A year or two later (by this time my mother and my brother and I had left Connecticut and moved back to our native Maine), I discovered a cache of comic books (with torn-off covers) for sale in a local notions store called The Kennebec Fruit Company. These could be had for a nickel apiece. Some were Classics Illustrated(bad), some were Donald Ducks(good), and a great many were E.C. titles such as Tales from the Cryptand The Vault of Horror(best of all). In these comics I discovered a new breed of vampire, both cruder than Stoker’s Count and more physically monstrous. These were pale, paranoid nightmares with gigantic fangs and fleshy red lips. They did not sip delicately, as Count Dracula sipped at the ever-more-wasted veins of Lucy Westenra; the E.C. vampires created by Al Feldstein and brought most gruesomely to life by the pen of Graham “Ghastly” Ingels were prone to tearingand rippingand shredding. In one story, vampires running a restaurant actually installed spigotsin the necks of their dying victims, suspending them upside down and drinking splurting red streams of hot plasma like kids quaffing from the backyard hose. And the victims didn’t just moan or sigh, like Lucy in her maiden’s bed; they were more apt to scream in long strings of repeated E’s and Y’s and G’s, making sounds— “Eeeeeeeahh!” “Arrgggggh!” “Eyyyyyyyggghh!”—that looked like terrible phlegmy expectorations. These vampires did not just scare me; they fucking terrifiedme, chasing me through my dreams with their lips peeled back to show their monstrous cannibal teeth.

My mother didn’t approve of the E.C.’s, but neither did she take them away; they were trash, and she often said so, but they were apparently not badtrash. Eventually I gave them up on my own (as she probably knew I would, and all the quicker if I wasn’t nagged about it), but those vampires remained with me all the same, as vivid and as vital in their own way as Stoker’s Count. Perhaps even more vivid and vital because, unlike Count Dracula, they were Americanvampires. Some of them drove cars…went out on dates…and there were the ones that owned the vampire restaurant (where, I remember, one of the specials was French Fried Scabs). Why, if owning a goddam beanery wasn’t good old American free enterprise, what was?

I reencountered Draculain 1971, when I was teaching a high school English class called Fantasy and Science Fiction. I came back to it with some trepidation, knowing that a book read—not just read but studied and taught, even at the high school level—at twenty-four looks a lot different than one read at the age of nine or ten. Usually smaller. But the great ones only get bigger and cast longer shadows. Dracula, although created by a man who never wrote much else of lasting worth in his life (a few short stories, such as “The Judge’s House,” still bear scrutiny), is one of the great ones. My students enjoyed it, and I’d say I enjoyed it even more than they did.

One night, the second time through the adventures of the sanguinary Count (I only taught high school for two years), I wondered out loud to my wife what might have happened if Drac had appeared not in turn-of-the-century London but in the America of the 1970s. “Probably he’d land in New York and be killed by a taxicab, like Margaret Mitchell in Atlanta,” I added, laughing.

My wife, who has been responsible for all of my greatest successes, did not join my laughter. “What if he came here, to Maine?” she asked. “What if he came to the country? After all, isn’t that where his castle was? In the Transylvanian countryside?”

That was really all it took. My mind lit up with possibilities, some hilarious, some horrible. I saw how such a man—such a thing—could operate with lethal ease in a small town; the locals would be very similar to the peasants he had known and ruled back home, and with the help of a couple of greedy Kiwanis types like real estate agent Larry Crockett, he would soon become what he had always been: the boyar, the master.

I saw more, as well: how Stoker’s aristocratic vampire might be combined with the fleshy leeches of the E.C. comics, creating a pop-cult hybrid that was part nobility and part bloodthirsty dope, like the zombies in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. And, in the post-Vietnam America I inhabited and still loved (often against my better instincts), I saw a metaphor for everything that was wrong with the society around me, where the rich got richer and the poor got welfare…if they were lucky.

I also wanted to tell a tale that inverted Dracula. In Stoker’s novel, the optimism of Victorian England shines through everything like the newly invented electric light. Ancient evil comes to the city and is sent scatting (not without some struggle, it is true) by thoroughly modern vampire-hunters who use blood transfusions and stenography and typewriting machines. My novel could look through the other end of the telescope, at a world where electric lights and modern inventions would actually aid the incubus, by rendering belief in him all but impossible. Even Father Callahan, the man of God, cannot really believe in Mr Barlow—no, not even when the evidence appears before his very eyes—and so Callahan is sent hence, into the land of Nod which lies to the east of Eden (in ’Salem’s Lot, Detroit serves as a stand-in for Nod). I thought that, in my story, the vampires would probably win, and good luck to them. Drive those cars, boys. Run that restaurant. WELCOME TO JERUSALEM’S LOT, BLOOD SAUSAGE OUR SPECIALTY.

The story didn’t quite turn out that way—as you will see for yourself—because some of my human characters turned out to be stronger than I had expected. It took a certain amount of courage to allow them to grow toward each other as they wanted to do, but I found that courage. If I ever won a single battle as a novelist, that was probably it. Writers have found it so much easier to imagine doom in the years since World War II (and especially in the years since Vietnam), easier to imagine characters who grow smaller as a result of their trials rather than bigger. Ben Mears, I discovered, wanted to be big. Wanted, in fact, to be a hero. I let him be what he wanted to be. I have never been sorry.

’ Salem’s Lotwas originally published by Doubleday in 1975. It is dated in many ways (I have always been more a writer of the moment than I wanted to be), but I still like it well enough to number it among my favorites. I like the picture it draws of a small New England town; I like its sense of deepening menace; I like its strong, intended echoes of Draculaand of the EC comics where the vampires ripped and snarked and tore instead of sipping delicately like wine-snobs at a vicarage tasting party. Most of all I like the moment where it takes off like a big-ass bird into a world where all the rules have become moot and anything is possible. Carrie, the book which came before it, seems almost fey by comparison. There is more confidence here, more willingness to be funny (“The world is falling down around our ears and you’re sticking at a few vampires,” one of the characters says), more pushing of the envelope. In a way, this book was my coming-out party.

The woman who brought me Draculafrom the Stratford Public Library never saw ’ Salem’s Lot. By the time the first draft was completed, she was too ill to read much—she who read with such enjoyment over the course of her life—and by the time it was published, she was dead. If she had read it, I like to think she would have finished the last hundred pages in one of her marathon chain-smoking readathons, then laughed, put it aside (not without some affection), and pronounced it trash.

But maybe not badtrash.

 

Longboat Key, Florida

February 24, 1999