Recommendations of the Editorial team
Stephen King – The Ranking
24. “Salem’s Lot” (1975, German: “Salem must burn”) ★ ★ ★ ★
Time, Stephen Kings To rediscover “Salem’s Lot”. King’s agent expressed the fear that his client could be labeled a “horror writer” after the sensational success of “Carrie” if he wanted to publish a genre work again with this book. His reaction: “Horror writer? Very good!”
This American perspective was new
So the decision for “’Salem’s Lot” was made. King chose seemingly safe horror territory. The world of vampires. Above all, he expands on one of his most important themes. The alienation from one’s own children, who, as bloodsuckers, become a plague. The author always felt more comfortable with small towns than with big cities. The chronicle of the 2,500-soul nest ‘Salem’s Lot, and how its residents gradually succumb to the horrors of the Marsten House, is full of loving details. The descriptions of nature, the tides and storms contain a magic with which the then 28-year-old King comes very close to one of his role models, Ray Bradbury.
It’s scary to imagine that the stricken residents don’t flee from the vampires, but simply surrender. They slow things down and wait for the inevitable until the city becomes more and more deserted. They are the people who ducked political corruption, Watergate and Nixon. As vampires, they don’t seem like the noble bloodsuckers from the Stoker cosmos who roam Europe in coats and with good manners. But like sick hobos from the Midwest. This American perspective was new.
Process the trauma
Even the assholes, drunkards and good-for-nothings are given a certain right to exist by the author. Their grotesque lifestyle quickly drives them into the arms of the undead. Although “’Salem’s Lot” with its schematic, almost archetypal roles – the priest, the gas station attendant, the undertaker – could also function as a soap opera.
King created two of his most interesting characters, especially with the two main characters Ben Mears and Mark Petrie. The boy Mark wants to save his parents who were murdered by the vampire Barlow. He himself is a thoroughly competent soul who has aged before his time. Ben Mears is even sadder to look at. The writer – whom some people, here King himself has apparently shown an elephant’s memory, consider to be a good-for-nothing – returns to ‘Salem’s Lot to process childhood memories. You can feel sorry for the man because he just wants to make peace with the past. Of course, his depression only increases due to the terrible events.
‘Salem’s Lot is one of King’s most frightening novels
The sobriety with which Stephen King describes the fate of Mears’ young love Susan Rogers – fate had just separated them, the next night she flies in front of his window as a vampire – is one of his greatest narrative moments. An early sign of his class: “’Salem’s Lot” is one of King’s most frightening novels, full of new ideas. And that in the subject that is supposedly completely examined by many authors, the vampire novel.
The story continued to preoccupy King for a long time afterwards. The priest Callahan, bitten by Barlow in this novel and traveling by bus as a kind of feverish hobo ever since, would reappear in the Dark Tower novels. In two short stories published later, the author also sheds light on the emergence of evil in ‘Salem’s Lot.
“Almost everyone thought the man and the boy were father and son” is the first sentence, and it remains King’s best to this day.