The Science of Stephen King

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: