'Salem's Lot

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1975

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Prologue, Chapters 1-3

Part 1, Chapters 4-7

Part 2, Chapters 8-10

Part 2, Chapters 11-13

Part 3, Chapter 14-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Symbols & Motifs

The Marsten House

The archetypal haunted house represents unfinished business. Ghosts walk its halls; it’s walls—as Ben Mears says—hold old unhealed traumas. The Marsten House contains Ben’s unresolved feelings about death. He left ’salem’s Lot as a child without fully coming to grips with what he saw in the house.

The house is a marker for the unfinished business of Ben’s childhood. He remembers his summer in ’salem’s Lot as idyllic, but above it all broods the Marsten House, as if a child’s summer is always haunted by the fear of growing up.

The Marsten House also represents the potential for evil to fester—whether the house is the source of the evil or just the eruption of underlying evil under the skin of the world. The residents of the Lot go about their lives as if the house had no impact on them, but they seem to be subliminally aware of its poisonous influence.

Science Versus the Supernatural

The science-versus-supernatural motif is typical of the Gothic genre. Most of the vampire hunters come to accept the supernatural surprisingly easily, but they all come to it from different directions. Ben’s belief comes both from an imaginative and literary mind and his own childhood experience. Matt’s initial belief comes from a similar place of emotion (the supernatural), influenced by fiction and his own youthful memory of the abandoned church he passed so often as a child.

Matt remembers Doctor Cody as an imaginative boy with a flexible mind, but Cody ultimately comes to his belief by the application of scientific method. Father Callahan has the doctrines of his church, but he also has a strong drive to believe in something greater than himself. Mark believes because fear is belief, and children fear. Only Susan, who lacks either imagination or the memory of childhood fears, is unable to believe and is destroyed.

The characters who believe nevertheless test their conclusions (science), calling on Doctor Cody, to verify that Mike Ryerson is actually dead so that if he rises again, they can be sure he wasn’t just deeply asleep or catatonic.

The two priests in the story illustrate a similar tension. The old priest in a tiny, isolated Mexican town believes Mark and Ben with very little question. Father Callahan longs to confront Evil (the supernatural). Consequently, he is willing, even eager, to accept the challenge of a supernatural force that embodies ultimate Evil. Yet even he tests his conclusions by recommending that they locate and speak to Straker before confronting Barlow.

The Cross

The cross, as it is used in this story, symbolizes faith, but not necessarily faith in God. When Barlow challenges Father Callahan to put down his cross and confront him face-to-face, he forces the priest to test whether his belief is in God or in the trappings of the church. Barlow implies that had Callahan been able to lay down the cross and put his faith entirely in his religion, the vampire would have been unable to approach him. Faith, not the cross, repels him.

The characters are also empowered by their belief in vampires. It is because they believe in vampires that they believe in the efficacy of the cross. Even the silliest representations of the cross, like two tongue depressors held in a cross shape or the little plastic cross in Mark’s monster display, burn with holy fire because of the holder’s belief that crosses repel vampires. Mark’s little plastic cross burns the brightest because his belief is the strongest.