Stephen King Knows Darkness

One of the things I'm very fond of telling people when trying to persuade them to start watching The Walking Dead - and I'm always trying to persuade cine-, tele-, and bibliophiles with taste to do so - is that the series would work even without the zombies. Take the same characters and put them into any other critical, apocalyptic scenario (pestilence, war, drought, famine, holocaust), and the story still works. Why? Because we're basically watching a microcosm of society stripped down to a bare visual, beaten and broken down, and still fighting based on an intrinsic moral code. It's like the idea of archetypes and inherent fiber. In the end, all we really want is to meet the baseline of Maslow's hierarchy of needs: we want to eat and to drink and have a place to go to the bathroom; we all want love; we all need a little air.

I'm finding more and more that 'salem's Lot is very much like The Walking Dead or The Grapes of Wrath or Boogie Nights. These are all masterpieces that would still like if you changed the setting or the period or the industry. In the end, people are all generally the same no matter where they've been or where they're going. Stephen King has a definitive understanding of this, especially here in this, a superlative work of art. His flip-flops between Ben and Susan and Mark and The Town as a whole all work together to show us that these are just people, everyday people, who are (sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly) finding themselves in what we, the readers, find to be extraordinary situations.

In my nightly reading, I am discovering that King is, in fact, the master.

     "Her mind felt dazed into unreality by the swift turnaround things had taken. Less than two minutes ago they had been discussing this business calmly, under the rational light of electrical bulbs. And now she was afraid. Question: If you put a psychologist in a room with a man who thinks he's Napoleon and leave them there for a year (or ten or twenty), will you end up with two Skinner men or two guys with their hands in their shirts? Answer: Insufficient data." - Susan articulating her own thoughts on everything she has just been told by Matt Burke; discovering that she may very well be only entering the story en medias res.

     "These are the town's secrets, and some will later be known and some will never be known. The town keeps them all with the ultimate poker face. 
     "The town cares for devil's work no more than it cares for God's or man's. It knew darkness. And 
     darkness was enough." - the town of 'salem's Lot on itself.