'Salem's Lot

“What was he doing, coming back to a town where he had lived for four years as a boy, trying to recapture something that was irrevocably lost? What magic could he expect to recapture by walking roads that he had once walked as a boy and were probably asphalted and straightened and logged off and littered with tourist beer cans?”

This passage introduces the theme: You Can’t Go Home Again. He knows childhood can’t be reclaimed. What was magic to an innocent child is mundane to an adult and tainted with the litter of the real world.

“[The house] was huge and rambling and sagging, its windows haphazardly boarded shut, giving it that sinister look of all old houses that have been empty for a long time. The paint had been weathered away, giving the house a uniform gray look. Windstorms had ripped many of the shingles off, and a heavy snowfall had punched in the west corner of the main roof, giving it a slumped, hunched look. […] He swallowed and stared up at the house, almost hypnotized. It stared back at him with idiot indifference.”

The author uses significant details and evocative language to convey not only the look of the house but its character as well. In addition to describing weathered paint and fallen shingles, he personifies it by describing it as “hunched,” “staring” in “idiot indifference.” Those last two words in particular evoke a sense of madness described in the Shirley Jackson quote in the Part 1 epigram.

“‘The town hasn’t changed that much. Looking out on Jointner Avenue is like looking through a thin pane of ice—like the one you can pick off the top of the town cistern in November if you knock it around the edges first—looking through that at your childhood. It’s wavy and misty and in some places it trails off into nothing, but most of it is still all there.’”

’Salem’s Lot is one of King’s more lyrical works. Its appeal lies largely in the mood he invokes through the use of language and imagery. Looking through a sheet of ice is a metaphor for the way that memory becomes distorted over time, the rough edges and ugliness smoothed out. Ben’s description hints that his own memory is distorted, not just unclear and imperfect but changed, no longer an accurate representation of reality.