‘Tis the season for ghosties and goblins and things that go bump in the night. Or, as in the case of Salem’s Lot by Stephen King, things that go bite in the night.

If you’ve spent any time reading this blog, you know my heart belongs to the ghost set. However, I always participate in the Supernatural Fiction Readers Group read over at Goodreads (join us!), and this year the members voted for Salem’s Lot, a novel about a small New England town beset by vampires. These are not the angst-ridden, reticent vamps of the Twilight series who delicately sip deer blood. Nope, these night roamers worship the dark side and will invite themselves into your home. And slash your throat with their fangs.

What, you say? No love triangle? No Team Jacob? This is Stephen King we’re talking about.

I love group reads and reading challenges because I always venture outside of my usual reading range. That’s a good thing.

So I read Salem’s Lot and found myself immersed in King’s writing. (For those of you who write, I absolutely recommend you check out King’s book On Writing.)

The ones who fight the good fight in Salem’s Lot are Ben Mears, a writer; and Mark Petrie, a brave young boy conversant with all comic book vampire lore. (Fortunately for the duo, the comic book sources prove remarkably accurate.) As I read Salem’s Lot, I kept feeling that Ben and Mark were both Stephen King stand-ins.) If you read or listen to the author’s note at the beginning of the book, you’ll be especially struck by the connection between Stephen King and Mark.

I found myself completely immersed in King’s writing. I wasn’t so much interested in the vampire element itself (and as Mark and Werner pointed out in the Goodreads discussion, there were glaring inconsistencies in King’s vampire world building) as I was in other aspects of the novel. Here are some of my random ramblings:

Vampire as metaphor. A small, insular New England town provides the perfect setting in which to explore evil, an evil literally embodied by vampires. Evil is a disease, an epidemic even. In the town of Salem’s Lot, you can observe the journey of evil as it enters the homes of people who harbor that soft center of greed or lust or cowardice that draws vampires like termites draw chimps. Then, like a virus, vampirism spreads exponentially. Maybe there’s a theme here–something about closing the door (or one’s soul) to evil.

Memorable characters. The character I was most drawn to is Father Callahan. Mostly I am drawn to Father Callahan because of the way King writes him. Here is an excerpt of Father Callahan musing on evil:

But there were no battles. There were only skirmishes of vague resolution….And EVIL did not wear one face but many, and all of them were vacuous and more often than not the chin was slicked with drool…At moments like this he suspected that Hitler had been nothing but a harried bureaucrat and Satan himself a mental defective. (240)

Yes, indeed. Some fine writing there, I think. Maybe Father Callahan is my favorite because he so wants to be good (me, too!) and he feels made for that big fight with EVIL (me, not so much). Everything else throughout the years has jaded him. Now Evil has come to town, and Father Callahan has his chance. Go, F.C.!

The title. Silly me, I never noticed until this book that the word Salem is inside of the word Jerusalem. Bet you noticed that long ago, and I’m just late to the party. The word Jerusalem means City of Peace. The word Salem means peace. Clever King—he would slip in a bit of verbal irony here as the town of Salem’s Lot is anything but peaceful.

I also thought a lot about the word “lot” in the title. And that led me to think about fate, as in…one’s lot in life. For some of the characters, simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time determined their lot. And that made me think of Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery” —a seemingly random distribution of luck that is perhaps not so random after all.

There you have my random musings about this book. I found lots to think about in Salem’s Lot, in this story of vampires in which, for me, vampires were the least part.

So, readers, what are you dipping into this Halloween season? Any favorite spooky reads? Have you read Salem’s Lot?