‘Salem’s Lot comes off as a quaint, wholesome town…on the surface. Jerusalem is a most holy city (the fighting and controversy over it notwithstanding), as opposed to most unholy Sodom. What’s more, ‘Salem sounds like fairly nearby Salem, Massachusetts, where the infamous witch trials took place. Is Ben Mears the ‘Lot’ of Jerusalem’s Lot? A fiery destruction is certainly ‘salem’s lot (i.e., fate). Indeed, ‘salem’s Lot sounds like a pun on ‘Sodom’s Lot’. A fire to rid a city of its evil two cities laid in desolation by some horrible evil ‘ Sale m and M oms on seem redolent of Sodo m and G omorrah. By the end of the story, Ben Mears has started a brush fire as the only way to rid ‘salem’s Lot of its vampires. Some kind of evil has emptied both towns of their residents. In the Prologue, part 3, we come upon a newspaper article, ‘GHOST TOWN IN MAINE?’, referring to two ghost towns: Jerusalem’s Lot and Momson (page 8 also, pages 594-5). “The town cares for devil’s work no more than it cares for God’s or man’s. The town keeps them all with the ultimate poker face.
“These are the town’s secrets, and some will later be known and some will never be known.
“It knew about the darkness that comes on the land when rotation hides the land from the sun, and about the darkness of the human soul.” –Ch. Nothing too nasty could happen in such a nice little town. “…the Lot’s knowledge of the country’s torment was academic. While the first adaptation took many liberties with King’s novel, he felt no animus against it, unlike his reaction to Stanley Kubrick‘s version of The Shining.
There have been two made-for-TV adaptations: the 1979 one starring David Soul, James Mason, Lance Kerwin, and Bonnie Bedelia and the 2004 adaptation starring Rob Lowe, Donald Sutherland, Rutger Hauer, and James Cromwell. It’s his second novel, as well as his personal favourite of all of those he’s written. ‘Salem’s Lot is a vampire horror novel written by Stephen King and published in 1975.
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