13. EVIL

The theory of evil is not strictly limited to Ben Mears and that's why I wanted to continue the conversation of how evil was represented in the book by a different character . I was really happy to see that Stephen King put Father Callahan into the novel because evil and religion go hand in hand. It's good vs. evil. If anyone would know what evil was, it would be a priest, right?

pg.167

"It was the steady, dead, onrushing engine of the church, bearing down all petty sins on its endless shuttle to heaven. It was the ritualistic acknowledgement of evil by a church now more concerned with social evils; atonement told in beads for elderly ladies whose parents had spoken European tongues. It was the actual presence of evil in the confessional, as real as the smell of old velvet. But it was a mindless, moronic evil from which there was no mercy or reprieve...In fact, he was being forced to the conclusion that there was no EVIL in the world at all but only evil - or perhaps (evil)."

When I read the previous passage, not only was I surprised that Father Callahan was having doubts about what evil was, I was also entertained with the idea that EVIL was not just one thing. It had many faces. Up until that point of the book, I was under the impression that if Ben Mears could just locate the source of evil, he could destroy it. That's not that case at all.

Father Callahan showed that he had experienced many faces of evil with each confession he went through. He saw that evil existed in every person dwelling in 'Salem's Lot. Each of them had their own source of evil living in them and they displayed that evil in various ways. It's almost scarier to think that evil does not exist in one form because then you know that you can't defeat it. Let's just say that evil was definitely not a new thing to the town of 'Salem's Lot. The vampires were just a different form of it. Evil existed long before the vampires came along and probably before the Marsten House was built too.