Aftermath for the vampires (post-book questions)

[aeroplane]

Mostly some things I'd be curious to hear a theory on and obviously we'd need to consider the events of One for the Road from Night Shift.

Here goes.....


1. Even though Salem's Lot takes place in a different era than we live in today (for the timeline), is it unreasonable to wonder why the State Police or feds never came in and tore the town to pieces looking for clues?

In theory, sooner or later a search would turn up a few hiding places and eventually someone would start piecing things together. Seems like if this sort of widespread disappearance of people happened in real life, a massive search would take place. But I also like to believe it would have happened during the timeline Salem's Lot takes place in.


2. Just how far could you count on the vampires branching out? In SL and One For the Road (OFTR), we see a number of characters depicted as living and working just mere miles from Jerusalem's Lot. They carry crucifixes but don't seem to be overly worried, otherwise they'd move further away.

It would seem like such a large number of vampires would get tired of waiting for a few hitchhikers or drifters a year to accidentally wander into their town after dark. So eventually, you'd think some of them would start making headway into nearby towns. Wouldn't you? We see a little of this mentioned in the press clippings collected by Ben Mears, but not a whole lot more detail than that.

[wally wonder]

those questions surfaced for me, aeroplane, least the first one did. but really, what happens when the unexplained happens, today, yesterday, or tomorrow? the dallas police show up and "area 51" becomes part of the vocabulary. i thought there was a suggestion that some kind of investigation took place, albeit, in bits and pieces, and...this could be related to Q2, didn't the boys from mexico head back cause they'd (ben, anyway) been reading the papers and decided to do something?

besides, rupert murdoch wasn't around (unless he had more hair and was busy climbing the corporate ladder) at the time and walter was getting ready to retire...and that's the way it was?

[scarywriter]

I didn't grow up in Maine, but one of the other sparsely populated parts of the country. I know from experience that sometimes towns die. A factory or a mill shuts down, business that rely on those workers close up shop, some of the people move to find new jobs, old folks who don't move get older and pass away, no one new moves in and next thing you know, a drive down Highway 71 takes you through what is essentially a ghost town. It doesn't raise any alarms or red flags for troopers or politicians or even the next town over.

[michal]

And why would the police "tear it apart"? There is no proof that a crime has taken place, no bleeding bodies - just people that have left and moved on.

[aeroplane]

And why would the police "tear it apart"? There is no proof that a crime has taken place, no bleeding bodies - just people that have left and moved on.

There is no proof of a crime but there are a couple of good reasons that someone might show up to investigate.

1. When somebody as important as a County Sheriff (Homer McCaslin) vanishes, it usually makes news and finding him would seem like a priority.

2. The town contains what is described as a brand new school, which is now going unused. Heck of a lot of tax dollars were spent on that only for it to sit empty.


Point is, I'd picture feds or detectives crawling all over that town looking for something.

[aeroplane]

Does anyone care to venture what percentage of the vampires who were already in Salem's Lot survived the fire started by Ben Mears?

Where did some of the go afterwards?

Who would have been the "new" Master in Salem's Lot with Barlow out of the picture?

One can also imagine the number of possible vampires who may have attacked later visitors to Salem's Lot like the Daniel Holloway family at the end of the original book or the Lumley wife and daughter from One For the Road. Perhaps it was Mike Ryerson, Danny Glick, Charlie Rhodes, Dud Rogers. The possibilities are endless.

[Reactor]

The story of the vampires obviously didn't end with the book. According to the ending of Salem's Lot, it still continues as we speak.

I'm not that experienced in vampirology, but it CAN be possible for them to die in hunger. If they don't spread after finishing Salem's Lot, and don't have the possibility to attack bypassers, sooner or later they shall die. This time, for real. A vampire can't just starve endlessly, they also need to eat. As the book stated, as the time passes, they became cognizant of their new existence, thus realizing that the town they fed upon became deserted and derelict. If they wanna live, they have to move on. I'm pretty sure they're still spreading, and their numbers are growing, as they turn more and more people into vampires. If the novel would be real, they would feast on the entire planet for now, as it takes very specialized weapons to take out a vampire. By the time the police or the military realizes the grim situation, it goes out of control.

I better check the window. Something is knocking the glass.

[Rand]

I'm not that experienced in vampirology, but it CAN be possible for them to die in hunger.

That depends on the writer's take on the myths, and starvation isn't usually listed as one of the ways to kill a vampire.

You're not thinking of the vampire-like race in Stargate Atlantis, are you? I ask because any story I've encountered where the subject comes up, not feeding only weakens them, often to the point that they're immobilized and their bodies become dessicated. In some they go comatose, in others they stay conscious suffering. Once they get fed again, they regain their strength. But we're talking about traditional Western style vampires here.

[Reactor]

No, I was talking about "oridinary" vampires, at least the ones in Salem's Lot seems quite oridinary to me. I know many writers deviate from the original recipes, and they decide to modify vampires' properties. This is what I hate the most - someone figures out a very good creature of the night, then along comes some writer-wannabe, and simply modifies this creature with long past, just to be...heh...creative.
Hey, I even read a book where vampires was just as easy to kill as a normal human being (in my opinion, that was a pile of poo), though we all know that vampires are invulnerable for common way of attacks. Reggie Sawyer blasted one with a shotgun, and nothing happened. Mark also knew that common bullets won't even scratch a vampire.

The "traditional" vampires also need to eat. Their afterlife is just as real as their previous one was. They live - therefore they need to consume blood. If not, sooner or later, they could die of hunger. Sure they could stay alive for huge amount of years - 3-400 years - but eventually, the lack of blood will be victorious above immortality. The vampire dies without food.

[GNTLGNT]

I don't have anyhting to add to all opinions above-coz they're all pretty danged good-but being the wise-a** I am, I still to have to drop a comment(kinda like an air-biscuit in church and about as repellent):biggrin2:Vampires do exist and they work for the Government-coz they suck the soul out of every paycheck!....

[Rand]

The "traditional" vampires also need to eat. Their afterlife is just as real as their previous one was. They live - therefore they need to consume blood. If not, sooner or later, they could die of hunger. Sure they could stay alive for huge amount of years - 3-400 years - but eventually, the lack of blood will be victorious above immortality. The vampire dies without food.

Not to pick the nit overly much, but again I think that depends on what legends you read and how the writer chooses to implement them. Since we're dealing with supernaturally reanimated corpses, we don't really know what they need to remain undead (as opposed to just dead). It's up to the writer to tell us what his rules are, and I don't remember King addressing what lack of nutrition would do to his creations.

Back to point though, I have no doubt that a hungry vampire would do his best to avoid staying unfed, so I agree that they would eventually choose to get out of town and find someplace with more food available to them.

[aeroplane]

Not to pick the nit overly much, but again I think that depends on what legends you read and how the writer chooses to implement them. Since we're dealing with supernaturally reanimated corpses, we don't really know what they need to remain undead (as opposed to just dead). It's up to the writer to tell us what his rules are, and I don't remember King addressing what lack of nutrition would do to his creations.

Back to point though, I have no doubt that a hungry vampire would do his best to avoid staying unfed, so I agree that they would eventually choose to get out of town and find someplace with more food available to them.

You're right, King never did say anything about how often the vampires need to eat. Nor did he ever really say how many vampires were created over the course of time in town, though I'd venture to say it was at least 100 or 200? It makes you wonder why so many stuck around in the vicinity of Salem's Lot during the time period of One For The Road, which was a few years later. At the same time, you also wonder where those vampires are sleeping during the daytime if the town was supposedly burned out.

Not to mention even if Salem's Lot is well-known as a haunted ghost town, you know darn well that five years later or maybe ten years later, some seedy real estate mogul (a Larry Crockett-type) is going to roll in and buy a bunch of land and properties.

[Jon0815]

Mostly some things I'd be curious to hear a theory on and obviously we'd need to consider the events of One for the Road from Night Shift.

Here goes.....


1. Even though Salem's Lot takes place in a different era than we live in today (for the timeline), is it unreasonable to wonder why the State Police or feds never came in and tore the town to pieces looking for clues?

In theory, sooner or later a search would turn up a few hiding places and eventually someone would start piecing things together. Seems like if this sort of widespread disappearance of people happened in real life, a massive search would take place. But I also like to believe it would have happened during the timeline Salem's Lot takes place in.


2. Just how far could you count on the vampires branching out? In SL and One For the Road (OFTR), we see a number of characters depicted as living and working just mere miles from Jerusalem's Lot. They carry crucifixes but don't seem to be overly worried, otherwise they'd move further away.

It would seem like such a large number of vampires would get tired of waiting for a few hitchhikers or drifters a year to accidentally wander into their town after dark. So eventually, you'd think some of them would start making headway into nearby towns. Wouldn't you? We see a little of this mentioned in the press clippings collected by Ben Mears, but not a whole lot more detail than that.

1. Yes, this is a problem which I don't think can be explained away, we just have to suspend disbelief. The Lot had over 1,000 residents, so presumably, the number who were vampirized was in the hundreds, at least (one of the characters speculates, well before the end of the book, that half the town already belongs to Barlow). Many of those residents would have had relatives outside the Lot who would have reported them missing. Even back in 1975, it's not plausible that you could have such a large number of persons- including children and a County Sheriff- vanish from such a small community over such a short period of time, without attracting major state and national law enforcement attention. And with State Police and FBI swarming all over the Lot, some of the sleeping vampires should have been discovered.

This also begs the question: Why did Barlow want to vampirize an entire town in the first place, after having survived for so long by keeping a low profile, a practice which would be even more important in the era of modern communications and record-keeping?

2. In traditional vampire lore, one obstacle to vampires' movement is that they can't cross running water (at least not while awake- Barlow probably couldn't have traveled as far as he did over the centuries, without having been carried across running water at some point). The book does mention a nearby river, so perhaps if there is a branching tributary creek/stream flowing around the Lot into the river, the vampires could have been trapped? Although in that case, they might have been able to escape during winter when the water's surface froze over.

Or perhaps Barlow simply ordered all his vampires not to leave the Lot, and they were still bound by their Master's commands after his death?

[guido tkp]

at this point, barlows efforts could have as much to do with the d.t. books, and plans/schemes made etc, etc, etc...of which barlow (the town and the townsfolk ) would now seem nothing more than a minor pawn in grander plans that mean absolutely nothing

much like the events and villains of 'black house', 'the regulators', & 'the mist'....and just about everything else, right ?

[vcalio372]

If I'm not mistaken, isn't Salem's Lot surrounded by streams or some sort of mythical boundary in which vampires can't cross? If so, then I guess the vampires must wait for passerby's who stumble across the town and are unaware of the danger that awaits them. But the bigger issue for me is how the ending of SL demonstrates how brilliantly King is able to invoke the feeling of dread within his readers. My wife and I drive up to Maine for weekends in the summer (we live in NYC) and there are dead little towns in which no one would really notice if they disappear. I'm not sure if King were somehow inspired by Hemingway's short story, "A Clean, Well Lit Place," or Faulkner's short story, "Death in the Woods," but I wouldn't be surprised if he were, because it seems like in a lot of his novels he does write about characters characters who, if they died, no one would really notice or even remember that they were alive in the first place. Salem's Lot seems to be filled with those sorts of people. Think of the Jud Crandall character from PEt Sematary, or the psycho woman (I forgot her name, Kathy Bates played her in the movie) in Misery. I guess that's why a lot of his novels do invoke a certain feeling of dread about life itself. He does force us to ask the question, "Just how significant are we?"

[aeroplane]

Not sure about the water theory. In One For The Road, it is implied that a character sees what is most likely a vampire from the window of a vehicle as the characters are driving to Salem's Lot in a blizzard. However, at that point they haven't even made it into town yet. Plus near the end of Salem's Lot, there were a few newspaper articles reporting mysterious disappearances of people who lived in towns bordering Salem's Lot.

One of many reasons that I raised this thread was also because of matters concerning state budgets and taxes. Ultimately, somebody is providing a budget for at least two school's in Salem's Lot and a hospital. So having them go unempty and unused wouldn't be acceptable under most circumstances.

Besides, the disappearance of the likes of Homer McCaslin should have brought a great deal more attention. A County Sheriff does handle affairs and is pretty much "in charge" in at least a dozen towns, most of them highly populated. He had been replaced in One For the Road, since the characters reference contacting the Sheriff in their area who would have been covering precisely the same area that McCaslin used to.

Also, I am rather curious how all of those houses that people ended up moving into after the story managed to get put up for sale? For example, The Griffen Dairy Farm property is bought by a family a few months after Ben/Mark leave Salem's Lot. By then, the Griffen's were vampirized. So who put the farm up for sale, who signed the paperwork, who collected money for it? Mr. Griffen? Larry Crockett?

[HorrorMama]

I don't have anyhting to add to all opinions above-coz they're all pretty danged good-but being the wise-a** I am, I still to have to drop a comment(kinda like an air-biscuit in church and about as repellent):biggrin2:Vampires do exist and they work for the Government-coz they suck the soul out of every paycheck!....


DOO DOO CCCCCHHHH!!!



i pictured a really cheesy stand up scenario when i read that hahahah

[guido tkp]

...and wouldn't that prove an interesting way to both restart kings tale of vampiric woe and allow king a very wide open area in which to make political & sociological commentary: what if budget cuts brought about a resurgent vampire infestation by having no real police & gov't oversight in an area where there seems to be no real interest by people to live...

but, say, an intrepid reporter, might stumble across a series of bizarre and unexplained missing persons reports all which seem to indicate a literal bermuda triangle: is it possible people enter the area...but do not come out !

[vampirefan]

Hello

This is my first time posting in this forum and this is my favorite book.

You have to remember that at the end of the book when the fire was started Ben and Mark had said their plan was to burn them from their hiding places so they would be easier to kill. My impression is that they probably killed as many Vampires as they could until they could not deal with doing it anymore. Jimmy Cody did some foreshadowing when he said "how long can we pull them from their holes and drive sharpened sticks through their hearts or something similar". I would assume that they picked off the easy ones and left before they got to all the vampires with better hiding places. Remember the parts about Mexico where they would track down the various newspapers. I always thought the events of Mexico were designed in part to show that Ben and Mark had gone through a horrible ordeal and needed to run to avoid going completely nuts. They were essentially trying to recover as much as they could before dealing with the vampires again.

Barlow had Straker and after his death they probably had one or two humans to serve as their day time protectors. These people probably were the ones responsible for the sale of the farm that was mentioned.

As far as police and the authorities conducting an investigation this was touched upon in the articles where they said that Perkins Gillespie was interviewed after moving to Kittery and he did not like talking about the lot. You had the constable leaving which leads to the conclusion that many other people had just up and left as well. There were no dead bodies or really any evidence of a series of crimes. It was also stated people moved in and moved out quickly until the fire. After the fire if no bodies were found there would be no evidence of anything to investigate and one could assume the remaining residents just left because of the fire. If families reported loved ones missing and they were never found that would likely just be attributed to the fire. Maybe this is not the perfect explanation as to what happened to them but as King made clear in the book, and later stories those who inhabited the area did not want to ask questions and would likely embrace the fire explanation because it represented a way of explaining things away so they would not have to think about it any more or talk about and acknowledge that something was amiss. Remember in one for the road the story of how the word vampire was only whispered and the Lot was not really talked about with the night a drunken bar patron being a rare example of when the subject was actually addressed. The people who would bring about an investigation did not want one and were content to try and ignore what happened.

People in the surrounding areas did know deep down what was going on and carried weapons to protect themselves as a result. The remaining vampires would likely try and remain hidden as they were aware of the premise in "One for the Road" that being that while people did not want to face them they were prepared and would do so when they had to.

It was mentioned that Mark had pondered becoming a priest while in Mexico and if I had to bet I would say that is probably what he did eventually. He and Ben likely created new identities and tried to find whatever peace they could.

The vampires likely survived on deer and other small animals during times there were no people around.

Maybe I have thought of this way to much but this was the impression I always had regarding later events.

[aeroplane]

The idea that Homer McCaslin disappeared into thin air should have been good enough. The guy was the County Sheriff, presumably for Cumberland County which is where Salem's Lot was located in the story.

A Sheriff in that County had jurisdiction in Portland, Maine which has a high population. So he was a pretty darn important person in law enforcement. That type of person is searched for until a search party is exhausted.

[Dan Olwell]

Mostly some things I'd be curious to hear a theory on and obviously we'd need to consider the events of One for the Road from Night Shift.

Here goes.....


1. Even though Salem's Lot takes place in a different era than we live in today (for the timeline), is it unreasonable to wonder why the State Police or feds never came in and tore the town to pieces looking for clues?

In theory, sooner or later a search would turn up a few hiding places and eventually someone would start piecing things together. Seems like if this sort of widespread disappearance of people happened in real life, a massive search would take place. But I also like to believe it would have happened during the timeline Salem's Lot takes place in.


2. Just how far could you count on the vampires branching out? In SL and One For the Road (OFTR), we see a number of characters depicted as living and working just mere miles from Jerusalem's Lot. They carry crucifixes but don't seem to be overly worried, otherwise they'd move further away.

It would seem like such a large number of vampires would get tired of waiting for a few hitchhikers or drifters a year to accidentally wander into their town after dark. So eventually, you'd think some of them would start making headway into nearby towns. Wouldn't you? We see a little of this mentioned in the press clippings collected by Ben Mears, but not a whole lot more detail than that.

More reasons why Stephen King should write a seqaul to 'Salem's Lot!!!

[Steep]

I agree there should be a sequal. it would be logical for the vampires to venture off instead of waiting for hitchhikers or other people to accidently end up in the Lot. The same argument could be made about It as well.

[aeroplane]

All we really know is that the vampires were eating wild animals, at least warm-blooded types. One main problem with relying on hitchhikers to show up every few months is that a single hitchhiker will usually feed only one vampire, at least a couple of vampires who are either working together or competing for the human's blood. We have to assume there are probably still a minimum of 300-500 vampires in town, even after the fire. The other question is that presumably people who lived in town for a long time would figure out somewhere to hide, even if Mears burned down their home(s). However, if you recollect the One For The Road story with the family from New Jersey, where in heck are they expected to hide during the daytime hours? That's a tough call.

[muskrat]

Allright, let's say eventually life DOES return to Salem's Lot, right? And soon it's a thriving community, although some weird characters exist there...and a teenage girl named Bella moves there and meets an odd guy named Edward, and...

Oh dear GOD, someone shoot me...

[Dan Olwell]

All the more reason for another book Mr. King.

[Sundrop]

Allright, let's say eventually life DOES return to Salem's Lot, right? And soon it's a thriving community, although some weird characters exist there...and a teenage girl named Bella moves there and meets an odd guy named Edward, and...

Oh dear GOD, someone shoot me...

Edward is probably gonna be played by Gary Busey in the movie, right?......