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In Salem's Lot, King talks about Evil (with a capital E). Discuss the theme of evil in the novel. What does it tell us about small town life?

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Glory Nmeribe
Dr. Linda Rosenkranz
ENGL 1302
Date
Title: The theme of evil and its implications for life in a small town in Salem's Lot novel
In the novel, Salem’s Lot by Stephen King (1976), Ben Mears a writer returns to
Jerusalem Lot to write a novel only to discover that the town is infected with vampires that he
must fight and eliminate. To his surprise, the old Marten House is still present and has been
recently bought by strange occupants. Ben Mears meets Susan Norton, and they fall in love, and
at one point he narrates his childhood experience to her of the haunted Marten house. With a
series of strange happenings in the town of fires, child abuse, disappearances, deaths and
pedophilia, the author slowly unfolds the evil that lies in the town of Maine. The master vampire
Kurt Barlow arrives in the town with the help of his business associate Straker, and he slowly
infects the town with his thirst for blood transforming the people into vampires. At last Ben and
Mark Pirie can set the town on fire and flee. Because society has chosen to overlook the moral
degradation in small towns, evil thrives unopposed, slowly eating into the souls of the living.
Stephen King describes the evil of homosexuality as a shift from the normal moral values
to the abnormal. There are rules of socialization and a code for normal sexual orientation that
defines the sexuality of adolescents (Eads,2010, p79). As we learn from Kings’ explanations
sexual perverts are part of the town; “The boy Danny had heard discussed in the store was a tenyear-old boy named Jerry Kingfield... He had simply disappeared in the marshes six years ago
while fishing. Some people thought quicksand; others held that a sex pervert had killed him.
There were perverts everywhere” (53). Apart from the vampires, homosexuality is the real horror

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in the novel Salem’s Lot. The master vampire Barlow uses his vampiristic hunger and sexual
desires to entice his male victims. It is important to note that young boys are the main prey to the
homosexuality oriented vampires. However, the erosion of sexuality did not start with the
vampires. Even when young Ralphie disappears some of the men in the town thought that a sex
pervert had captured him as we learn from Mark Pirie; “He had heard one of the men in the store
say that probably a sex pervert had gotten Ralphie. Mark knew what perverts were. They did
something to you that got their rocks off, and when they were done, they strangled you . . . If a
sex pervert ever offered him candy, he would kick him in the balls and then run like a split
streak” (King, p138). The pedophilia is similar to the vampires in that after they were done with
the victim they murdered them. The main character Ben Mears aims at reinstating the normal
behavior in the society although the town is suspicious of him at first. Homosexuality is a ladder
t...


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