The Science of Stephen King

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: