A cartoon that appeared in the Boston Daily Globe in 1896.
In 1876, two years after his assassination, Abraham Lincoln’s resting place was disturbed by grave robbers hoping to steal his remains for ransom. Thankfully, a secret service agent caught the nefarious robbers, and they were only able to lift the lid of the coffin before being arrested.
While consumption has nearly been eradicated from America, it is presently a real threat in developing countries, as nearly 50 percent of the deaths occur in India, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Pakistan. At the time of the vampire panic, consumption was sweeping across the world, in a time of only developing knowledge of science and disease. Robert Koch, a German microbiologist, identified the bacteria in 1882, yet it took years for the public to fully embrace the true cause of the disease. As described on the website for the Connecticut Historical Society, blame on consumption’s deadly grip shifted depending on the sufferer’s background:
The wealthy blamed it on heredity, as an issue of one’s constitution, and so took trips to warm climates for a “cure.” For literary types (think Emerson or Thoreau), the culprit was the stress of modern life and their own genius. They sought refuge in nature. The middle class saw the cause as overstimulation from an urban life, including heavy studying, and working in an office. For people living in rural areas, the causes were spiritual and often related to vampirism.4
Because of these beliefs in the supernatural, desperation to save loved ones took a macabre turn. Such as in the case of the Brown family, who lived in the farm country of Vermont. The Browns were ravaged by the disease. First, the matriarch Mary Eliza died in 1882. Next, twenty-year-old daughter and sister Mary Olive succumbed to the same disease. Several years later, brother Edwin, formally the heartiest of the family, became ill with consumption. It was ten years after the loss of her mother and sister that Lena Brown began to show signs of the disease. After Lena died, father George Brown was desperate to keep his only living child from following her to the grave. When community members began to imply that perhaps something sinister was at play, George felt no choice but to believe them. With no clue to the realities of bacteria, George came to believe that his dead wife and daughters were rising from their graves and feasting on innocent Edwin. This made sense to him, as consumption’s symptoms presented in a sort of “drain” in which the victim slowly lost blood in their cheeks, weight, and strength, until they were a shell of their former selves.
Since there are nine hundred calories per liter of blood, and five liters in a human, a vampire would have to drain one person a day in order to survive.
Neighbors and friends, probably concerned for their own safety, convinced George to allow them to exhume the three women and check for blood in their hearts. This, they believed, would be proof of vampirism. On St. Patrick’s Day 1892, George gave the okay. He understandably did not attend the exhumation. “After nearly a decade, Lena’s sister and mother were barely more than bones. Lena, though, had been dead only a few months, and it was wintertime. The body was in a fairly well-preserved state,” the correspondent later wrote. “The heart and liver were removed, and in cutting open the heart, clotted and decomposed blood was found.” During this impromptu autopsy, the doctor again emphasized that Lena’s lungs “showed diffuse tuberculous germs.”5 Even more troubling than digging up the deceased, the villagers agreed that the best way to treat Edwin’s consumption was to use an inexplicable medicine. They burned Lena’s heart and liver, and then fed the ashes to her brother. Not unsurprisingly, this did not cure Edwin, and he died in less than two months.
While it’s difficult to understand the beliefs of George Brown and his fellow rural Vermonters today, we can empathize with his great desire to protect his family and community at that time. In Salem’s Lot, this poignant protectiveness of a small town is on full display. Ben Mears, who spent part of his childhood in the close-knit village, is willing to risk his life in order to save his friends and neighbors from the vampire, Barlow. In fact, Susan Norton, the novel’s female protagonist, does just that, dying to save others. Her death, in my opinion, marks one of the most memorable and gut-wrenching deaths in all of King’s fiction.
While vampires drain the innocent of their lives, in true rural gothic fashion, Ben must traverse the literal underbelly of Jerusalem’s Lot, within the darkened basements and root cellars, in order to slay the beasts. I have to wonder, as I think back on my literature class, Tales of Terror, if what makes Salem’s Lot so successfully terrifying is that at a time, not so long ago, the people of New England, the world in fact, had to face a true vampire; a vicious and indiscriminate disease.
CHAPTER FOUR
Rage
In 1977, mere months after the publication of The Shining, an author named Richard Bachman arrived on the literary scene. Bachman’s debut, Rage, later compiled in the 1985 collection The Bachman Books, was a starkly realistic account of a teenager unhinged. It would be years before it was revealed to the reading public that Stephen King and Richard Bachman were two psyches intertwined, or, perhaps more accurately, one and the same. In the introduction to The Bachman Books, Stephen King described the beginning of Rage, including its original title. “Getting It On was begun in 1966, when I was a senior in high school. I later found it moldering away in an old box in the cellar of the house where I’d grown up—this rediscovery was in 1970, and I finished the novel in 1971.” On the official Stephen King website, King answered not only why he adopted the pseudonym for Rage’s release, but also where he came up with the moniker:
The thing is, one book is all most writers want to produce or can produce in the course of a year and some of them only publish a book every two years. Ed McBain is another novelist who publishes multiple books in some years and his original name was Evan Hunter. That’s the name he’s always published under and he adopted the pen name of Ed McBain for the same reason I adopted Richard Bachman and that was what made it possible for me to do two books in one year. I just did them under different names and eventually the public got wise to this because you can change your name but you can’t really disguise your style. The name Richard Bachman actually came from when they called me and said we’re ready to go to press with this novel, what name shall we put on it? And I hadn’t really thought about that. Well, I had, but the original name—Gus Pillsbury—had gotten out on the grapevine and I really didn’t like it that much anyway, so they said they needed it right away and there was a novel by Richard Stark on my desk so I used the name Richard and that’s kind of funny because Richard Stark is in itself a pen name for Donald Westlake and what was playing on the record player was “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet” by Bachman Turner Overdrive, so I put the two of them together and came up with Richard Bachman.1