'Salem's Lot

Mark Petrie represents Ben’s childhood self, the boy who got lost somehow between Ben’s experience in the house and when he was forced to leave ’salem’s Lot with that experience unresolved. When they meet, Ben feels a sense of coming together, of immediate recognition.

Mark is an idealized boy. Like Ben, he is unusually imaginative and insightful. He is also described as exceptionally poised and graceful. He is gentle, but when accosted by a bully, he is physically competent to defend himself. He is also socially astute enough to know that if he doesn’t defend himself, he will be at the bottom of the pecking order for the rest of his school life. He is a natural leader, taking Susan under his wing when they make their foray (however ill-advisedly) into the Marsten House. He is shown to have an unusually facile power of belief, a belief so quick and strong that he instantly recognizes Danny outside his window as a vampire and responds instinctively and correctly. It is the same power of belief and imagination that allows him to enter the state of concentration in which he is able to replicate Houdini’s ability to escape from the ropes with which Straker has tied him.

Critics of the story have described Susan as vapid. She is described repeatedly as a pretty or very pretty girl but never beautiful. Susan also seems young for her age. She is 25 or 26. When she tells Ben her age, he remarks that she is seven or eight years older than he thought when he first saw her—in other words, he saw (and still sees) a girl, just barely, though technically, a woman. Susan thanks him, but she adds, “I think.” The subtext indicates to the reader that it isn’t really a compliment, even if both Ben and Susan take it as such.

From the outset, this relationship looks more like a case of hero worship on Susan’s part than actual love. Ben represents for her the fantasy life she wants—leaving salem’s Lot to be a famous and successful artist in the city. When Ben tells Susan not to go to New York without a job already lined up, the effect is patronizing, no matter how good his intention. He comes across as a mentor more than a peer—not surprising, given that he is 10 years older than she is. Susan submits meekly to his advice. Ben’s observation that he took her at first sight for closer to 18 than 25 reinforces the impression of Susan as young for her age—more girl than woman. It would be unfair to state that there is no love between Ben and Susan, but their instant connection isn’t necessarily fate, prophecy, or even lust at first sight.

Susan goes from one man to another, never quite achieving agency on her own. Gradually losing interest in Floyd, who does not satisfy her yearning for escape from childhood. Susan falls for Ben, seeing in him a rescuer to snatch her away from her devouring mother.

She finally seizes the initiative and goes to prove to herself (and Ben) that there is no such thing as vampires. She falls afoul of Barlow and is consumed. In the process, she ceases to be an innocent girl—pretty but too unformed to be beautiful. She becomes a woman and becomes death, which Ben must destroy and conquer by his own hand.

Barlow is the outsider who disrupts the stability of the town. He doesn’t enter the story until near the end of Part 1, and he has very little interaction with the fearless vampire hunters until he challenges Father Callahan’s faith. Critics have noted that neither Barlow nor any of the other vampires in this story is a complex character. King has said that he modeled Barlow after Dracula, whose titular vampire was hardly more than a faceless menace. Later authors like Anne Rice and Barbara Hambly will give more nuanced portrayals, but in the process, the vampires will lose much of the genuine horror they originally invoked.

In King’s multiverse, Barlow is a Type 1 vampire—very human in appearance, highly intelligent, and able to hibernate for centuries. Sun burns their skin but doesn’t destroy them. There is also a grandfather type who are the oldest and most powerful of the Type 1s. They resemble the Nosferatu, the vampires who predate Stoker’s Dracula. They have a mouthful of sharp teeth with two fangs centered where the human incisors would be, and their skin is gray and wormlike.

Type 1 vampires can create Type 2 vampires. The Type 2s are fast and strong. They are not terribly intelligent, and they are destroyed by sunlight. They live very short lives and can create other Type 2s by draining humans of their blood. They can also create Type 3 vampires by biting if they do not drain the victims’ blood. Straker is a Type 3 vampire, and Doctor Cody would have become a Type 3 if he had not disinfected the bite wound.

Type 3 vampires can tolerate sunlight and survive on ordinary food, although they also drink blood. They cannot create another vampire, but they can put a human victim into a trancelike state that erases the victim’s memory when they recover. The victim is not harmed apart from the unconscious violation.

Barlow does not turn Callahan into a vampire. By forcing Callahan to drink his blood, Barlow puts him in a half-human state. Callahan can now detect all three types of vampires but is damned, unable to enter churches or touch holy symbols.

Everyone in ’salem’s Lot is corrupted by the Marsten House or by whatever evil underlies it. Father Callahan is corrupted by vanity: his desire to take up sword and shield against Evil like a modern Templar or Quixote. His faith has been eroded by the petty, ugly sins of his parishioners. He admits that he is losing his belief in the precepts of the church. The battle against Barlow is his opportunity to restore his faith.

The prospect of battle against Barlow reinvigorates Father Callahan’s belief but not enough. In Callahan’s final confrontation with the vampire, Barlow challenges him to put down the cross and face him armed only with his faith in God. Callahan is afraid to do it. His faith in God is not strong enough. He fails to be the warrior for God that he dreamed of being, and without the power of faith behind it, even the cross he holds ceases to have any power over Barlow.

By drinking Barlow’s blood, Callahan acquires the ability to recognize vampires, but he is forever cut off from his church, which will no longer accept him. Given the role of faith in the vampires’ relationship to the church, the burning of Callahan’s hand when he touches the door of the church is as much a manifestation of his own shame as of the holiness of the church itself.

The character of Father Callahan appears in The Wolves of the Calla, part of King’s Dark Tower series. The reader learns that Callahan will wind up in New York as a vagrant. Eventually, he goes to work in a homeless shelter and begins to recover from his alcoholism. He will occasionally fight vampires and other evils both human and supernatural.

Matt Burke, the teacher, is a guide and mentor for many people in the town. Many of the townspeople—like Mike Ryerson—are his former students, and he continues to care about them. Matt becomes the group’s Van Helsing—the vampire expert and mentor figure for all the others. As part of the mentor role, he dies before the final conflict, leaving his students to become the masters when they have learned everything he can teach them.

Matt represents the “superstition” end of the science-versus-superstition spectrum. Not that he is superstitious in the sense of belief without evidence but rather that he takes myths, legends, and folktales as evidence. He has all the proof he needs in his experience with Mike Ryerson. He feels little need to test his conclusions.

Doctor Cody represents the science end of the science-versus-superstition conflict. Unlike Mark’s father, whose rationalism is the death of him, Cody recognizes the limits of human knowledge. He accepts the vampire hypothesis as possible and proposes a suitably scientific test. His encounter with the freshly risen Margie Glick would seem to be fairly conclusive. Upon being bitten by Mrs. Glick, Cody would have become a Type 3 vampire, but he treats the bite as if it were an organic infection, sterilizing the wound, showing that science is a legitimate tool in the vampire hunters’ toolbox.