It certainly could be the witch’s candy house in the woods from Hansel and Gretel, Castle Dracula, Hill House, or the Overlook Hotel - dwellings with horrific pasts and dangerous ghosts and supernatural monsters. This goes beyond the so-called “haunted house” and includes any setting that gives us pause before entering or sends a chill up the spine. The Bad Place is a great standard-setting for horror stories going back to the dawn of storytelling (stay out of that cave). The Marsten House - the Bad Place - overlooking Salem’s Lot. As a matter of fact, it took some pretty interesting bounces, and I ascribe this mostly to the fact that, while my ball existed in the twentieth century, my wall was very much a product of the nineteenth.”Īnd with the “wall” that he continually bounced his story against being so firmly fixed in Gothic storytelling, ‘Salem’s Lot was predestined to fall into similar territory. “I decided I wanted to try to use the book partially as a form of literary homage…So my novel bears an intentional similarity to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and after a while, it began to seem to me what I was doing was playing an interesting - to me, at least - game of literary racquet-ball: ‘Salem’s Lot itself was the ball and Dracula was the wall I kept hitting it against, watching to see how and where it would bounce, so I could hit it again. As he explains in his excellent survey course on the horror genre, Danse Macabre: Salem’s Lot began, of course, as a novel by true Master of Horror Stephen King, and he deliberately retooled scenes from Dracula for it.
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