'Salem's Lot

media_type Print (Hardcover)
pages 439
isbn 0385007515
preceded_by Carrie (novel)Carrie
followed_by The Shining (novel)The Shining


"''Salem's Lot"' is a 1975 in literature1975 horror fiction novel written by Stephen King and was the author's second published novel. The town's full name is 'Jerusalem's Lot', a location that would be revisited in the short stories 'Jerusalem's Lot' and 'One for the Road' both from King's 1978 short story collection 'Night Shift (book)Night Shift'. The title King originally chose for his book was 'Second Coming', but he later decided on 'Jerusalem's Lot'. The publishers, Doubleday (publisher)Doubleday, shortened it to the current title, thinking the author's choice sounded too religious. They also undertook a last minute price change, reducing the cost of the book from $8.95 to $7.95, thereby producing what some call the 'holy grail' for serious Stephen King collectors as perhaps no more than 4 such copies of the unchanged dust-wrapper exist.David Aronovitz A.B.A.A. / I.L.A.B.
'Salem's Lot' has been adapted into a television mini-series twice, first in Salem's Lot (1979 TV mini-series)1979 and then in 'Salem's Lot (2004 TV mini-series)2004. It was also adapted by the BBC as a seven part radio play in Salem's Lot (radio drama)1995.

The novel was nominated for the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1976.

Plot summary
Ben Mears, a successful writer who grew up in the town of Jerusalem's Lot (Stephen King)Jerusalem's Lot, Cumberland County, Maine (or “The Lot”, as the locals call it), has returned home following the death of his wife. Once in town he meets local high school teacher Matt Burke and strikes up a romantic relationship with Susan Norton, a young college graduate.

Ben plans to write a book about the “Marsten House”, an abandoned mansion that gave him nightmares after a bad experience with it as a child. The Marsten House was the home of '30s gangster Hubert 'Hubie' Marsten, a hitman who specialized in rather unsavory hits. Hubie's profession intersected with his personal life and after his suicide, it was discovered he was responsible for the deaths of several children. Unbeknownst to Ben and his new friends, the Marsten House is about to be inhabited by the Vampire (Stephen King)vampire Kurt Barlow. It is later revealed that Hubie Marsten had in fact communicated with the erstwhile Barlow, and that in the course of their correspondence Marsten may have extended to Barlow the necessary invitation to come to 'Salem's Lot.

Mears discovers that the Marsten House has been bought by a Mr. Straker and a Mr. Barlow, appearing as a pair of businessmen who are opening an antique store in town, although only the tall, bald Mr. Straker has yet been seen in public. Their arrival coincides with the disappearance of a young boy, Ralphie Glick, and the death of his brother Danny. Over the course of the book, the town is slowly taken over by vampires, reducing it to a ghost town by day as they sleep.

Ben and Susan are joined by Matt Burke and his doctor Jimmy Cody, along with a young boy named Mark Petrie and the local priest, Father Callahan, in an effort to stop the vampires from dominating the town. When Mark Petrie and Susan break and enter into the Marsten House, they are found and taken prisoner by Mr. Straker. Mark is able to wound Straker (who is eventually killed by the master vampire Barlow for failing his duties), but Susan is captured by Barlow before Mark has a chance to rescue her. When Mark returns to the others, the characters begin to run into several unfortunate tragedies. Susan, while held hostage by Barlow, becomes a vampire herself, and is sent (unsuccessfully) after Mark Petrie, before being left by Barlow in the cellar of the Marsten House with a note daring his adversaries to kill her. Father Callahan is caught by Barlow at the Petrie house, and after Barlow kills Mark's parents, he forces Callahan to throw away his cross and drink blood from Barlow's neck, corrupting his soul so that he can no longer even approach a church. The ex-priest flees the town. Finally, Jimmy Cody is killed when he falls into a dark basement and is impaled by knife traps set by Barlow, while Matt Burke dies from a heart attack in the town hospital.

Finally, Ben and young Mark Petrie succeed in destroying the master vampire Barlow, but, lucky to escape with their lives, are forced to leave the town to the crop of newly created vampires. The novel's prologue, which is set shortly after the end of the story proper, describes Ben and Mark's flight across the country to a seaside town in Mexico, where they stop to recover from their ordeal.

An epilogue has the two returning to the town a year later, intending to renew the battle. Ben, knowing that there are too many hiding places for the town's vampires, sets some underbrush on fire in an attempt to destroy as many homes as possible thus making the vampires easier to hunt.

Background
While teaching a high school Fantasy and Science Fiction course at Hampden Academy, King was inspired by 'Dracula', one of the books covered in the class. 'One night over supper I wondered aloud what would happen if Dracula came back in the twentieth century, to America. 'He'd probably be run over by a Yellow Cab on Park Avenue and killed,' my wife said. (In the Introduction to the 2004 audiobook recording that Stephen King read himself, he says it was he who said 'Probably he'd land in New York and be killed by a Taxi Cab, like Margaret Mitchell in Atlanta,' and it was his wife who suggested a rural setting for the book. Introduction to 'Salem's Lot', Simon & Schuster, Inc. 2004.) That closed the discussion, but in the following days, my mind kept returning to the idea. It occurred to me that my wife was probably right — if the legendary Count came to New York, that was. But if he were to show up in a sleepy little country town, what then? I decided I wanted to find out, so I wrote "Salem's Lot', which was originally titled 'Second Coming".

King expands on this thought in his essay for 'Adeline' Magazine 'On Becoming a Brand Name' (February 1980): 'I began to turn the idea over in my mind, and it began to coalesce into a possible novel. I thought it would make a good one, if I could create a fictional town with enough prosaic reality about it to offset the comic-book menace of a bunch of vampires.'

Politics during the time influenced King's writing of the story. The corruption in the government was a significant factor in the inspiration of the story. 'I wrote ''Salem's Lot' during the period when the Sam ErvinErvin committee was sitting. That was also the period when we first learned of the Daniel EllsbergEllsberg break-in, the Watergate tapesWhite House tapes, the connection between Gordon Liddy and the CIA, the news of enemies' lists, and other fearful intelligence. During the spring, summer and fall of 1973, it seemed that the Federal Government had been involved in so much subterfuge and so many covert operations that, like the bodies of the faceless wetbacks that Juan Corona was convicted of slaughtering in California, the horror would never end ... Every novel is to some extent an indavertant psychological portrait of the novelist, and I think that the unspeakable obscenity 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 (1956 film)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.''The Fright Report' 'Oui' Magazine January 1980 p. 108

King first wrote of Jerusalem's Lot in a Jerusalem's Lotshort story of the same title, penned in college (but published years later for the first time in the anthology collection 'Night Shift (book)Night Shift').

In his non-fiction book, 'Danse Macabre (book)Danse Macabre', King recalls a dream he had when he was eight years old. In the dream, he saw the body of a hanged man dangling from the arm of a scaffold on a hill. 'The corpse bore a sign: ROBERT BURNS. But when the wind caused the corpse to turn in the air, I saw that it was my face - rotted and picked by birds, but obviously mine. And then the corpse opened its eyes and looked at me. I woke up screaming, sure that a dead face would be leaning over me in the dark. Sixteen years later, I was able to use the dream as one of the central 's campus newspaper, King foreshadowed the coming of "Salem's Lot' by writing: 'In the early 1800s a whole sect of Shakers, a rather strange, religious persuasion at best, disappeared from their village (Jeremiah's Lot) in Vermont. The town remains uninhabited to this day.''The Stephen King Companion' Beahm, George Andrews McMeel press 1989 p. 267

In addition to 'Dracula', Shirley Jackson's 'The Haunting of Hill House' (the opening passage of which King employed as an epigraph (literature)epigraph for Part One of his novel) and Grace Metalious' 'Peyton Place (novel)Peyton Place' are often cited as inspirations for ''Salem's Lot'.

Links with King's other works
'Jerusalem's Lot' and 'One for the Road (short story)One for the Road', from 'Night Shift (book)Night Shift'
These two short stories act as a sort of bookend for ''Salem's Lot'. 'Jerusalem's Lot', written early in King's career and inspired by the works of H. P. Lovecraft, takes place in the 19th century and provides a back-story for the later novel, dealing with the underlying source of the evil in Jerusalem's Lot and the Marsten House. 'One for the Road (short story)One for the Road' was written after ''Salem's Lot' and takes place after the events of the novel. Both stories were published in the 'Night Shift' collection.

Matt Burke brings up the disappearance that is explained in 'Jerusalem's Lot' during a conversation with Ben about the strange history of the town.

'Pet Sematary'
The highway exit sign for 'Salem's Lot is noticed by characters driving past it.

'It (novel)It'
To keep his concentration upon the visitation of Danny Glick, Mark Petrie repeats certain rhymes—ending with '...he thrusts his fists against the posts, and still insists he sees the ghosts', a rhyme of major significance to Bill Denbrough in 'It'.

As in 'Pet Sematary', the exit sign for 'Salem's Lot is seen from the highway.

The Dark Tower (series)The Dark Tower series
Father Callahan returns in 'The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla', the fifth book in The Dark Tower series, and makes subsequent appearances in the The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannahsixth and The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Towerseventh books as well.
In Barlow's letter, Barlow tells Father Callahan that 'He bears the symbol of the white' a term later used in 'The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower'.

Limited/illustrated edition

In 2005, Centipede Press released a deluxe limited edition of ''Salem's Lot' with black and white photographs, the two short stories 'Jerusalem's Lot' and 'One for the Road', and over fifty pages of deleted material. It weighed over , was and over thick. A trade hardcover edition with a preface by King was later released.

Deleted material
Different names for the town and the vampire; 'Salem's Lot is compared to 'Momson' (mentioned in the final text of the book as a Vermont town whose residents mysteriously vanished in 1923), and Barlow is called 'Sarlinov'.
A conversation between Ben and Susan about the true nature of evil.
An extended version of the scene in which Straker delivers his 'sacrifice' to his 'dark father.'
A scene in which after being pronounced dead, Danny Glick's vampirism is foreshadowed much more prominently.
Barlow's letter to the protagonists is instead a cassette recording. A vampiric Susan is with him.
A more gruesome fate for Dr. Jimmy Cody. In the original manuscript he is devoured by rats, but in the actual book he is impaled by knives. The vampires set this trap.
More scenes of vampires causing chaos; Sandy McDougall is bitten by her infant son Randy, Dud Rogers bites Ruthie Crockett. Later, the aforementioned McDougalls are slain by Jimmy Cody.
Father Callahan, the town's troubled Roman Catholic priest, meets his end differently. Rather than being forced to drink Barlow's blood and leaving town damned, he marks the vampire with a knife before committing suicide. Furious, the vampire desecrates the priest's body, decapitating it and hanging it upside down.
Barlow is killed by sunlight rather than a stake through the heart. More rats are present in the final showdown as well.

Legacy

''Salem's Lot' was the first of King's books to have a huge cast of characters, a trait that would appear again in later books such as 'The Stand', 'It (novel)It', 'The Tommyknockers' ' 'Needful Things' and 'Under the Dome'. The town of Jerusalem's Lot would also serve as a prototype for later fictional towns of King's writing, namely Castle Rock (Stephen King)Castle Rock, Maine and Derry, Maine.

King revisited the character Father Callahan, the local priest whose faith falters in the dreadful presence of Barlow, in his 'The Dark Tower (series)The Dark Tower' series. He appears in 'The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla', 'The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah', and 'The Dark Tower VII: The Dark TowerThe Dark Tower', and provides insights into his experiences after being exiled from 'Salem's Lot. In addition, the central characters of the 'Dark Tower' books acquire an actual copy of ''Salem's Lot' at the end of 'Wolves of the Calla', which leads them to seek out King himself in one of the many alternate realities featured in the series.

''Salem's Lot' was also the first novel by King in which the main character is a writer, a device he would use again in a number of novels and short stories.

The town of Jerusalem's Lot is mentioned in the 2002 Rappingrap song 'Lose Yourself' by Eminem, as well as 'Serve The Servants' by Nirvana (band)Nirvana.

The book also makes an appearance in 'Day Of The Dead,' where it is examined by a zombie in one of Dr. Logan's experiments.

Media adaptations
'Salem's Lot (1979 TV mini-series)Salem's Lot' (1979) - Miniseries.
'A Return to Salem's Lot' (1987) - Film and in-name only sequel to 1979 miniseries.
'Salem's Lot (radio drama)'Salem's Lot' (1995) - Radio drama.
''Salem's Lot (2004 TV miniseries)'Salem's Lot' (2004) - Miniseries.

Editions
ISBN 0-451-15065-1 (paperback, 1976)
ISBN 0-450-03106-3 (paperback, 1982)
ISBN 0-606-02434-4 (prebound, 1990)
ISBN 0-385-00751-5 (hardcover, 1990)
ISBN 0-8161-5686-7 (library binding, 1994, Large Type Edition)
ISBN 0-671-03974-1 (mass market paperback, 1999)
ISBN 0-671-03975-X (paperback, 2000)
ISBN 0-385-51648-7 (hardcover, 2005)

References




en.wikipedia.org