Kelly: “What is your favorite Stephen King novel or story and why?”
Sara Melendez: “Hmm … so hard to narrow down, and there are so many! I think Carrie really captivated me because I was only a teen and a very sheltered one at that, raised in a dysfunctional household in a small town with a mom who didn’t have a grip on reality and a high degree of religiosity. I wished I had superpowers so I could escape. Carrie was my tortured superhero! That was the one story that resonated with me, in a strange way, I guess.”
Meg: “What a great example of how fiction can be such a healing and vital part of growing up!”
Thanks to Sara Melendez we were able to stand back and see Jack, Wendy, and Danny Torrance from her perspective as a crisis counselor. This is a testament to the true humanity, whether sweet or depraved, that Stephen King evokes in his novels and stories. While Jack Torrance ultimately succumbs to the evil at the Overlook, the balance of good and evil within him remains the truly compelling aspect of the modern horror masterpiece The Shining.
CHAPTER THREE
Salem’s Lot
One of my (Meg’s) most delightful college courses was a literature class called Tales of Terror. It was naturally popular, in no small part because of its enticing name. As a lifelong horror reader, I made sure to pounce on it once registration was open. We read a number of memorable books and short stories, including Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Shirley Jackson’s The Possibility of Evil (1965). What really tickled me was the chance to deconstruct and discuss a Stephen King novel. As a literature major, I was used to my fellow students maligning King, one very loudly sharing her disdain for the author in our Romantic Literature course. Many had agreed with her analysis, nodding their heads in unison at her insistence that Stephen King was not “literary.”
I had remained silent, seething underneath.
In Tales of Terror, we were assigned King’s 1975 vampire novel Salem’s Lot. I had already read it as a teenager, but I was more than ready to dive back into the idyllic yet terrifying town of Jerusalem’s Lot. In fact, it was because of this novel and the studies of Tales of Terror that I came to understand the term “rural gothic” which has informed much of my fictional work.
American Gothic fiction is a subgenre of Gothic fiction, first developed in Europe with the writings of novelists like Harold Walpole and Ann Radcliffe. American poet and short story writer Edgar Allan Poe popularized the genre, with a macabre atmosphere that nearly always led to death. As Americans took the spooky reins of gothic literature, they branched out into several subtopics. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Washington Irving both wrote upon the dark side of the puritanical, colonial era of America, while authors like William Faulkner are known as purveyors of Southern American Gothic, in which they meditate on the crumbling infrastructure of the southern United States.
The aspects of rural gothic fiction are rather broad, in that they can occur in any place, as long as the setting is far from the bustle of modern, technologically advanced America. What defines rural gothic is not only the subtle aspects that make small-town USA different than the urban city centers, it is also the pervading sense of horror that simmers underneath, hiding beneath the edifice of small-town values. Salem’s Lot is the perfect gateway into this nuanced subgenre as Stephen King himself explained in a radio interview. “In a way it is my favorite story, mostly because of what it says about small towns. They are kind of a dying organism right now. The story seems sort of down-home to me. I have a special cold spot in my heart for it!”1
The town of Jerusalem’s Lot, much like King’s fictional Maine towns, Derry and Castle Rock, exists in more than one of his works. While it appears first in Salem’s Lot, it has been revisited in short stories like “One For the Road” (1977) as well as in the last three novels of the Dark Tower Series (2003, 2004). Part of Jerusalem Lot’s appeal to readers is its complicated religious history in which a mysterious sect of Puritans mysteriously vanished from the town in the 1700s. This, of course, sounds like the perfect colonial gothic plot for Hawthorne or Irving. But it is the vampires in the 1970s that fold constant readers into the fictional town as they discover along with characters Ben Mears and Susan Norton that beyond the charming buildings and quirky residents, Salem’s Lot has a vicious, evil heart.
To prove a woman was a witch, the “touch test” was used in Salem. When an accused was brought close to an innocent, if that person seized in a fit and then halted at the touch of the defendant, the woman was considered proven to be a witch.
It was in the real town of Salem, Massachusetts, that true horror unraveled in the 1690s. Many have learned about the Salem Witch Trials, an unsettling piece of New England history which exposed the settlers’ very archaic beliefs in witchcraft. Innocent people (mostly women and children) died because of both lack of scientific understanding as well as mass hysteria, or group think, in which beliefs are intensified within a community. Lesser known is a similar panic that echoed the witch trials. Nearly two hundred years after supposed “witches” were hanged by their neighbors and loved ones, a vampire panic overtook another sleepy community in New England.
In 1990, children playing near a gravel mine in Griswold, Connecticut, found a haunting discovery. In order to convince his mother that the skeletal remains were indeed authentic, one boy brought home a skull as proof. The macabre burial site caught the attention of archaeologist Nick Bellantoni, who soon discovered that the bodies had been interred in the early nineteenth century, based on the decay of the skeletons, as well as their meager wooden coffins. Yet, as described in the Smithsonian’s “The Great New England Vampire Panic” there was a peculiarity to one grave that intrigued Bellantoni:
Scraping away soil with flat-edged shovels, and then brushes and bamboo picks, the archaeologist and his team worked through several feet of Earth before reaching the top of the crypt. When Bellantoni lifted the first of the large, flat rocks that formed the roof, he uncovered the remains of a red-painted coffin and a pair of skeletal feet. They lay, he remembers, “in perfect anatomical position.” But when he raised the next stone, Bellantoni saw that the rest of the individual “had been completely … rearranged.” The skeleton had been beheaded; skull and thigh bones rested atop the ribs and vertebrae. “It looked like a skull-and-crossbones motif, a Jolly Roger. I’d never seen anything like it,” Bellantoni recalls. Subsequent analysis showed that the beheading, along with other injuries, including rib fractures, occurred roughly five years after death. Somebody had also smashed the coffin. The other skeletons in the gravel hillside were packaged for reburial, but not “J. B.,” as the 50ish male skeleton from the 1830s came to be called, because of the initials spelled out in brass tacks on his coffin lid. He was shipped to the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C., for further study.2
Curious about why this body was so obviously mistreated post-burial, and convinced it wasn’t the doing of a typical grave robber, Bellantoni sought the expertise of Michael Bell, New England folklorist and author of Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires (2011). Bell had a chilling answer, rooted in the history of nearby Jewett City, Rhode Island, bordering the farm community of Griswold. Based on his research, Bell had come to understand that a panic had spread across the bucolic edifice of the area. Much like in Salem’s Lot, the townspeople and farmers believed there was an invading, supernatural evil. Why this shared belief swept New England, and as Bell asserts, as far west as Minnesota, is a complex question. What is an important connection, is that the exhumations of bodies, in which loved ones went as far as decapitating or burning the hearts of their loved ones in order to prevent further “vampirism,” is that tuberculosis gripped the region. Consumption, as it was called at the time, was an extremely painful and drawn out death that frightened people in both urban and rural settings. Caused by a bacterium known as Mycobacterium tuberculosis, consumption “may infect any part of the body, but most commonly occurs in the lungs (known as pulmonary tuberculosis). General signs and symptoms include fever, chills, night sweats, loss of appetite, weight loss, and fatigue.”3 It is transmitted by an active patient spitting, coughing, or sneezing into the air.