'Salem's Lot

’Salem’s Lot is an example of Gothic horror in the vein of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mary Shelley, and Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula. It contains most of the elements of the traditional Gothic: a gloomy castle or haunted house, a sense of enclosure and entrapment, a desolate or haunted landscape, a damsel in distress, a ghost or monster, a hero with a dark secret, and a confrontation with evil in supernatural form.

The European Gothic is the literary reflection of Gothic architecture that appeared in the medieval era. It is often associated with dark, spooky buildings, such as castles and cathedrals full of secret passages and hidden chambers. American writers adopting the genre suffered a dearth of ancient castles and abbeys, so substituted wilderness to create a sense of isolation and menace. In his languorous and dreamy description of the town of ’salem’s Lot, King creates loneliness and isolation that turns a pretty little town into a sinister place. The reader has the impression the town is set apart from the real world, an effect that King reinforces when Ben reflects that the name of the town ought to be “Time” to reflect this air of being lost in the past while time passes it by.

Male characters dominate ’Salem’s Lot. Susan Norton (Ben’s damsel in distress) is the only female character of any substance. The early Gothic genre was largely the domain of women writers and readers. Many of its conventions felt like familiar obstacles to women. The sense of constriction and of being threatened by overwhelming unseen forces evoked social constraints, especially the genre’s emphasis on captivity and forced marriage. Susan feels those constraints in her mother’s pressure to marry Floyd Tibbits. Like other Gothic heroines, Susan struggles to achieve agency by controlling a chaotic environment and distinguishing the supernatural from the rational. Ben, by contrast, is not the classical Gothic protagonist. Usually, protagonists find themselves trapped in their isolated circumstances either inadvertently or against their will, like Jonathan Harker finding himself a prisoner in Dracula’s castle. Ben returns voluntarily to grapple with death in the place where he first encountered it. This makes him an active protagonist from the beginning, where Gothic protagonists are more often reactive at the outset, becoming active as they confront and attempt to alter their circumstances.

The Gothic genre nearly always deals with the subject of the supernatural. However, different authors handle the subject in different ways. King’s vampires are actual monsters that embody the characters’ deep psychological fears and uncertainties. Other authors fall on the side of reason. Their supernatural entities turn out to be delusions or tricks perpetrated by ordinary humans using material or scientific means. Either way, Gothic horror explores a world in which God is either nonexistent or is detached from good and evil. Characters cannot call on God for support. The characters in ’Salem’s Lot employ the trappings of the church, but God does not intervene directly. Like Father Callahan, they are forced to confront supernatural evil on their own.