blown back from the door, crying “Unclean!” The symbolic lack of cleanliness here is that lack of faith, which bars the doors of the church to you; here the man as figured as fallible, not the church. Similarly, one could argue it’s the individual priests and who are at fault for their abuse, not the church, but then of course the church covered it all up for decades, so that involves them a bit, and then there’s also the scale–the institution of the priesthood would seem to either attract predators or create them or both, and or systemize a sexual repression that has a tendency to then manifest in problematic, monstrous ways….

John Sears calls attention to the ambiguity of the ending in not showing whether the fire Ben sets actually succeeds in eradicating the vampires, which Alissa Burger points out King shows in a later short story, “One for the Road,” it did not. So Ben’s staking Barlow is not really a happy ending, but rather a battle won in a lost war. Based on his retroactive introductions, King still seems to consider it a personal victory on his own path to faith in human integrity: it was a happy ending for him that his characters had the bravery to fight the war, even if it was ultimately a doomed effort. I guess that’s the type of bravery we’re going to need now more than ever.

-SCR

‘Salem’s Lot was published in 1975, just a year after Carrie. Stephen King’s second book is his first official doorstopper, so I’m posting the summary by itself for manageability.

In the novel’s prologue, a tall man and a young boy who are apparently not father and son are making their way across the country. The man supports them with odd jobs and checks the Maine newspapers for any news of the town of ‘Salem’s Lot, which he eventually finds in the form of a long article describing how a lot of the town’s residents have relocated or simply vanished. The young boy decides he wants to join the priesthood, and a priest confronts the man about the insane things in the boy’s confession, which the man says are all true. The man then asks the boy to return with him to ‘Salem’s Lot.

In Part One, “The Marsten House,” thirty-two-year-old Ben Mears returns to ‘Salem’s Lot twenty-five years after he lived there as a boy, and two years after his wife Miranda was killed in a motorcycle accident. Ben’s first move is to scope out the creepy town fixture of the Marsten House. Then in the park, he meets an attractive girl named Susan, who happens to be reading one of the novels Ben has written. Ben tells her about his childhood in the Lot, including leaving shortly after his aunt’s house burned down in the big town fire of ’51. We get some history about the town, including that it was named after a pig and that it’s so small it’s isolated from most of the country’s tragedies. Susan fights with her mother about Ben (she’s been dating another man, Floyd Tibbets, whom her mother prefers) before going to the movies with him, after which Ben tells her about the time he went into the Marsten House, which has a famous history in the town because the rumored gangster Hubie Marsten shot his wife there before hanging himself. Going in as a boy to impress some other boys, Ben claims he saw Hubie Marsten still hanging in the master bedroom, and that Hubie opened his eyes before Ben fled. He admits he could have hallucinated it, but believes the house has some kind of monstrous, psychic energy. He had wanted to rent the house upon his return, but someone had already bought it, and he and Susan can see apparent candlelight illuminating it from the porch of Ben’s boarding house.

We get a description of a long day in the Lot tracking different town members, including a groundskeeper, Mike Ryerson, finding the body of a dead dog hanging from the cemetery gates; the new young boy Mark Petrie besting a bully; the real-estate agent Larry Crockett reflecting on the suspicious deal he made with the strange man named Straker who bought the Marsten House and is opening an antique furniture store with his partner Barlow; the high-school English teacher Matt Burke noticing there’s a car parked at the Marsten House; Ben going to Sue’s parents’ for dinner; the young brothers Ralphie and Danny Glick heading through the woods after dusk to visit Mark Petrie when they’re accosted by something mysterious; and finally, a mysterious figure apparently making some kind of sacrifice. Danny returns home without Ralphie and can’t remember what happened, and a few days later Danny’s hospitalized and dies of anemia. Straker calls in a service from Larry Crockett (who made a killing investing in trailer parks) to have some furniture delivered to his house. The men tasked with the delivery are overcome with fear as they drag a large piece of furniture down to the Marsten House cellar. One of them returns to Larry and says he thinks he might have seen a kid’s clothes down there that might be Ralphie Glick’s, but Crockett bribes him to ignore it.

Constable Parkins Gillespie interrogates Ben about where he was when Ralphie disappeared, and Ben refuses to let Gillespie near his manuscript pages. Gillespie also questions Straker. Ben and Susan have sex in the park, after which point he finally explains that his book is about the Marsten House and that he’s done a lot of research on Hubie Marsten, who was a contract killer. Ben believes the house still contains Hubie’s evil, especially since kids have started disappearing again now that the house is re-occupied. Ben then goes out to Dell’s bar and ends up meeting Matt Burke, who talks to him about the Marsten House because he found out Ben was writing about it from the town librarian. After Danny Glick’s funeral, Mike Ryerson is burying the coffin when he becomes convinced that Danny’s eyes are open inside the coffin, and he eventually digs it up and sees that they are. A weird stranger visits Dud Rodgers at the dump he runs, and Dud starts to feel hypnotized. Father Callahan, drunk again on a Sunday night, ponders the nature of evil. Matt and Ben have dinner together and keep discussing the Marsten house and Danny Glick’s death. Matt goes to Dell’s and runs into Mike Ryerson, who’s very sick, so Matt lets him come home with him; that night Matt hears Mike say “come in” and Matt is overcome by fear as he hears the laugh of a child and “sucking sounds.”

In Part Two, “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” Matt calls Ben to his house (asking him to bring a crucifix) and they debate whether Mike is dead; Matt voices his vampire suspicions, and Ben says people will think he’s crazy, so they call in the Constable and medical examiner to make their own determination, fudging what really happened. Matt, Ben, and Susan are planning to visit the Marsten house that day when Ben is attacked by Floyd Tibbets and has to be hospitalized. Susan argues with her mother, who thinks Ben is bad news and has something to do with all the weird stuff going on; when she shows Susan a tabloid claiming Ben was drunk at the time of the motorcycle accident that killed his wife, Susan says she’s moving out. Ben sends Susan to Matt’s house and Matt tells her what happened with Mike; they hear a noise upstairs and Matt goes up and sees Mike rise, then banishes him out the window with a crucifix. Matt has a heart attack.

Sandy McDougall wakes the next morning to find her baby Randy dead. Ben and Susan debate what really happened at Matt’s house. Floyd Tibbets dies in jail. Corey Bryant visits Bonnie Sawyer to carry on their affair when Bonnie’s husband shows up and threatens to kill Corey; when Corey finally leaves, he runs into Barlow. Some bodies have disappeared from the morgue. The undead Danny Glick visits Mark Petrie, who staves him off with a cross. Ben convinces Dr. Jimmy Cody to exhume Danny Glick, but when they try to get permission from the Glick parents, they find out they’ve died. In the meantime, Susan decides to go out to the Marsten house by herself, where she runs into Mark Petrie. Jimmy and Ben sit up with Marjorie Glick’s body, and when night falls, she rises and attacks them, biting Jimmy before Ben banishes her with a cross; Jimmy douses his bite wound with vodka which somehow staves off its effects. They make up a story about what happened when they talk to Sheriff McCaslin. Mark and Susan see Straker leave the house before they break in, but then Straker is inside and knocks Mark out and ties him up in the attic. Using Houdini as inspiration, Mark manages to free himself and bashes Straker in the head with a bed leg when Straker returns. Mark tries to go down to the cellar to get Susan, but Barlow is down there with her, and Mark flees; that night Susan visits him as a vampire but he refuses to let her in. Father Callahan visits Matt and they debate about the supernatural and the changing conception of “evil” in the Catholic church.

In Part Three, “The Deserted Village,” lots more townspeople are getting sick. Susan attacks Sheriff McCaslin and her parents. Mark tells Ben what happened to Susan, and Mark, Ben, Jimmy and Father Callahan make plans to confront Barlow. Eva Miller notices a weird smell in the cellar of her boarding house where Ben’s been staying. Father Callahan hears everyone’s confessions so they’ll be pure for their confrontation with Barlow. When they get to the Marsten house, Callahan tries to banish the evil with a cross, and there’s a weird light and the windows blow out. Inside, Straker’s hanging upside down and bled out, and Barlow’s left a letter for them saying he’s going to kill them. They go to the cellar, where Ben stakes Susan. Callahan and Mark go to Mark’s parents while Ben and Jimmy go back to Matt at the hospital. At Mark’s, Barlow attacks and kills Mark’s parents; Callahan gets him to let Mark go by agreeing to let go of his cross, and Barlow makes Callahan drink blood. Ann Norton visits the hospital with a gun but is stopped, then dies. Ben and company debate where Barlow is hiding now that his house has been compromised. Father Callahan, now unclean so he can’t enter a church, buys a bus ticket out of town (and some liquor to go with it). The school bus driver wakes up to kids vandalizing his bus that turn out to be vampires. Corey Bryant returns as a vampire to Bonnie’s to take his revenge.

The next day, Jimmy, Ben and Mark visit Barlow and Straker’s shop, now closed, and find Mike Ryerson’s body. Ben makes stakes at Mark’s house while Mark and Jimmy try to find the vampires’ daytime hiding places and go to the McDougals’, exposing the father’s body and making him writhe but letting him return to the shadows. They realize from chalk Mark saw on Barlow’s fingers that he’s in Eva Miller’s boarding house basement, where there’s a pool table. A former student visits Matt at the hospital and witnesses Matt’s heart attack and death. Jimmy and Mark go to the boarding house, where Jimmy falls into a trap set by the vampires, who removed the cellar stairs and put a bunch of knives at the bottom. Mark manages to escape and gets Ben. They get holy water from the church and return to Eva’s, finding Barlow’s case in the cellar. Ben hacks it open with an ax and Barlow looks in Mark’s eyes, causing Mark to attack Ben and almost shoot him, but Ben overcomes him and manages to drive a stake into Barlow, destroying him. The other vampires come out but can’t touch Mark and Ben because of their holy water. After Ben burns his manuscript, he and Mark leave ‘Salem’s Lot.

In the epilogue, strange stories from ‘Salem’s Lot continue, and Ben and Mark return to town. They go to the place where the famous fire of ’51 started, and Ben starts a fire to drive out the remaining vampires. The End.